the city portrait - an epic collaboration

Often the seams are hidden from view, as if to say, ‘how this was made doesn’t matter.’ For Regen Melbourne, how things are created does matter, because to us, the doing is what regeneration is all about.

The City Portrait is a result of epic collaboration, but what does that actually mean? Here is the short version of all the hands involved in bringing it to life. The long version can be found in Making the City Portrait on the City Portrait platform - there, you’ll read about the loads of people who shared their time, resources, knowledge, questions, effort and HOPE in the creation of this platform.

How did we create such a beautiful platform that ALSO holds lots of layers of information?
In short, his name is Miek Dunbar, and he’s exceptional. We met Miek at the end of last year, and the idea of creating a platform together to hold complex relationships between data for Melbourne sparked joy for all of us. Maths! Design! Fun! We had it all. Miek jumped into this work because he cares about it. We didn’t have a formal partnership or paid agreement between us: the collaboration and design process became part of Miek’s research agenda in his role at the RMIT School of Design. We later realised that the way that we worked together had a formal name - ‘commoning’ - and it was perhaps because we weren’t trying to adhere to something formal and constructed that our collaboration was so genuine.

An early sketch from Miek of the digital platform at the beginning of our partnership.

Miek was joined for part of the project by Zaib Sheenan, who took on an internship with Miek as part of her studies at RMIT School of Design. Zaib contributed to the Wild Hope exhibition where we displayed the City Portrait prototype, and is the brains and hands behind the “What’s this doughnut thingy?” that introduces the framework in a fun, accessible way.

How did we stop getting stuck on ‘metrics of non-biodegradable waste’ and start talking about what all of this means for Melbourne?

Ben Hart and his team at Fireside Agency have been partners of Regen Melbourne since early days, supporting the narrative development of how we talk about this wild and wooly thing that is an engine for collaboration. As the City Portrait was coming together, they generously gave us 50 pro bono hours (shout out to Tara Crowe & Chris Harrigan) to support the messaging to raise us up from the technical elements of this City Portrait to what it means and what we need to do to act.

Once we had this great story in front of us, we wanted to make it feel even more tangible - as in, we literally wanted a print artefact that could offer a tactile way to get a sense of the City Portrait. The best way that we could describe this was to make a “magic foldy thing” to hand out at the City Portrait launch event. And, lo and behold, Ollie Pelling and the team at Good&Proper not only understood this description, but also brought this together, well, like magic.

How did we invite others into the process who’d never heard about Doughnut Economics or City Portraits?

This was enabled by the magic of Naomi Stead and Wendy Steele, who curated the Wild Hope: Conversations for a Planetary Commons exhibition at RMIT.

They identified just the right place for us to showcase an early prototype of the platform in this exhibition: PlaceLab Melbourne. An installation there meant we could test assumptions we had about function, narrative, usability and how people engage with data. The wonderful Kiri Delly and the PlaceLab team were both gracious hosts and active partners for the installation and three public workshops we ran.

How did we get all those numbers on the inside of the Doughnut [the Social Foundation]?

Well, first we had to decide what the numbers should be measuring! That was done through a maushive amount of workshops and conversations with sector experts to collectively set the ambitions for each dimension of Melbourne’s Social Foundation.

Then to undertake the data collection, we relied on publicly available data, much of which is only visible because organisations have invested in measuring and sharing these metrics for years (e.g., VCOSS, Foodbank Australia, Edelman). We were joined on the data hunt by data analysis support from the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation (LMCF), and then Lokesh Sangarya, who began volunteering with the RM team to refine and build out the Social Foundation data.

All of this built on a baseline desktop review of existing data points led by Sarah Beattie-Smith and Claire Wild, who at the time were enabled by Point Advisory with 100 pro bono hours to get us started on the whole City Portrait back in 2022.

How did we get all those numbers on the outside of the Doughnut [the Ecological Ceiling]?

Great question. The process of downscaling the Planetary Boundaries that make up the Ecological Ceiling to a city level is a gnarly one because they’re PLANETARY. We kicked off this process through an exploration with Arup, led by Reid Beauchamp and Amelia Tompkins. This helped us to understand the essence of the Planetary Boundaries and some options for localising measurement. Then, we heard about the work of Open Corridor and immediately started to work with Josh Hopkins to develop Greater Melbourne’s quotas for consuming valuable resources.

In order to feed localised data into the ‘Planetary Quota Machine’ (not the technical term), we extended our partnership with Open Corridor to include the University of Melbourne Centre for Cities. Through the tireless support of Professor Sarah Bell, we recruited a research assistant, Navam Niles, to reach out to data holders, engage with them about the City Portrait and sift through the masses of data to determine what could be applied to the analysis.

Both these partnerships were made possible because of continued funding from LMCF, a key funder of Regen Melbourne who has supported the City Portrait from the beginning - championed by Stephen Torsi and the whole team.

How did we point readers to more detailed research on each dimension of the Doughnut?

The understanding of each dimension of the Melbourne Doughnut is underpinned by A LOT of expertise and knowledge. A LOT. Even just in Melbourne. Just as we were scratching our heads about how we could effectively capture this, we met with Altiorem, whose purpose is to make research on sustainable finance and related topics more accessible. With no reason to reinvent the wheel (or rich and freely available online library of purpose-driven research, in this case), we agreed to partner with Altiorem to link our two platforms. Working with Mariana Wheatley, we co-hosted two student interns, Lauren Clark and Gemma Romiti, who developed new content for Altiorem’s library on Doughnut Economics and on individual dimensions of the Melbourne Doughnut.

How did we test the overall direction of the City Portrait as it moved from early idea to launch-ready?

This is where Regen Melbourne’s alliance came into play. From the beginning, we knew we needed a group of trusted friends to ground the process and the emergent platform in reality. Partners in learning, we might say. And so, the group of Learning Partners came together to guide the City Portrait’s structure, purpose, audience and key messages. Members of this group include Mariana Wheatley (Altiorem); Reid Beauchamp, Thomas Cochrane, Jo Gardner-Marlin and Amelia Tompkins (Arup); Warwick Smith (Centre for Policy Development) Kate Henderson (City of Melbourne); Reanna Willis and Claire Wild (ERM); Ben Hart (Fireside Agency); Stephen Torsi (LMCF) and Leigh Halford (Think Impact).

Their big-picture and detailed thoughts shaped core elements of the platform, and the contributions of this group to the City Portrait platform and launch extend beyond our collaborative sessions together. We look forward to continuing to collaborate as the City Portrait makes its way out in the world..

Why such a focus on collaboration in a research project anyway?

For us, the doing is central to the regenerating, the remaking that our city needs. Because of this, the collaboration was the research: could we make a City Portrait that would not only show us the city’s strengths and shortcomings, but would also represent how we need to work to create the change we want to see?

And it turns out we can, and we did, together.