The Dream of 'la ville fleurie': A Non-Linear History and Pragmatic Criticism of Public Gardens in Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis sets out to theorize the social and political agency of public gardens, and to find a means of comprehending their potential for facilitating creative as opposed to prescriptive cultural change, as well as their (perhaps more predominant) culturally conservative tendencies. I pursue this objective in large part through a more fulsome description of effects specific to gardens, attempting to develop a criticism capable of perceiving the function of different garden forms, and a more open-ended trajectory for their evolution. \n \nThe focus is on gardens in Montreal, as seen in part through the lens of the city’s annual beautification campaigns (which ran more or less continuously between 1914 and 1989) and a variety of other horticulturally-oriented beautification initiatives undertaken by the municipal administration and in large part enabled by the staff and resources of the Montreal Botanical Garden. Culminating in the city’s hosting of the Floralies internationales in 1980, this history provides context for the evolution of a distinctly horticultural urbanism in Montreal—one which attributes to gardens an enhanced social significance and sees in them an avenue for (usually prescriptive) cultural change. \n \nAgainst the background of this history, as well as in more active juxtaposition with it, I investigate the social and political functioning of two particular gardens in Montreal—one found at the site of the Botanical Garden and the other at the Jardins des Floralies in Parc Jean-Drapeau. By weaving together an experimental fieldwork, creative writing practice and archival research, I attempt to describe a much wider range of effects in and of gardens than is usual from either a social scientific or art historical point of view. Juxtaposing those descriptions in turn with analysis of a variety of (historically related) media forms, I produce a way of seeing gardens that registers a distinctive but underappreciated sociality (in other words, the basis for re-imagining their role in processes of social change).
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".