Institutional Politics, Power Constellations, and Urban Social Sustainability: A Comparative-Historical Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of sustainability is theoretically comprised of three distinct dimensions: environmental, economic, and social. Most public and academic discourse, however, focuses on environmental and economic sustainability to the neglect of social sustainability, which refers to a condition where an extended set of basic needs are met for all residents regardless of their race/ethnicity, age, religion, gender, socioeconomic status and/or level of ability and the highest possible level of social inclusion and participation in community life is promoted. While some scholars and policymakers have recently turned their attention to social sustainability, conceptualizing and assessing social sustainability is fraught with problems. In this dissertation, I develop a comprehensive social sustainability assessment framework that focuses on six key policy areas: housing, transportation, food, leisure and recreation, social cohesion, and identity and sense of place. I then incorporate data on Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland into the social sustainability framework in order to conduct a comparative analysis of the cities' relative degree of social sustainability. My analysis--which brings both qualitative and quantitative data to bear on 30 social sustainability criteria--indicates that Vancouver is ranked higher than Seattle and Portland in terms of social sustainability. I then adapt and use two sociological theories of policy development--institutional politics theory and power constellations theory, which tend to focus on the national or state level--to test which one better explains the differential level of social sustainability in the aforementioned cities. In short, I find that power constellations theory best explains why Vancouver has the most socially sustainable policies and programs, primarily due to the strength of organized labor and center-left political parties in the city. Overall, this dissertation contributes to research on social policy development and social sustainability and provides scholars and policymakers with a deeper understanding of the institutional and political determinants of social sustainability.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".