Failed planning: lost opportunities and choices for the future

Abstract

Purpose Social, spatial and environmental justice are inseparable, and key for sustainable urban development. The city is the cradle of innovation and production. Also, the city is the site of riots, where protesters demand their right to access services and resources. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question: Why do plans to resolve urban ills in developing countries fail to deliver and achieve social justice? Design/methodology/approach This paper investigates weaknesses, limitations and outcomes of planning processes in a developing country. The author used two qualitative research tools: document analysis augmented with informal interviews. The author uses Egypt as a case study in an attempt to answer this question. The author reviewed two types of documents: official reports that the Egyptian authorities produced and donor agencies prepared plus both published and unpublished research. Interviewees are those who participated in elaborating and executing urban plans and policies. Findings Achieving social, spatial and environmental justice is amongst the reasons for planning metropolitan areas and their regions. Unfortunately, rarely plans accomplish social, spatial or environmental justice. Institutional setup is the reason for failed urban planning – institutional failures lead to both policy and market failures, thus complicating urban problems. Originality/value Approved plans must have the power of legislation, and planners need to reclaim their authority and autonomy, which requires regulating the profession. Planning education must be at the graduate level and available to other disciplines, such as economics, public administration, law and the like. Planners must acquire the following competencies: technical competencies for analytical actions; hermeneutic competencies for communicative actions; and critical competencies to observe professional ethics. They must emancipate themselves from their bias to enlighten and empower their constituents.

Editorial

“…All authors of these issues are nonwestern. There were nine articles on urban issues (Wiedman and Wang, 2020; Zohou et al , 2020; El-Kholei, 2020a; İnce et al , 2020; Ferah, 2020; El-Kholei, 2020b; Ammar et al , 2020; Lingyan and Ming, 2020); two articles on academic research in architecture (Salama and Hurol, 2020; Hurol, 2020), three articles on memory/place/tectonic affects (Tang et al , 2020; Ghelichkhani, 2020; Aksel and Imamoglu, 2020), two articles on the issues of plurality and polyphonic approaches (Salama and Hurol, 2020; El-Ashmouni and Salama, 2020); one article on decolonialism and cosmopolitanism (El-Ashmouni and Salama, 2020); one article on parametric design (Tünger and Taşlı Pektaş, 2020); two articles on photovoltaic facilities (Krstic-Furundzic et al , 2020; Ibrahim, 2020); one article on transformation and social change (Al-Betawi et al , 2020); two articles on sustainability and cittaslow (İnce et al , 2020; Babatunde, 2020); two articles on architectural education (Rauf, 2020; Pasha, 2020); one article on conservation of built-heritage (Thirumaran et al , 2020); one article on traditional villages (Huang and Yuanyuan, 2020); one article on post-war reconstruction (Kudumovic, 2020) and one article on post-pandemic environment (Ghada and Gharib, 2020). Some articles combined double keywords.…”

Hermeneutic phenomenology for spatial analysis

“…Institutional failures resulting from ignoring the constituents' views led to policy and market failures. These failures are responsible for the limited success of the implemented plans and projects, thus aggravating urban issues (El-Kholei, 2020). For plans to succeed, planners must free themselves from their prejudices and see problems through the eyes of their constituents, which is a case for using hermeneutic phenomenology in all phases of planning, starting with problem definition and goal articulation and ending by implementation, monitoring and evaluation.…”