This contribution uses Animal Rescue Centres (ARCs) as an unconventional but revealing lens through which to examine how planning theory, methods, and disciplinary identity are evolving. ARCs sit at the margins of planning: essential infrastructures of multispecies care, yet largely absent from policy frameworks, sustainability agendas, and academic debate. Their marginality exposes deeper tensions in how planning defines “development,” allocates legitimacy, and imagines its publics.

Drawing on ongoing doctoral research that combines spatial analysis, site assessments, planning case studies, and qualitative engagement with ARC operators, this contribution reflects on what ARCs reveal about planning’s conceptual blind spots. Their experiences of regulatory invisibility, land-use precarity, and inconsistent decision-making highlight how planning practice continues to privilege human-centric, service-oriented infrastructures while overlooking forms of care, labour, and environmental value that fall outside established categories.

The discussion considers how multispecies perspectives, welfare‑oriented infrastructures, and informal sustainability practices challenge planning’s methodological assumptions and open new avenues for research–practice dialogue. It asks what planning becomes when its objects of concern expand beyond human needs, and how such expansion might reshape long‑term spatial futures, policy design, and public understandings of what planning is for.

By foregrounding ARCs, the contribution invites a broader conversation about how planning can build itself up, conceptually, ethically, and methodologically, to engage with emerging forms of urban and rural care that currently sit beyond its field of vision.