Volume 5 issue 1 february 2018
From Specificity to Abstraction: Analysing the Relation Between Urban Policies and Socio-economic Division
AYA BADAWY
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This paper addresses the debate of whether generalisation or localisation is better in analysing the relation between policies and urban division. On one hand, some point to the overall policies and legal strategies that caused division in the city in general. Yet this approach neglects the uniqueness of local areas in the city. On the other hand, other researchers have focused on micro scale areas in the city and studied the relation between policies and division. However, this localisation focus presents results that are too specific to be used in comparative analysis with other cities. This paper takes a third approach and argues that abstract reasoning serves as the midway solution between both. That is, to derive the general strategies causing division in the city from the investigation of micro scaled divided areas. The research is conducted in Cairo, the capital of Egypt, and it follows three phases of analysis: concreteness, categorisation and abstraction. The abstract relation between policies and division in Cairo is presented within the TPSN framework under the four socio-spatial dimensions of territory (T), place (P), scale (S), network (N). The researcher concludes that influential policies which differ from one divided area to another are just versions of one deeper relation, and that this relation has to be induced from the study of specific cases rather than generalised.
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