Street network and home-based business patterns in Cairo’s informal areas

Abdelbaseer A. Mohamed and Maarten van Ham

Land Use Policy, 2022, vol. 115, issue C

Abstract: Identifying the economic potential of informal urban areas is a topic of increasing interest for policymakers and practitioners in less developed countries, yet little is known of how informal street design influences the type and count of business opportunities. By adapting a space syntax framework, this study aims to quantitatively verify the association between the street design of informal areas in Cairo and patterns of home-based businesses in areas where small business prevalence is high. This paper contributes to the literature by developing a methodology which is fit for testing hypotheses, allows to control for the influence of unobserved factors, and which extracts the spatial rules, trends or logics of business patterns. The results show that street accessibility is an important factor in encouraging (or discouraging) the settlement of home-based businesses. Home-based businesses are spatially distributed along the local primary streets, which provide flows of potential customers. Our findings contribute to a better knowledge base for understanding how different types of economic activities and the spatial properties of the built environment relate to each other, how street design may impact on the emergence of small and micro-enterprises, what kind of business may suit isolated laneways, how informal business activities can be anticipated and managed, and how land use regulations can be improved.

Keywords: Economic opportunities; Street accessibility; Space syntax; Informal settlements; Cairo (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837722000370
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:115:y:2022:i:c:s0264837722000370

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106010

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().