INTRODUCTION AND CONCEPT

Hesham A. A. Mokhtar
Professor of National Planning and Urban Development
We all practice planning in our personal lives with different degrees of awareness
and complexity. In the simplest form, each of us plans his day through analyzing
involved circumstances, determines the goals he wants to achieve, evaluates
possible alternatives and choose the most suitable, while taking into consideration
time and physical limitations according to surrounding factors. Nobody could live
without planning, even if practiced spontaneously or impulsively; whether
businessman or housewife, without planning one remains paralyzed in status quo.
Complexity of planning process depends upon multiplicity of involved variables;
accordingly, it becomes easier and simpler to plan with higher number of
constants involved, while it implicates the participation of professionals and
experts in various fields relevant to the amount of variables the plan deals with.
The necessity of professional structured planning increases in relevance to the
ambition of targets as well as the diversity of surrounding factors and
circumstances. But such a necessity also depends to a far extent upon the decision
maker’s degree of awareness regarding the complexity of challenges and the
importance given to the task in hand; as carelessness always lead to disasters and
makes it harder to remedy the consequences and implications.