An Ecological Political Economy of Climate Urbanism in Ottawa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past few decades, decreased federal and provincial funding for municipal services and infrastructure has constrained municipal budgets and led to competitive, entrepreneurial styles of municipal governance. These structural changes have coincided with growing public demand for municipalities to protect the local environment and take action on climate change. Drawing on discourse analysis, historical research, and interviews, this thesis applies an ecological political economy (EPE) perspective to examine the influence of federal and provincial neoliberal policies on municipal environmental governance in Ottawa. The main argument of this thesis is that amidst global economic instability and a worsening climate crisis, the City is shifting to a ‘climate urbanism’ policy approach that positions Ottawa to compete globally for labour and capital investment to fund ‘low-carbon’ and ‘climate-resilient’ technological and infrastructure fixes. Strategically adopting discourses from global climate science, ‘climate urbanism’ is the City’s current attempt to reconcile ongoing fiscal challenges with worsening environmental problems and a neoliberal economic growth imperative. Over the past three decades, the City has co-opted environmental discourses to legitimize economic growth while externalizing the problematic consequences of this growth, contributing to deepening social and ecological crises. Case studies on the People’s Official Plan and the Herongate redevelopment demonstrate how Ottawa residents are contesting the City’s ‘climate urbanism’ by developing and advocating for grassroots policies that recentre social and ecological needs.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".