Revisiting the Reclaimed Street: An analysis of Kensington Market’s Pedestrian Sundays’ initiative as an exercise in community participation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This report examined a pedestrian street initiative in the inner-city Toronto neighbourhood of Kensington Market, testing whether it addresses the pressing concerns of gentrification for the residents and business owners. Kensington Market’s monthly occurring Pedestrian Sundays take place during the summer season in which the historic store-front streets of the neighbourhood are closed off from motorists and opened for pedestrian usage. Kensington Market’s community planning of the Pedestrian Sundays initiative bear the potential to inform wider and institutional changes to promote pedestrian-inclusive planning in Toronto (McClean and Rahder, 2013). Recent criticisms have emerged that the initiative may be advancing the neighbourhood’s gentrification by attracting an urban professional demographic and transforming the event from a community-oriented event to a primarily tourist attraction (McClean and Rahder, 2013). Determining the procedural mechanisms of the initiative was crucial to reveal who has the most to gain from the initiative, who influences it, and whether the initiative is sustainable. The guiding research question undertaken in the report was to what extent is Kensington Market’s Pedestrian Sundays’ initiative informed by the concerns and values expressed by local businesses and residents? The report comprised a synthesis of two main components: first, the process and policy behind the initiative was examined. Second, the level of the initiative’s incorporation of local business and residential concerns and advice was assessed using criteria for community participation. The planning of the initiative showcased a nexus of informal planning practices (e.g. grassroots public participation) and the more formal, traditional forms of urban planning (e.g. municipal oversight, public engagement). The stakeholders responsible for planning Pedestrian Sundays included a combination of long-term residents, local business owners, and community association representatives. It was found that the initiative originated through local activists’ efforts in coordination with neighbourhood associations, and eventually co-opted by Kensington Market’s Business Improvement Association (BIA). The BIA’s establishment of a Street Events Committee permitted community funding of the event, and surveys and meetings are held throughout the year to engage community members to discuss matters relating to the Market, including Pedestrian Sundays.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it