Income growth and sustainable behaviour motivation in developing countries: Understanding the relationship according to the environmental kuznets curve (ekc): the case of Cairo, Egypt

Enhancement of the urban environment quality has been the point of interest of numerous researches that studied and analysed the factors affecting sustainable practices and behaviours. The most prominent of which is the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), that hypothesizes that environmental quality and sustainability are enhanced as income grows. However, the EKC seems to miss variables that may affect the environmental quality as public awareness and support for environmental protection. Additionally, it does not represent the majority of slower growing economies where consumerism is at its highest as in the case of developing countries. The paper focuses on Greater Cairo Region (GCR), Egypt as an example, where citizens live a consumer’s lifestyle since the 1980s Sadat's liberalizing policies. The issue – among other triggering reasons as the over population of the CBD – that caused the swoop of suburbanization, represented in upscale gated communities providing only 10% of the housing stock scattered in the desert’s outskirts, claiming to offer a more sustainable lifestyle for the high-income and luxury segments that present 8% of the country’s population and receive almost 65% of the GDP. The research, accordingly, aims at examining the applicability of the EKC in a developing country’s city and questions: do urban communities of high level income groups necessarily represent a more sustainable behaviour and environment than communities of lower level income groups?. To achieve the said aim, the paper compares the sustainability indices of two urban areas of high and low-income groups in GCR, through a multi-criterion framework (environmental, social, economic and institutional) for assessing these areas’ sustainability. The framework includes quantitative indicators that can be measured simultaneously for the two chosen areas as the noise levels, quantity of solid waste generated, residential density, mean travel time and distance to work, etc. The paper concludes that income level clearly influences the sustainability of urban areas, however, in cities of developing countries, sustainability may be proven to be higher in urban areas with a lower income level where hidden potentials and motivation for sustainable behaviour can be found.