ABSTRACT
This chapter is premised on the provocation that planning, as a field and discipline, runs the risk of being irrelevant to the key issues and debates of the twenty-first century. The most urgent of these twenty-first-century issues are climate change and poverty. This essay focuses on poverty, with particular attention to how, in the new millennium, a global conscience and mandate to alleviate poverty has emerged. But this global consensus is also an articulation of power, including the power to determine the key ideas and practices of development, to shape and disseminate “poverty truths.” In this essay, I chart the formation of a new hegemony on poverty, paying attention to how some poverty interventions, such as microfinance, are promoted as a panacea. I argue that the diffusion of poverty truths is inextricably linked to the diffusion of capital. Such circuits of knowledge, power and capital point to how “ideas are also weapons” (Marcos 2000, unpaginated). This stunning statement, sent to the world from the struggles in Chiapas, indicates that the hegemony of certain world views and knowledge paradigms has crucial implications for the organization of space, resources, opportunity, and justice – in short, what we may call planning. Yet neither the millennial issue of global poverty nor the struggle over “poverty truths” has entered current planning discourses. There is a persistent disjuncture between the concerns of planning, including its articulation of social justice, and the fierce battle of ideas that is raging about the new millennium and poverty. This chapter seeks to remedy this disjuncture by foregrounding the articulation and contestation of “poverty truths.” In doing so, it not only makes the case for planning’s role in the twenty-first century but also highlights how a study of circuits of truth and capital must serve as the prelude to planning action.
