Transposing tactical urbanism to urban design: key lessons in building legitimacy to reconnect waterfronts to central neighborhoods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The issue of physical urban integration is central to urban design and has been a goal of waterfront conversion projects since the 1980s. However, the focus on precinct plans delineated according to land ownership creates strongly visible edges that negatively affect user experience. This paper explores how tactical urbanism may contribute to building legitimacy for addressing such critical urban design issues. The study focused on a project launched in 2020 on the edge of Montreal’s downtown waterfront. Shadowing of urban design processes, onsite observation, and semi-structured interviews demonstrated that tactical urbanism was useful in reviving public debate on the uses of downtown city streets. Nevertheless, the incremental nature of the intervention generated tensions that could compromise future redesign projects capable of achieving a significant, long-term reconnection of the urban fabric. Key lessons for planning authorities and urban designers therefore concern the legitimacy of the solution, governance, and the urban design process of tactical urban experiments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".