The increasing attention being paid to time and temporalities in planning is now significant (Dobson and Parker, 2024; 2025; Jensen et al, 2025; Hutter and Wiechmann, 2022; Lennon and Tubridy, 2022; Laurian and Inch, 2019) and existing and emerging scholarship indicates the multiple possible avenues for research on time and temporalities in planning in Europe and beyond. Drawing on work that reviews and critiques time and its use in planning (Parker and Dobson, 2026 forthcoming; Dobson and Parker, 2024), the paper reflects on six identified modalities or themes of time and the multiple temporalities involved in planning. One important aspect of this research agenda is bringing time back into centre stage in the politics of planning and place, given that practices involving the manipulation of time for planning and urban governance cut across territories and demonstrate how governmental priorities necessitate changes to systems and policy or processes. Such understanding can also reveal how timing, speed or squeezes of process may marginalise some voices or issues, as well as limit the event horizon for planning in the face of long-term challenges. When positioned amongst pre-existing literature on time and planning, the six perceptible modalities presented are active ways of shaping or using time in planning research and practice. These groupings function as a useful framework for giving shape to the development of planning theory and research agendas and further exploration of the emerging ‘temporal turn’ in planning studies (Dobson and Parker, 2024; Wiechman and Hutter, 2024).

The integrated rural development of primary, secondary, and tertiary industries serves as a vision of balanced and embedded rural development through new spatial models of the rural complex under China's Rural Revitalisation strategy. In practice, however, these projects frequently disembed from their rural surroundings. Existing research seldom explores the enclavisation of rural integrated development (including primary, secondary, and tertiary industries) and its mechanism. Drawing on Lefebvre's ‘representation of space’, this study argues that the enclave is inscribed before the boundary is built and is also generated within conceived space. The argument is developed through a typical case study of a rural complex in China, organised around three mechanisms. Firstly, as the national vision of integrated development is transmitted top-down across administrative scales, it is recoded as a tourism-led programme that displaces the slow, localised, use-value rationale of agriculture. In addition, urban background planners, working under compressed project timelines and standardisation pressures, reproduce a replicable urban-park aesthetic for the rural landscape. Moreover, every relevant party focuses on exchange value or political performance, while the rural dimension secures no advocate in the process. This study conceptualises the outcome as a representation of enclavisation and challenges collaborative planning theory. The failure of planning does not lie in distorted communication but in the efficient alignment of elite values and external power. Rural planning should thereby attend less to procedural deliberation and more to the question of whose conceived spaces are ultimately embedded in plan-making.

Determining ‘valid knowledge’ and ‘the facts that matter’ are key concerns in planning practice and literature, but much existing theory places agency on the planner to determine validity while overlooking the structural mechanisms that surround complex decision-making in planning practice. This research applies the philosophy of critical realism to identify key elements of structure including a critical realist conception of structural hegemony, alongside political rationalities, public policy doctrines such as the public interest, and professional ethics. These concepts are proposed as key causal mechanisms impacting upon decision-making and the determination of valid knowledge. Referencing an empirical case study of the siting of a waste-to-energy incinerator in the UK context, the research identifies a hegemonic lag whereby hegemonic rationalities and doctrines actualise decisions that endure through subsequent planning processes despite political and public contestation, and changes in policy, local context, and planning personnel. This hegemonic lag is proposed as an explanation of why complex planning decisions often become controversial.  

It is still unclear why residents define certain geographical areas as their neighbourhoods, and this lack of clarity has a profound impact on urban decision-making. The aim of this research has been to develop a conceptual model for self-defined neighbourhoods. I conducted a mental mapping activity with 15 residents from Dublin 8 in Ireland representing different sociodemographic characteristics, housing typologies and duration of residency. Dublin 8 is a postal code area in the inner city of Dublin chosen for its urban and social diversity. In 1:1 meetings which lasted two hours, I asked each resident to rate their neighbourhood satisfaction and draw a memory map of the area that came to mind when they gave their opinions followed by deep discussions for the reasons. While theories define a neighbourhood as the area reachable within 15 minutes walk in all directions from home, the research revealed that residents perceive their neighbourhoods as a sector of the area they walk, with their home often situated at the edge rather than the center. This sector can range from a single street to a 20 minute walk from their home and can be an area or a network of streets. The research helped in identifying some of the factors that shape self-defined neighbourhoods and developing a conceptual model to represent them. This can help in predicting the area that a resident will consider as their neighbourhood and in turn narrowing the gap between neighbourhood design and user experience.