ABSTRACT
Strategic planning is intrinsically concerned with the ‘becoming’ of the city. It recognizes the complexities of reality, and emphasizes the state of ‘uncertainty’ that challenges planners and the planning systems. In Egypt, the planning process is confronted with a particular type of ‘uncertainty’, where the country struggles through day-to-day affairs dealing with the various issues as they arise rather than through a defined process. Many scholars have thus struggled to investigate and understand the planning process in Egypt. They described the Egyptian planning system as operating solely through ‘parental blessings’. The latter is an Egyptian saying that refers to mystical or ambiguous ways that cannot be otherwise described. Simultaneously, this is dependent on the personal preferences of the actors involved in the decision-making, who are identified through the government and other municipality personnel who follow a top-down and central hierarchy. This state of ambiguity and uncertainty was further deepened by the recent political turmoil, which added another layer of instability and recurrent changes. In this context, the planning process in Egypt appears to require a degree of flexibility and adaptability, which is not dealt with in traditional planning. The country first embraced the ideas of strategic planning in the first half of the 2000s through cooperation with international development agencies such as UN-HABITAT and UNDP. This shift towards strategic process was perceived as successful, particularly in the early phases that were closely monitored by these international agencies. However, the transfer to national authorities was rather problematic. The Egyptian institutional and bureaucratic aspects confronted the planning process, and helped the development of a contextualized –‘Egyptianized’-version of strategic planning. Not only was this version deemed less successful in comparison with the early phases, it was inserted in a vicious loop. The top-down institution of decision-making continued to perceive planning as a well-defined rational system to apply, and new projects continued to go back to the early ‘un-contextualized’ version of strategic planning. Furthermore, the role of citizen participation is rather challenging: on the one hand, it conflicts with the top-down institution and, on the other hand, the citizens overemphasized their personal interests in the spatial transformation of the land use and boundaries and disregarded other dimensions that reflected the common good of society.
