The influence of organic urban morphologies on opportunities for home-based businesses within inner-city districts in Hanoi, Vietnam

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

“…Space syntax has shown to be empirically powerful in interpreting economic opportunities. For instance, the abovementioned thoughts were pursued further in studies of socioeconomic class (Omer and Goldblatt, 2012;Vaughan, 2007), office buildings (Desyllas, 2000), retail activities (Narvaez et al, 2014;Ortiz-Chao and Hillier, 2007;Porta et al, 2009;Scoppa and Peponis, 2015;Sevtsuk, 2010), and various types of businesses (Thai et al, 2020(Thai et al, , 2019.…”

“…Except for Han et al (2019) and Thai et al (2019), the majority of studies put spatial patterns of various types of activities, such as people-oriented services (e.g., hair salons, restaurants, coffee shops) and goods-oriented services (e.g., light industrial work, repairing, and storage), in the same category. Though ideally expected to be spatially distributed and sorted, the question of whether all various types of small enterprises need similar levels of street accessibility has to be addressed.…”

“…In Egypt, the informal economy, including agriculture, contributes to up to 60% of the total GDP, according to official estimates (El-Sharnoubi, 2019). A major part of this informal sector is organized around 'home-based businesses" (HBBs) in which low-income households rent out, or use part of their residential property for retailing, light manufacturing, food preparation, and/or repair services with less than five workers (Dwelly et al, 2005;El Mahdi, 2010;Singerman, 1996;Smit and Donaldson, 2011;Thai et al, 2019;Tipple, 1993). HBBs tend to be an important feature of the urban landscape in developing countries (Breen, 2010;Tipple, 1993) as they were in Europe, prior to industrialization (Strassmann, 1987).…”

“…Generally speaking, more (less) connected spaces, for which volumes of population movement will be largest (smallest), are expected to have more (less) retail and service activities (Porta et al, 2012). However, more research on how such activities are distributed within less connected, accessible neighborhoods is needed (Thai et al, 2019). Furthermore, most prior studies have mainly focused on patterns of movement-driven activities, largely neglecting the patterns of other types of businesses, such as manufacturing and food preparation, where clients rarely visit.…”

“…Also, the impact of unobserved variables, such as spatial autocorrelation, remains unexplored. Overall, existing studies are limited in terms of the sophistication of the methods, often using a very small sample size (Thai et al, 2019), considering solely one index of accessibility (Han et al, 2019), or employing only descriptive statistics or correlation analysis (Shafiei, 2007), which generally restricts statistical validity.…”