AbstractThis paper is an extended analysis of the discursive formation and content of a key document emerging from the Social and Economic Planning Council (SEPC), established in 1942 under the chairmanship of Dr H.J. van Eck. The central proposition is that the publication in 1944 of Regional and Town Planning, the SEPC's fifth report, represents a key moment in the articulation ‐ if not the immediate adoption ‐ of a specifically ‘modernist’ discourse of spatial planning in South Africa.Against a background of turbulent political, economic and social change ‐ and under the influence of Van Eck's clear commitment to rapid industrialisation ‐ the SEPC's work on post‐war ‘reconstruction’ can be understood as an attempt to map the parameters necessary for state intervention to set South Africa firmly on the path of economic modernisation. The report proposes a radical transformation of the relatively ineffectual and fragmented pre‐war planning system to enable more effective (and centralised) direction by the state of processes of spatial development at both local and regional level. The major part of the paper is devoted to examining the terms in which this argument is discursively framed and the way in which it connects with the SEPC's broader project of reconstruction and modernisation, on the one hand, and planning discourses current elsewhere, particularly in Britain, on the other.The paper concludes by examining the generally dismissive reception accorded the SEPC's far‐reaching proposals at the time. The most immediate institutional impact of the SEPC's report was the establishment of the National Resources Development Council in 1947. It may be tentatively suggested, however, that its more significant legacy might only have emerged somewhat later, with the introduction of the highly interventionist mode of spatial planning that accompanied the installation of apartheid as a profoundly transformative programme of social engineering.