Non-profiting for “a more inclusive creative city” Tracking the gentrification frontier from Toronto’s downtown to the disinvested inner-suburbs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By tracking the shift to “more inclusive creative city” planning from Toronto’s economically- prioritized downtown to its disinvested inner-suburbs, this Major Paper argues that the non- profit sector is increasingly playing an instrumental, although often overlooked, role in the production of gentrification. As entities that coincide with urban economic restructuring from managerialism to entrepreneurialism, non-profit organizations are emerging as necessary players in public-private partnership redevelopment projects because of their special abilities to maintain cost-cutting agendas, re-direct public funds, legitimize private capital flows, and build consensus through program delivery. The paper examines the non-profit organization, Artscape, as it spearheads the new trajectory in Toronto’s creative competitiveness agenda with an initiative called Creative Spaces Outside of the Core (CSOC). The context is set for this case study through an overview of how Toronto’s socio-spatial polarization has been exacerbated by specific “place-based” municipal programs, while highlighting the instrumental role of the non-profit sector in extending the creative city’s geographic reach. \n \nFor thirty years, Artscape has played a catalytic role in the transformation of now gentrifying/gentrified downtown Toronto neighbourhoods through the development of artist housing and “community cultural hubs,” while maintaining a contradictory anti-gentrification mandate. Setting a philanthropic gaze on Toronto’s inner-suburbs as its next frontier, the organization has re-packaged the creative city script as a therapeutic solution to so-called inner- suburban “blight.” Artscape’s first CSOC development in the racialized, low-income area of Weston is expected to serve as a model for other inner-suburban neighbourhoods. The Artscape Weston Hub is embedded in a broader privatization and densification scheme and is positioned as the centrepiece of a “revitalization” strategy that aims to brand Weston as a destination for private investors, visitors and upscale residents. An investigation into the local critical discourse leading up to the construction of the non-profit-led, “inclusionary” project reveals correlating displacement pressures now faced by Weston’s marginalized residents. \nDrawing from the case study, this Major Paper concludes with considerations to some possible routes of anti-gentrification resistance in the face of political threats posed by the non-profit sector.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".