As Australasian cities create newer generations of strategic metropolitan planning, equity is both proudly assumed as a foundational egalitarian character of urban living, and anxiously affirmed in guiding principles for sustainable development. Specifically, equity concerns underwrite the design and delivery of strategic visions via principles associated with strong communities and collaborative community governance. New generation plans increasingly prioritise connecting the community dots (albeit through conventional nodal development such as transit-oriented design). Hence, it is timely to reconsider the challenges posed to community planning by the normative conditioning of equity and the privileged role of strategic plan-makers (pro)claiming “strong communities”. Particularly, we must observe the variable participative capacities expected of communities, and the risk to equity when implementing metropolitan plans where competitive efficiency priorities prevail. This paper draws insights from Melbourne’s long-term metropolitan planning strategy to explore these equity-efficiency tensions, to describe the normative agendas aligned with strong and participative community, and advance insights into wider implications for the collective and personal resilience of the communities caught between decision makers and planners in high-order agendas. Drawing on generational and cognate plans, the paper politicises the equity agenda emphasising two critical questions for planning theory and practice: what political content do we neglect in re-dressing metropolitan planning strategy so as to appear more attentive to achieving equitable planning (after Inch, 2012 and Porter, 2011)? and how can we foster resilience by ‘negotiating a democratic ethos’ (Bond, 2011) into our understanding and practice of building strong communities that better serves equitable urban governance?