Planning has lent legitimacy to the development of society through the application of different theories and practices. With its embodied concepts and values, planning influences the direction of change that a society may achieve. Given the great role that planning plays in shaping societies over long periods of time, in situations where it is planning knowledge that is subject to travel between nations, consideration of the context specificity is particularity essential. This thesis deals with the complex process of transferring collaborative planning knowledge to a different institutional and cultural context. The research adopts a proactive approach, examining the practical and theoretical potential imbued in a new context. It is argued, in this work, that an exogenous planning model has to be re-contextualized and landed in a new context through its assimilation with that context’s history and cultural values. The research focuses on Egypt and is directed towards understanding the specificities of the Egyptian institutional context and the cultural values inherited from the history of Egyptian society. The author’s interest lies in addressing the ways in which such an understanding can contribute to the development of collaborative planning knowledge. The research strategy is designed with reference to the cross-cultural transfer of knowledge and the study utilises an action research approach through which the author plays the dual role of practitioner and action researcher. Implementing collaborative planning in the Egyptian urban context of the city of Zifta provided a valuable opportunity to understand how planning knowledge may be transferred between different cultural contexts. The intellectual foundations for the collaborative principle is scrutinised, and complemented by an examination of Egyptian social philosophy. A conceptual framework for the joint development of knowledge in cross-cultural planning research is put forward, which derives from a combination of the practical and theoretical investigations carried out. / <p>QC 20121003</p>

The dissertation examines how the Swedish cultural code, contained in books by Astrid Lindgren, was transferred into the Polish linguistic and cultural domain. The research reveals how the Polish cultural filter affected the image of Swedish reality in the translations. The analysis took into account the transfer of both verbal and visual aspects of the cultural elements. A smooth transfer was achieved in the following sphere: changes in the linguistic code between interlocutors from different social strata; the way in which people from the privileged classes were addressed; the transfer of the verbal folklore of children. The folklore of Swedish and Polish children was shown to be more or less congruent, which may indicate the existence of a universal, transnational children’s code. The reconstruction of intertextual references was achieved in relation to the Bible. References to world literature succeeded in crossing the cultural border only partially. The complexity of the cultural code of the original led to an exoticization of the translated text. The colloquial language and dialect of the original, reflecting the structure of Swedish society failed to find its way into the translations. Emotionality in the form of expression, typical of Polish culture, caused the translations to be characterized by the use of diminutives. The emphasis on the emotional element is also visible in the enormous diversification of the verba dicendi in the translations, which also makes the text more expressive. The linguistic and stylistic conventions of the target language (i.e. Polish) caused the translations to depart from Lindgren’s simple and repetitive style. The addition of footnotes in the translations demonstrates the strong didactic tendencies in literature for children in Polish culture. They did not enrich the text of the translation, however, with any new information. The transfer of the visual element in the first translations was characterized by polonization and folkoricization. Scenes that show children at work and portray village life were subjected to a form of purification, so that the small-town milieu—in contrast to the village—was shown to advantage through its visualization. The typical rural buildings and the costumes of their inmates were transmitted via a strategy of folkloricization: by drawing on the relatively well-regarded peasant culture of the Podhale region of Poland.