Beyond an Eyesore: Re-Imagining Scarborough’s Strip Malls as a Network of Public Spaces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis celebrates the vitality and public life of the post war era strip malls located in Toronto’s inner suburb of Scarborough. These spaces are ritualistically utilitarian and informal social destinations due to their easy accessibility and the variety of small local independent retailers. The question examined by this thesis is, what is the everyday accessible public space of a pluralistic society in an inner suburban context? By building upon theory and design precedents, this thesis materializes the potential in the future for community vibrancy without diminishing the existing vitality and public life of Scarborough’s strip malls. This full potential of strip malls is realized by reimagining them as a connected network of public spaces, which are pluralistic social destinations with permanent and impermanent spatial interventions that promote gathering for daily use and events in indoor and outdoor conditions. This thesis is accomplished through texts, narratives, maps, photographs, and drawings which outline the present situation and propose a future design approach.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".