totally agree with you that planning decisions tend to be sticky and influence the city for a long time also it is hard to "heal " some of the consequences of it , however this top down planning process is somehow shifting to a more bottom up collaborative process .anyway hopefully in the near future the way of planning should change.
for Egypt the situation is very interesting there is the absolute top down planning from the government (it doesn’t matter before or after the “revolution”) which is done in a very" non transparent way " by some planners of course :). but there is a lot of urban interventions even big scale intervention like an exit from the ring road 
and there is also a lot of informal settlements where there is a strong and somehow connected community and sometimes stick together against plans of relocation.
anyway its a very interesting mess and there are some urbanists and architects who are working in very interesting projects with the people and try to coordinate the “development process” like al athar lana
there is also some interesting researchs about cairo like cairofrombelow where I am a volunteer translator
There was even a constitution proposal for urban rights made by some researchers .
actually i think urbanohumano was a partner in Ecosistema Urbano which was responsible for the dreamhamar project .