Rise Overrun: Condoization, Gentrification, and the Changing Political Economy of Renting in Toronto

Privately owned high-rise condominiums have been increasing as a proportion of all housing units built in the Greater Toronto Area for many decades. This has inspired a growing literature theorizing both “condoism” as an emergent planning-development regime and the implications of “condoization” and “condofication” for urban governance and everyday life in cities like Toronto. Building on this literature, this article assesses the implications of Toronto’s increasing reliance on (mainly vertical) condominium development for the socio-spatial transformation of the housing market, particularly for renters. Analyzing time-series data from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the Census of Canada to quantify the effects of the city’s condoization, we answer three key questions: How important is condominium development for understanding the restructuring of Toronto’s economy? How has condoization contributed to the ongoing gentrification of Toronto’s inner city? How is condoization restructuring Toronto’s rental market? Building on previous research categorizing and mapping the gentrification of Toronto’s inner city, we find that condoization is an increasingly defining element restructuring the city’s rental market, while this restructuring also plays a central role in the advancing gentrification of the city’s core

CIViCdb 2022: evolution of an open-access cancer variant interpretation knowledgebase

CIViC (Clinical Interpretation of Variants in Cancer; civicdb.org) is a crowd-sourced, public domain knowledgebase composed of literature-derived evidence characterizing the clinical utility of cancer variants. As clinical sequencing becomes more prevalent in cancer management, the need for cancer variant interpretation has grown beyond the capability of any single institution. CIViC contains peer-reviewed, published literature curated and expertly-moderated into structured data units (Evidence Items) that can be accessed globally and in real time, reducing barriers to clinical variant knowledge sharing. We have extended CIViC’s functionality to support emergent variant interpretation guidelines, increase interoperability with other variant resources, and promote widespread dissemination of structured curated data. To support the full breadth of variant interpretation from basic to translational, including integration of somatic and germline variant knowledge and inference of drug response, we have enabled curation of three new Evidence Types (Predisposing, Oncogenic and Functional). The growing CIViC knowledgebase has over 300 contributors and distributes clinically-relevant cancer variant data currently representing >3200 variants in >470 genes from >3100 publications

A community approach to the cancer-variant-interpretation bottleneck

As guidelines, therapies and literature on cancer variants expand, the lack of consensus variant interpretations impedes clinical applications. CIViC is a public-domain, crowd-sourced and adaptable knowledgebase of evidence for the clinical interpretation of variants in cancer, designed to reduce barriers to knowledge sharing and alleviate the variant-interpretation bottleneck