, vol. 12, issue 2090-0694, pp. 29-45, 2014.
By the start of the 1950s, following the end of World War 2, the world was confronted with destroyed and demolished cities. Such conditions required aggressive development, which was carried out by professionals of the planning, and architecture disciplines, aiming to fulfill the urgent social requirements of building new cities. A surprise result was the inability of both disciplines to fulfill the social community requirement of promoting a healthy environment and providing citizens with better quality of life. The need for a new intermediate discipline was recognized. Since then the appearance of the urban design as a profession has been established, practiced and taught among the architecture and the planning schools around the world. In Egypt by the start of the 70s, a number of pioneers returning from Europe and the United States have introduced the new discipline to the Egyptian architecture and planning schools. Since then Egypt has managed to establish a special school in the field, with a specific shift towards the physical dimension, aesthetic and social needs. One of the great deficiencies of the urban design practice in the Egyptian school is the neglect for the other dimensions of the sustainable urban design, especially those concerning the economic and environmental dimensions. The paper aims to emphasis the importance of the economic dimensions and the need to efficiently include it as a core dimension in the urban design process. The paper’s methodology was based on a number of theoretical analytical studies defining the importance of the economic dimension and classifying the types of urban design projects, in the Egyptian context. Based on practical experience, the paper presented an innovated tool that would allow the full integration of the economic dimension in the urban design process. The tool was tested and reported on through practical application on an urban design project and a field survey carried out with a number of urban design experts and practitioners.
