Quality of Life & Architecture in Governmental Low Income Neighborhoods

Abstract

Quality of life assessment is used to measure people’s level of satisfaction with their lives, and it is performed through assessing many indicators. “Residential Environment” is one of the main indicators that constitute Quality of Life (QOL). The majority of previous research measuring the residential satisfaction focused on the three main domains of the Residential Environment, namely; Housing Unit, Neighbourhood and Social Environment. Each of these three domains is further divided into attributes; these attributes are the basis of the assessment process. Previous research conducted to study the domain of residential environment in low income neighborhoods used survey questionnaires with Likert scale as an assessment method. In most of these studies, the attributes chosen for measurement were selected by the researchers themselves without the residents’ participation. The questionnaires used did not allow the residents to justify their answers. When it comes to Egypt, the research in both quality of life and low income neighborhoods is scarce. That is why this research aims to fill the gap, through revisiting these three domains in the specific context of an Egyptian low income neighbourhood. This was done by extracting the attributes that constitute each domain from the residents’ point of view in order to allow them to voice their needs. Accordingly, ethnography was considered an appropriate approach that reaches residents input at grass-root level and hence was chosen to conduct the study with the residents of a governmental low income neighbourhood in New Cairo, Egypt. Marginal participant observations over a ten months span along with semi structured interviews were used for data collection.