Volodymyr Proskurin
Strategic planning expert
Mr. Proskurin has 13 years of experience in strategic planning. He helped nearly 40 cities to develop strategic plans. As part of MLED Project, he helped to develop strategic plans for Kryvyi Rig and Dnipropetrovsk.
We can view planning at a number of levels. There is an everyday level – setting an aim. If you don’t set an aim, you won’t receive anything. For example, you come to a café for a meal. Until you order the dish you won’t be served anything and you’ll be hungry. At the philosophical or even metaphysical level, information goes first, and then it is materialized. In other words, we should generate something, some of our dreams, thoughts, wishes. City is a complex social and economic organism requiring management. And management always has a number of aspects: organization, planning, motivation, monitoring. These are well-known aspects of management.
The future of the city should be planned by all means. In the majority of cities such planning is absent. It is important to have a vision of the future of the city. Moreover, this vision should be agreed with practically all population of the city. The point in strategic planning is to find the strategic positions from which to start the activities, for example, the best resources in the city which can be used for the development of the city, and to set an ambitious goal. This is how strategic planning starts. And then we have to develop a certain scenario, certain trajectory of how we are going to get there, what resources will be required, what leverage we will use.
It is important to take into account economic aspect as the basis of any development, as these are the sources of our income. We can’t plan expenses until we understand how much income we will have, and where from. This is one of the components. Another component is environmental component, which is becoming as important as economic one. The world is changing; the population quantity is growing in the world, along with increasing anthropogenic risks. And we should take this into account in any city. Social aspect is not least important in the development of the mankind, as a certain marketing leverage. If to take a global view, the world is socializing extremely quickly. More and more people understand their unity on that planet. They realize that we are all alike. There is a mission for everyone. Those who actively participate in this process, work for the development, they will receive more from this world, as they invest more. Thus all these three aspects – economic, environmental and gender play very important role in our project, as they fully comply with the requirements of the contemporary world.