Abstract: Regarding town planning in Victoria as a multiplicity of practices – ensembles of institutionalised activities – I interrogate what I regard as a neglected cluster of ‘knowledge’-making practices and probe their sources and legacies. I pose the Foucauldian question ‘what is the nature of our present?’ in relation to what has shaped the planned face of Melbourne. In particular, I set out to trace the diverse constructions of the norms and forms which became Melbourne’s planning doxa through a genealogy of planning in Melbourne from c1914 to 1929; a period catalysed by events including creation of the Victorian Town Planning and Parks Association, outbreak of worldwide war and ending with the establishment of the Metropolitan Town Planning Commission. I argue that strategic and statutory planning in Melbourne lie at the nexus of private profit through property investment and social benefit, and have done so for the last century. Early town planning folded together disparate planes of reference including health/medicine, architecture/surveying and moral purity. I examine, in particular, the nexus between Foucauldian dispositifs of eugenics and town planning and their constituent discourses, including those of moral purity, health, progress/development and certainty. I illuminate some of the formal and informal encounters between such dispositifs to demonstrate how the disparate association of ideas became a planning doxa of certainty.