Summery Social Planning History and Development

From historical approach, social planning comes from social philosophy theories and development of social sciences of the late 19th century. After the World War I because of unorganized situations of the European countries, the first models of social development planning paid less attention to basic theories and used engineering principles and techniques. So the aim of the paper is to review social engineering and development of social planning.
Systematic review is used in this paper as a research method. Thus different documents as papers and books related to social engineering, social planning, social work and socioeconomic development were reviewed. Finally researcher used 17 documents in the study.
Early 1940s and 1950s social engineering was a scientific attempt to analysis the reality of society, planning for developing the future and preventing social problems. But it was revealed that it’s not possible to analysis and assess complex relationship between social problems by mathematical models and it couldn’t make comprehensive model to cover all social and nonsocial variables. So practically social engineering was put aside and social planning techniques and principles was mentioned in academic views. After World War II, along with social, economic and political evolutions, considering social planning was seemed to be necessary.
In the last decades, social planning consists of practical methods and techniques and becomes as an independent knowledge among social and economic sciences and social work. Nowadays experiences of different countries reveal that according to the nature of social planning, it is completely influenced by social, economic and political situation of each society, thus its methods and techniques aren’t significant factors by themselves.