STRATEGIC SPATIAL PLANNING: TOWARDS CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATION IN ARABIC SCHOLARSHIP AND A COMPARATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR PLANNING APPROACHES

This study aims to clarify the concept of strategic spatial planning within Arabic scholarship, explain its foundations and defining characteristics, examine its relationships with other planning approaches, and develop a diagnostic framework for assessing its use in studies and planning documents. It addresses overlapping terminology and classification levels, as well as the difficulty of distinguishing defining characteristics from tools and normative objectives. The study combines a selective critical integrative review of the literature with comparative conceptual analysis, connecting strategic, relational, and institutional perspectives and linking strategy formulation to implementation and learning. The analysis indicates that strategic spatial planning is characterized by the interdependence of spatial understanding, priority setting, appraisal of alternatives, and mobilization of capacities and resources. It also highlights the need to distinguish planning approaches from spatial scales, sectoral domains, instruments, and documents. Urban, regional, and national scales provide settings for applying the approach, while regulatory and structure plans and sectoral programmes can perform complementary implementation functions. The proposed diagnostic framework connects characteristics to assessable evidence and explicit rules for judging its adequacy. Its relationship to earlier frameworks is specified, while evaluation of planning processes is distinguished from evaluation of their impacts. The study contributes a conceptual synthesis for Arabic scholarship that draws on international literature while recognizing institutional and spatial diversity. Its findings remain conceptual and comparative; assessing the prevalence of conceptual ambiguity in Arabic literature and validating the framework require subsequent empirical testing.