Caribou Ford is the imaginary Canadian city used by the Green Village demonstrator. Its first neighbourhoods did not start with a blank map, but with places in Oxford which I know well.
The Oxford examples were chosen because they differ in useful ways: population, wealth, building types, commercial and academic activity, and natural environment. Those differences give us reasons to expect different amounts and kinds of waste, and different ways of handling it.
The Canadian places are not intended as copies of Oxford neighbourhoods. They are translations. I kept enough of the original character to give each district a recognisable role, while changing the name, setting and urban form to suit a fictional Canadian city. Even the city name follows the same idea: Caribou Ford is a Canadian transposition of Oxford.
The Oxford starting point was Summertown: an affluent residential neighbourhood with families, older adults and a local shopping street.
Avonlea Village turns this into an established residential neighbourhood with tree-lined streets, detached houses, smaller apartment buildings, schools and a walkable main street of shops, cafés and services. Its residents include families, professionals and older adults.
The name comes from Avonlea, the fictional community in L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables stories. The intention is to borrow the Canadian literary association, not the geography or historical setting of rural Prince Edward Island. For the urban form, Toronto's Bloor West Village was a more useful comparison.
Blackbird Leys supplied a different residential case: a neighbourhood with more constrained household budgets and a mixture of families and smaller households.
St. Lawrence Commons is a planned residential community containing townhouses, apartment buildings, co-operative and other rental housing, alongside owner-occupied homes. Schools, a community centre, playing fields and local shops serve households of different sizes and incomes.
The name echoes Toronto's St. Lawrence neighbourhood, a recognised example of mixed-income, mixed-use development. “Commons” suggests shared space and community facilities without labelling residents by income or housing tenure.
The analogy is deliberately limited. The real St. Lawrence is close to downtown, unlike Blackbird Leys. What I am borrowing is the housing mixture and community structure, not its position in the city. If constrained spending matters to a model, it is better to state that as an explicit scenario assumption than to imply it through a place name.
Broad Street is a university and downtown visitor district, with student residences (colleges), pubs, shops, libraries, a museum, and exhibition spaces and other cultural attractions.
St. George Quarter is the Canadian version: a downtown university and cultural district containing historic academic buildings, student residences, libraries, museums, cafés, restaurants and shops. Students, employees and visitors create substantial daytime activity and seasonal changes.
The name refers to the University of Toronto's St. George campus. “Quarter” makes it a district rather than an individual campus building.
Shotover Hill gave me two related but distinct cases: low-density streets in woodland with "posh" houses for high-income owners, and a recreational park attracting visitors.
Cedar Glen translates this into a wooded ravine and park district at the urban edge, with trails, picnic areas and recreational facilities. Residential streets border parts of the park, but the park and the housing remain separate components of the study area.
The name is invented, with an echo of Toronto's Cedarvale Park and Ravine. “Glen” means a valley, so this deliberately translates Shotover's recreational landscape into a ravine setting rather than insisting on a hill.
The Cowley retail parks supplied the large-format shopping case: a suburban commercial area with large stores and extensive parking.
Junction Crossing is a commercial area with big-box stores, a supermarket, smaller retail units, restaurants, parking lots and delivery areas. Its principal users are shoppers and employees; any neighbouring housing is recorded separately.
“Junction” evokes a transport crossroads and also Toronto's Junction area, where the real Stockyards shopping development is located. “Crossing” supplies a plausible fictional development name. The result is best thought of as an open-air big-box retail centre.
Twin Fort Landing was not one of the original Oxford translations. It was added later, when the demonstrator needed a destination-retail setting in which several businesses and a public space could be affected by the same event.
Its immediate inspiration came not from the five Oxford neighbourhoods above, but from Bicester Village, a famous luxury open-air designer outlet shopping centre in Oxfordshire. I also had something unusually useful for a fictional waste demonstrator: published documentation about how waste is actually handled there. In particular, a 2022 Operational Waste Management Plan describes container sizes, waste streams, back-of-house movement by Facilities Management and transfer to a service yard. Those details helped guide the service side of my modelling; the quantities, event effects and other numerical assumptions in the demonstrator remain illustrative. In Caribou Ford it becomes a fictional Canadian retail destination containing representative sports retail, a food hall, a café and a pedestrian promenade.
That makes it useful for a different kind of modelling. One event can bring extra visitors to the whole development, while the individual businesses respond differently. It also gives us a place in which to model the service side: back-of-house bins, public bins and the movement of waste through the local collection system.
So Twin Fort Landing belongs to the same city, but it arrived by a slightly different route. The first five areas were deliberate Oxford-to-Canada translations. Twin Fort Landing was added later because the demonstrator needed another kind of place — its name is an allusion to a proposed Latin etymology: Bi-cester, meaning "two forts".
The point was not to hide Oxford inside a Canadian map. It was to avoid starting with six anonymous rectangles labelled A, B, C and so on. Places I know provide useful differences to think with: households and shops, students and visitors, parks and car parks, ordinary days and exceptional ones.
The resulting Caribou Ford districts are still illustrative. They give the models something concrete to act on; they are not claims that Summertown, Blackbird Leys, Broad Street, Shotover Hill, Cowley or Bicester have been measured and reproduced.
If the demonstrator were developed into a real municipal system, these fictional profiles would be replaced by local data and locally chosen models. The important thing at this stage is that the places are different enough to make different modelling problems visible.
There is an older educational idea behind this way of working. W. W. Sawyer, in Mathematician's Delight, contrasts learning abstractions as half-understood words with attaching them to situations one can actually imagine:
One can learn imitation history — kings and dates, but not the slightest idea of the motives behind it all; imitation literature — stacks of notes of Shakespeare’s phrases, and a complete destruction of the power to enjoy Shakespeare. Two students of law once provided a good illustration: one learnt by heart long lists of clauses; the other imagined himself to be a farmer, with wife and children, and he related everything to this farm. If he had to draw up a will, he would say, ‘I must not forget to provide for Minnie’s education, and something will have to be arranged about that mortgage.’ One moved in a world of half-meaningless words; the other lived in the world of real things.
— W. W. Sawyer, Mathematician's Delight