Abstract: This paper starts from the premise that during the entire 20th century, mainstream ideal concepts of Western planning have been echoed in a way often ‘larger than life’ in Canberra (Fischer 1984). It was particularly the type of modernist planning between the 1950s and 1970s which developed Canberra into an open air museum of planning models. It comes to the surprising conclusion that a similar kind of perfectionism as that applied to build the modernist city of strong central regulation and of (eventually unaffordable) public expenditure could be observed when Australia’s version of Thatcherism began to dismantle the body of planning control, corporate memory and planning expertise and replaced it by an econocratic frame of reference (Fischer 2004, Pusey 1991). In the years following the introduction of self-government in 1988, Canberra became an exemplar of “planning in post-modern times”, supplying classic case study material for the study of neo-liberal politics (Fischer 2013: xi). The division of planning responsibilities between the two levels of government and the disjunction between the associated plans have created a range of urban development dilemmas. However, since the turn of the millennium and in particular since the centenary, there has been a partial redirection of attention on the significant planning history of the city and the need for a twolevel planning system that works. This paper focuses on the struggle to reach this point, most notably in the proliferation of inquiries, plans and reviews since the OECD ‘urban renaissance’ study of 2002. It is positioned within a larger critique of ‘urban renaissance’ as a planning concept in the context of post-modernism. The paper seeks to capture salient developments in Canberra’s planning through a combination of document analysis and oral history.