The geography of neighbourhood based collective action: a flyvbjergian perspective on school closings in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the reciprocal nature of planning decisions and neighbourhood based collective action within the context of public elementary school closures in Toronto. Based on a Flyvbjergian perspective, it is argued that in order to understand the true nature of civil society it is important to distinguish between rationality and power; democratic purposes and actual practices; enlightenment and anti-enlightenment ideals. Flyvbjerg's framework is supplemented by a geographical perspective whereby it is argued that the neighbourhod is at the crux of how democracy reinvents itself as it is the underlying ‘local level’ dynamics within this unit that acts as a potential catalyst for broader social/economic change. The thesis consists of four sections. First, Flyvbjerg's conceptualization of civil society is explored; theories of collective action are reviewed; and a neighbourhood approach presented. Second, using content analysis of various public documents, the education reform between 1995–2000 is traced to set the background context. The third section forms the core of the thesis whereby the latent power of civic agency is defined and measured based on Putnam and Epstein's framework on social capital. Using GIS and statistical techniques (factor analysis, multiple regression and logistic regression) the relationship between civic agency and neighbourhood structure is then explored using school profile data from the TDSB and geocoded census information from Cities Lab data base. The designation of schools at risk (in 1998) is then empirically tested on the basis of neighbourhood variants of rationality and power. The results reveal the political and technical nature of planning decisions. The fourth section describes the process of schools closures that followed 1998, based on participant observation of public meetings. The spatial disjunctures of power reveal the positive and negative consequences of collective action. The conclusion discusses the values and limitations of using a Flyvbjergian perspective.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".