The evident conflict in upgrading policies between several entities necessitates the crucial need to develop a reliable urban appraisal method to ensure successful interventions. The Egyptian initiative, aims at categorizing them into ‘unsafe’ versus ‘unplanned’ areas. Yet, it has ignored some basic socio-spatial and psychological quality of life indicators. Accordingly, the study aims at strengthening the local-level data collection through testing the reliability of the ‘ISDF’ index versus the two other sets of indicators statistically, by conducting an urban socio-economic survey on 30 different Ashwa’iyyat areas in Egypt.
