Unsettling public space: property and the politics of home in Vancouver
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The central motivation of this thesis is to explore the relationship between the settler-colonial city, homelessness, and public space in Vancouver, Canada. By tracing the historic and contemporary tensions over two public spaces in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, the thesis aims to understand how they have been implicated within – and thus serve as a lens through which to understand – the evolution of the settler-city. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in the Downtown Eastside, including 57 semi-and un-structured interviews, over 200 hours of participant observation, and archival and case law analysis, the thesis traces the social, political, and legal threads that weave together to produce the shape of, and life within, public space in the neighbourhood. Overall, the thesis reveals how people in the settler-city experience, live in, and embody public space – and the ways in which they weave and negotiate new subjectivities, modes of sociality and home, and politics in the settler-colonial city. This work makes significant, novel contributions to scholarship on settler-colonialism, geographical understandings of home and of homelessness, and socio-legal definitions of public space. It highlights the ways in which the settler-colonial State comes to bear on intimate, everyday geographies and subjectivities beyond the Indigenous/settler dichotomy. It argues that current neighbourhood residents domesticate public space in ways that reveal, resist, and rework the wider carceral domesticities of the neighbourhood and, in turn, the enclosure of home under settler-colonialism. Finally, it posits that this unsettling of home and of public space produces new possibilities for multiple lived and legal relations to – and definitions of – public space, revealing the ways in which public space is a critical site of struggle in the settler colonial city.
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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 | 0.029 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".