During the last decade, a growing number of planning theorists have taken a 'communicative turn' (Healey, 1996) in describing and theorizing urban and regional planning. A rapidly growing amount of work drawing on Habermasian, ethnographic and related frameworks has prompted some to articulate the emergence of new forms of 'collaborative' or 'deliberative' planning (Healey, 1997; Forester, 1999, respectively), and to declare the ascendancy of a 'new paradigm' (Innes, 1995), or the existence of 'consensus' among scholars about key theoretical and methodological questions (Mandelbaum, 1996).In what follows, we wish to question some of these claims by advancing two main arguments. First, that communicative planning, despite its marked contribution to the understanding of planning, is but one in a number of recent approaches to theorize planning. Second, that some aspects of the communicative approach are problematic as a theoretical basis for planning, mainly because they draw attention away from the underlying material and political processes which shape cities and regions.We will also observe a persisting confusion in planning theory, linked to the inability of theorists to agree on two fundamental definitions: what is 'theory' and what is 'planning'. In our work, we define 'planning', after Lefebvre, as the public production of space; that is, all policies and practices which shape the urban and regional environment under the auspices of the modern state.The central subject of this essay -'theory' -can also be defined in many ways. We lean towards the meaning identified by Raymond Williams (1983: 316-18) of theory as 'an explanatory scheme', or in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, 'suppositions explaining a phenomenon; a sphere of speculations and concepts as distinguished from that of practice'. To be sure, analysis can never be neatly separated from normative and ethical assumptions, though we stress the explanatory, conceptual, analytical, deconstructive and critical aspects as the main 'pillars' of the theorizing endeavor, without which the prescriptive and normative aspects of theory are often shallow and ineffective (see also Yiftachel, 1989;Fainstein, 2000).