Ethnicity and Space

Abstract

Broadly speaking, this paper is concerned with the ways in which different ethnic groups co-exist within a given spatiotemporal framework. More precicely the study investigates the spatial and social relations between the two major ethnic groups in the island of Cyprus, that is, the Greek Cypriot majority and the Turkish Cypriot minority, which existed in the rural area of the country from the time in which the island was under the British colony until it achieved independence in 1960. Spatial analysis and more precisely the "space syntax" method is used to investigate the relations between the ethnic groups. It is suggested that throughout each community and its social groupings, a similar set of spatial characteristics is reproduced and through this repetition we recognise ethnicity is space. Space is therefore, in itself a social behaviour not merely a backcloth to social behaviour, and under its material shell encloses logic and abstract rules.