This thesis addresses the question of how it might be possible to articulate an understanding of urban planning practice which is at once reflective and transformative. The aim of the work is to develop a range of alternate conceptualisations of planning practice, drawn from ideas developed within critical theory, sociology, art, architectural theory and architectural design practice, from which to consider the possibilities of both talking about and practising urban planning differently.

As  starting point in that broader inquiry, this thesis proposes a sense of “dislocation” within the experience, conceptualisation and articulation of planning practice, the result of strategies of dissociation and disciplinary defence, predicated upon an emphasis of the break between modernism and post modernism, between practice and theory, and between plan and process. It is posed that these positions, expressed within contemporary planning theory, have in turn made it difficult to place planning practice with respect to temporality, spatiality, other disciplines and its publics. 

Turning to architecture, exploration of positions which adopt the in-between, the interdisciplinary, the critical, the pragmatic, the projective and the performative as their basis for practice have been fundamental to the development of the arguments of the work. Through this thesis it is argued that urban planning needs to initiate a new debate about practice, and that it might use a discussion of interdisciplinarity, reflectivity, criticality, futurity and materiality in order to develop a politics of engagement, at both subjective and disciplinary levels.