ABSTRACT
The fi rst World Congress of Planning took place in Shanghai in June 2001. There was a brief moment of euphoria, as some Western planners thought the Congress held the promise of “one world, one planning,” and that planning had become, or was in process of becoming, one discipline, one universal profession. It must soon have become apparent, however, that the global discourse was far from unifi ed, and that planners often talked past each other, not quite knowing whether or not they made sense to their polyglot audience. English was the lingua franca of the Congress, but not everyone was conversant in the language, and the translation of specialized terms at this academic meeting must have tried the skills of the simultaneous interpreters who labored bravely and anonymously in the background. How, for example, was a Chinese planner to explain to a colleague from, say, Barcelona, Spain, the intricacies of local institutions in the hyperactive metropolis that is Shanghai, and vice versa, when the entire municipality of the capital of Catalunya is smaller than a single urban district of the Shanghai municipality with its population of 14 million registered denizens and another 4 million temporary migrant workers, and do this in a language that is foreign to them both? To say the least, it must have been a challenging task.
