Parkdale People's Palace: Rethinking a Heritage Church as Revitalized Social Infrastructure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent decades, Canada’s church buildings have been steadily declining in number and use due to the increasing secularization of society and the diminished role of Christianity in the country. Rather than demolishing the buildings, methods of adaptation and/or intensification of usage can prolong the buildings of heritage value; however, their revitalization is often impeded by the constraints of heritage and the need for sustainable financial investment, delaying opportunities for creating socially beneficial spaces for the community. Considering the history of Toronto’s church buildings as community-oriented places and the growing demands for an abundance of social infrastructure, this thesis asks: how can a church building in disrepair become more socially relevant to its community through architectural adaptation? South Parkdale is a neighbourhood demonstrating a commitment to social equity in the face of dramatic gentrification forces. Neighbourhood understanding is developed through mapping, photography, and community reports, which reveal degrees of social tension and priorities and provide a basis for surrounding church buildings to work both for and within a robust community-oriented agenda. Bonar-Parkdale Presbyterian Church is selected for its signs of disrepair and intent for revitalization and is explored through photography and drawing. Inspired by key community directions and community-oriented design precedents, this thesis builds on the community’s existing needs to suggest Bonar-Parkdale Presbyterian Church’s transformation into a community food hub. The design proposal introduces new spaces and programming for public connectivity and integration of the many members of community, thus suggesting greater communal usage and renewed social relevance. In its entirety, this thesis argues for an intersection of heritage and social infrastructure empowered by community ideals in order to present socially constructive futures among Toronto’s declining church buildings.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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 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".