Anticipating disaster : uncertainty, heritage, and place-making in Vancouver, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within a generation, residents of Vancouver, Canada have come to realize that their city faces a major seismic threat with uncertain timing for which they are not fully prepared. Simultaneously, Vancouver is confronting a housing crisis, a drug toxicity crisis, and a climate emergency that has intensified wildfires, heat waves, and flooding. This dissertation explores how a convergence of crises on differing timescales affects planning and governance, along with the values that undergird these decisions. Specifically, how do place-based values inform processes of planning for disaster recovery in Vancouver? My research engages with multidisciplinary literatures on disasters, heritage, affect, anticipation, and governance to explore both formal and informal avenues of planning and place-making. Through policy analysis, neighbourhood walks, participant-observation, and interviews with community-based groups in the Vancouver neighbourhoods of Dunbar and Grandview and with local professionals in the heritage and disaster fields, I follow the ways that people anticipate future disasters and act to preserve what they value. This ethnography demonstrates how my interlocutors’ efforts constitute a holistic form of disaster recovery planning, building a sense of community around shared values to face an uncertain future. By studying the connections between people, heritage, and place, I establish heritage as an emplaced expression of values with a relationship to materiality that goes beyond the physical and is always both changing and threatened by change. Heritage values circulate within a moral economy of place, connected to processes of development, displacement, and belonging that give rise to neighbourhoods that are at once cherished, inequitable, and at risk. The seismic, social, and climatic risks facing Vancouver are neither evenly expressed nor addressed, as varying disaster temporalities affect place-making practices through what I call anticipatory crisis governance, a policymaking framework in which planning for an uncertain future is inflected through present crises. Conversely, my interlocutors demonstrated values-based techniques of imagining ‘otherwise’ for future disaster recovery – harnessing the speculative nature of disaster planning to envision alternatives for building or restoring a community. Though rooted in Vancouver, this ethnography suggests ways of envisioning post-disaster recovery that can positively affect many communities – urban and rural – today.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".