What Does Planning Owe the Unhoused? Toward a Planning Theory of Homelessness

Homelessness is now an enduring feature of cities across the globe, yet planning scholarship has been reluctant to say plainly what it owes the unhoused. In this essay, I argue that planning scholarship's engagement with homelessness reflects two connected failures. First, its analytical frameworks remain too parochial to address the global structure of informaility that creates housing precarity. Second, its normative foundations remain too thin to evaluate responses against what unhoused people need to flourish. Drawing on worlding and frameworks from the Global South, I develop a scholarly planning approach that engages urban informality and precarity as analytical categories, centers racial dispossession, and grounds its prescriptions in a capabilities framework. I propose a framework for planning scholarship that reconceptualizes homelessness through the capabilities approach, justice, and human flourishing.