The Layers of Power, Place and Climate Operationalizing Climate Action in Public Space—A Decade of Edmonton’s WinterCity Strategy and the Politics of Winter Cities in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the politics of winter cities in Canada, using a case study to assess whether climate plans have been effectively translated into infrastructure and management practices. Employing a research-design approach, the study uses speculative redesign to explore how winter design and governance principles could have been integrated into the case study. As Canada’s most recognized winter city, Edmonton presents a critical test case: Has it successfully implemented climate policy into infrastructure? This study analyzes the outcomes of planning into design and governance to evaluate the operationalization of climate action in public spaces in Edmonton, AB, and Canada more broadly. Participants were selected through purposive sampling based on their expertise in Winter City Theory, the Edmonton WinterCity Strategy, or Warehouse Park, with no demographic criteria considered. Reflexive analysis was conducted to account for potential biases, including the author’s dual role as both researcher and participant. The study explored how well participants’ understood winter city concepts, their materialization in planning and governance, and, in some cases, their cultural implications. Key findings reveal significant gaps in integrating winter city principles into design, planning, and governance, with path dependencies that position winter considerations as secondary. Power dynamics influenced decision-making, and empirical evidence suggests that adapting infrastructure and governance to climate patterns remains a challenge. A critical gap identified in the literature is the absence of winter-specific amenity provision standards in Edmonton—or any major Canadian city. Edmonton prioritizes temporary celebrations and snow-clearing over everyday winter-conscious features, limiting the year-round functionality of public spaces. To build climate-responsive cities or embed adaptability into existing ones, public spaces must be reconfigured with both tangible and intangible elements that support adaptability. These spaces should function as socio-ecological systems aligned with local climate realities, challenging outdated narratives of conquering nature and instead fostering resilience through intentional design and governance.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".