The Victorian economy is transitioning from an industrial economy to one based on knowledge and services. This might suggest that there is no need to plan for industrial uses. However using the measure of land consumption, industrial users across metropolitan Melbourne consume nearly 300 hectares of land per year (which is equivalent to one and a half times the urban area of North Adelaide).This growth has been enabled and supported over time by consistent and long term strategic planning. By its very nature, the outcomes of strategic planning often lie far in the future. Using time series data from the Victorian Urban Development Program’s geospatial industrial land database, this paper explores the land use outcomes of strategic plans. The paper will start with a broad economic and land use analysis of metropolitan Melbourne. It will then focus on development over the last quarter of a century in Australia’s most active industrial land market, Laverton North in Melbourne’s west, to draw the linkages between strategic planning, economic structure and on the ground development.