Urbanizing The Countryside? The Governance Of Rural Restructuring In Bancroft And North Hastings County, Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation comprises a case study of local governance in the Town of Bancroft, Ontario, and the surrounding municipalities of North Hastings County. The capacity for strategic agency by local governance actors, regarding economic development initiatives and mitigation of inequality, is the central object of analysis. The contexts of economic change - from lumber production, through mining, to tourism and recreation - and political structures - considering colonial origins, Canada’s hierarchical system of government, and the recent impacts of amalgamation and downloading in Ontario in the late 1990s - are shown to be profoundly structure the agency of local governance actors. The dissertation demonstrates a resulting intensification of “urban” phenomena in a traditionally “rural” space - while new forms of work encroach, and development pressures intensify - and highlights the limitations of existing structures of local government regarding the maintenance of a cohesive and inclusive community. A fundamental social disjuncture is shown to correspond to mixed land tenures of the sub-region: public Crown Land supports a generational rural economic culture at odds with the dynamics inherent to urbanizing spaces governed by municipal corporations. Semi-structured interviews with actors in local governance and key economic sectors, alongside document analysis of plans, reports and local histories provide the methodological foundation. To the field of rural geography, the dissertation contributes an early analysis of post-COVID 19 rural transformation, demonstrating the effects of North Hastings being brought into the metropolitan space economy of Southern Ontario to an unprecedented extent. The distinctive analytical perspective - centring structured agency - offers a new approach to rural research in Ontario. Regarding the study of local government, the dissertation contributes an important case study in intergovernmental relations under twenty first century neoliberalism. Analysis of a small municipality - in relation to horizontal and vertical governmental dynamics and with regard to the management of essential infrastructures - provides a clear demonstration of the pressures driving institutional change. Finally, the dissertation interjects into contemporary urban theory debates, presenting an empirically grounded argument that planetary urbanization is best understood as a process inherent to the particular land use and political systems of the municipal system, spread by European colonization.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".