‘We have always been here’: Busking, urban space and economy of Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation follows the buskers in Montreal to garner from them an understanding of the city’s economy, culture and urban space, and their entanglements. It is a historical and geographical study that examines the position of the itinerant entertainer or musician in the political economy of the city. Both history and place are explored from the vantage point of this \nitinerant figure; and spaces frequented by buskers in the present or in the past are foregrounded in tracing urban transformations effecting the city since the 1960s. \nAn oral history project, it engages with memories of busking and formal and informal archives to address the lived experiences of buskers in the contemporary city; transformations in spaces of busking and their position with relation to the city’s economy; contestations over urban \npublic space; and the neoliberal entanglements of Montreal’s economy. Buskers' life histories are privileged in exploring concepts such as flexible, immaterial and precarious labour. The thesis, therefore, decenters the creative class in examining the entrepreneurial and self-regulated \nworker and the nature of labour intermediaries within the neoliberal economy. It shines a light on the role of surveillance and politics of access that are deepening social divides in this new economy. It also compares the historical representation of street musicians and performers to their own perceptions of busking. In doing so, it not only challenges the distinctions between work and leisure, but also between economic and cultural or social domains. \n \nThe thesis foregrounds a temporal and spatial claim on the city by buskers. It is an argument for their place and practice in urban space and economy. Implicit is also a critique of urban planning and policies that are producing a sense of displacement among the economically \nand socially marginalised. Experiences of surveillance and power, institutionalisation of culture, and professionalization of public art within the cultural economy make visible the exclusionary landscapes of the postindustrial city. Finally, in centering informality and informal spaces of \nwork and sociality through buskers, the thesis unsettles dominant narratives of Montreal to challenge a dichotomous framing of the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".