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This paper builds on earlier investigations of psychiatric asylum closure by focusing on their not infrequent successor role as educational facilities. We ask two questions: what conditions underpin a transition to educational re-use, and how is former asylum use remembered and memorialised in the successor context? Through recounting and interpreting the histories of acquisition and adaptation at two sites (Carrington, Auckland and Lakeshore, Toronto), we build a narrative that suggests a variable response to the shadows cast by stigma and the vilification of asylum. We distinguish between memorialisation (material reminders on site) and remembrance (narratives of past use). Former asylum sites, we contend, are attractive for educational users for their campus-like settings, range of buildings and (now) suburban locations. For city residents and planners replacing one institutional use with another keeps the site green, brings employment, and retains semi-public access. Memorialisation is often strategically low-key and remembrance more personal and individual. The net result is a relict landscape that speaks to the transcendence of stigma despite the relatively recent demise of the asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the characteristics of areas with numerous group homes (residential care facilities) that cater to a variety of user groups. An overview of patterns of locational concentration precedes the results of an ecological analysts for the Minor Planning Districts of the City of Toronto. The pattern of ecological correlates among the three group home types analyzed supports results obtained elsewhere, but cautions against referring ecological associations Identified for one sort of facility to other facility types. The conclusion questions the suitability of present areas of locational concentration of group homes as host environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the debate on the concentration of social services facilities within North American cities. Application of the location quotient and the coefficient of localization to data on adult services, children's services and psychiatric group homes in Toronto, Ontario; Demonstration of a high degree of localization in all three categories; Placement policies to relieve certain areas of the inner city of the social and economic pressures.