Planning scholarship is beginning to recognise the importance of time and temporality in spatial governance debates, with Parker and Dobson (2025) underlining the prescience of “uchronia" or the concept of ideal time in the determination of local plans and planning applications. This paper applies this concept to the urban governance approach of Birmingham, a city with a long track record in the planning and execution of large-scale regeneration projects. It focuses on the hosting of the 2022 Commonwealth Games which were seen by policy makers as a catalyst for achieving some long-established ambitions for revitalisation of the Perry Barr district in the north-west of the city. The paper argues that the tight timescale of delivery and urgency of associated planning processes led to a temporal speeding up before the Games to expedite the essential works for the hosting of the two week event itself. But a corresponding lack or urgency post-Games created challenges for the fulfilment of wider legacy in the Perry Barr district where policy ambitions not accompanied by institutional structures, resourcing and processes needed to realise more lasting regeneration benefits. The paper concludes by reflecting more boradly on the importance of time to entrepreneurial modes of urban governance as an area that has been underresearched.