Individuals’ Cultural Code and Residential Self-Organization in the City

Abstract

In previous chapters we presented the individual agents in a somewhat oversimplified manner. Their ‘personal’ properties (economic status and cultural identity) were defined as one-dimensional quantitative variables. Each individual agent was defined, first, along a one-dimensional economic scale as rich, poor, or some intermediate degree in between the two poles. Second, and in a similar way, each individual was defined also by a cultural measure as segregative Blue, on the one pole, segregative Green on the other, or Neutral in some degree i.e. Yellow in between. While such a uni-dimensional quantitative description might be appropriate with respect to the economic state of agents, it is by no means acceptable in the case of their cultural properties. Cultural groups, and even more so the cultural properties, tendencies and affiliations of individual agents, cannot be stretched along a single, uni-dimensional, continuum. Rather, in reality, the cultural properties of individuals and cultural groups form complex, multi-dimensional family resemblance structures, not very different from the categories and cities discussed in Chap. 1 (see further discussion below).

With Itzhak Benenson