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"The urban connection" develops a promising actor-relational approach to urban planning. With respect to the usual governmental planning, it is focused outside in, instead of inside out. It derives its leitmotif from the actual debate about state controlled versus neo-liberal planning and reflects on innovative post structuralist scholars in the field of planning, economics, social geography and governance. It then takes its own position in that debate, reflecting on actor-oriented experiments in planning practices. These experiments deal with the daily planning practice with a pro-active and operational attitude, contrary to the usual retrospective case studies. Therefore it results in concrete suggestions on how to develop a more robust planning-approach in an ongoing globalising and fragmenting world

Not only in the Netherlands, but also elsewhere, there is stalemate between modern and postmodern/post-structural planning, or alternatively, between state-controlled and neo-liberal planning. Since the 1980s at least, modernist, state-controlled planning has been fundamentally debunked as a highly regulatory and prescriptive operation, resulting in syrupy planning processes, which are very costly, inflexible and inefficient, and suppressing all new and creative initiatives that do not fit within the set framework. Postmodern and post-structural alternatives developed since then have been very effective in counter-attacking the alleged virtues of that planning strategy, but less fruitful at promoting effective and/or sustainable practices. The article assumes that this is related to the fact that time and again these alternatives continue to be formulated from within the existing planning framework, from a specific governmental, or at least a government influenced, view of planning: in essence from the inside-out. From this position, the article goes on to describe the possible outlines for a practical outside-inward, actor-relational-approach. It has been developed from experimental case studies in concrete planning practices, for example, a case study in Southern Limburg in the Netherlands. Concurrently, it has also been derived from a fundamental interaction with behavioural, urban regime and actor-network/network actor theories, with an extensive evaluation of the latter. The article concludes with a call for a new fundamental, but proactive, reassembling of spatial planning in an actor-oriented, as opposed to a government-oriented, way.

Since the 1980s and due to the ongoing complexity and diffuseness of global networked societies, planners have tried to move beyond classic technocratic and/or sociocratic ideas of planning towards new approaches, which address the multiplicity and fuzziness of our perceptions and actions in time and space. Innovative ideas have been developed concerning discursive, collaborative, informal and post-policy planning, as well as relational geography, multi-planar, non-linear and actor-relational approaches. Nonetheless, techno- and sociocratic approaches remain dominant conceptions for much teaching and practice in Europe and elsewhere. This is partly because these innovative contributions of the past 20 or 30 years have been fragmented and isolated. However, they can also be regarded as the beginning of a bigger transition towards what we call a movement of 'planning of undefined becoming'. In this article, we will sketch a framework in which these innovative ideas about the planner's perceptions of fuzzy, complex and co-evolving space and time will in some way be interrelated. From this background, we will also critically reflect on some planning experiments in practice inspired reciprocally and incrementally by these ideas, developing applications for practitioners along the way.