Defining targets and limits to urban sprawl: Are proposed greenbelt scenarios sufficient to achieve these benchmarks for Montreal by 2070?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasing awareness of the negative effects of urban sprawl has ignited a significant debate on this issue in Montreal and has emerged as a serious concern. Rapid increase in urban sprawl between 1951 and 2016 within the Montreal Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) highlights the urgency of addressing this challenge. Efforts to protect Montreal's forests, agricultural lands, and other open areas from further urban sprawl have become increasingly important. This study assesses several greenbelt scenarios as potential strategies to control urban sprawl. To explore potential future pathways and provide guidance for future planning, this study proposes targets, limits, and warning values to urban sprawl as a reference framework. Various urban development scenarios for the Montreal CMA and its Census Subdivisions (CSDs) until 2070 are developed and evaluated. Scenarios 1 to 3 are evaluated as unsustainable, scenario 4 represents a transitional range toward sustainability, scenario 5 is somewhat sustainable, and scenario 6 is sustainable. The Montreal CMA is surrounded by valuable natural areas, including agricultural lands which provide an opportunity to establish a greenbelt around built-up-areas. This study assesses four greenbelt scenarios to evaluate their potential for curbing urban sprawl. At the CMA level, the analysis reveals that while greenbelt scenarios significantly reduce sprawl compared to the current trend, they remain inefficient to achieve the limit to urban sprawl in Montreal. None of the proposed greenbelt scenarios reaches the desirable limits or targets and fall beyond the warning values. However, at the CSD level, the greenbelt scenarios significantly affect certain areas, with Gore projected to meet its target and several other CSDs falling within the range between the limit and the warning value, demonstrating effectiveness at curbing urban sprawl. This research demonstrates the potential of greenbelts to positively influence urban development patterns towards sustainability, even if the current proposal does not fully achieve the defined targets and limits. Further improvement and adaptation of these strategies may lead to more sustainable urban development outcomes in the long term. This study introduces a quantitative reference framework for evaluating the effectiveness of potential growth management strategies in the Montreal CMA and its CSDs. The findings offer a valuable perspective on the potential future of urban sprawl and allow for a comparison of various planning alternatives.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".