Reimagining Our Cities: A Response To The Polycrisis
The Australian Quarterly invited CEO of Regen Melbourne, Kaj Löfgren, to reflect on RM’s work in the context of the polycrisis for their April 2025 edition. The article is republished here with permission.
“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” – Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize-winning chemist
When I collect my boys from our local primary school, I’m always taken by the absolute chaos of hundreds of kids running out of the front doors towards the street, all at the same time. They display a full range of emotions, some joyous, some downcast. Some are running, some barely walking.
Parents and carers scoop up their kids in huge hugs. My youngest is typically one of the last out the door, walking slowly and caught up in his own thoughts. As he finally reaches me, the energy that had burst out of the school only moments before has almost completely disappeared. We hug, roll our bikes away, and calm is restored to the street.
What is initially perceived as chaotic is actually a window into a remarkable example of a complex and adaptive system. A system is made up of a purpose, a multitude of parts, and most critically, the relationships that connect those parts together.
A good school has a clear and shared goal, a culture that empowers and incentivises everyone to play their best roles, and a natural environment that reminds us that human systems are nested within our ecology. While a great principal is a critical ingredient, a school system is made up of the endless human connections, interrelationships, structures, processes, feedback loops, accountability mechanisms, and a diversity of essential roles.
A good school is more akin to an organism than a machine, where the multitude of mutually beneficial parts work towards a common goal; a place where kids and community thrive together. A system in balance.
In late 2019, Melburnians watched in horror as the east coast of our country burned. Apocalyptic footage and photos filled our screens. And then the smoke came. Our city was blanketed, houses were shuttered, and the smell of burning filled the air. As the country reeled, news emerged of a new virus in China. We didn’t pay attention, overwhelmed and in grief for the loss and disruption of the Black Summer.
But soon we were under the first lock-down. Then the second. The imbalance in our natural ecosystems collided with our human systems. Schools were closed. The delicate balance of our world dramatically interrupted.
In this heightened, pressurised context, a small group of Melbourne organisations came together to envision what these disruptions might mean for the long-term future of our place. Regen Melbourne was initially a small community research project that rapidly became a large collective visioning process.
Harnessing a deep love for our city, and inspired by place-based organising in other cities like Amsterdam, Birmingham, and Oslo, what followed was the collaborative development of a new holistic measure of progress for the city, the co-design of three ambitious “Earthshot” projects, and a collective research platform to power the work.
Regen Melbourne has become an engine for ambitious collaboration in service of our city; a vehicle to navigate challenges now and to chart transition pathways to a safe and regenerative future.
Our Polycrisis Context
Every year in January, the World Economic Forum (WEF) publishes an annual global risk perceptions report. The report brings together insights from more than 900 experts from across all sectors, including civil society, government, business, and academia. In a world of endless media cycles, doomscrolling, and reactivity, the report reveals some startling insights worth pausing and reflecting on.
This year’s report reveals that 88% of respondents believe there is a moderate, elevated, or looming risk of global catastrophes in the next two years. The report defines global catastrophes as events that would “negatively impact a significant proportion of global GDP, population, or natural resources.”
It goes on to outline that across the next two years most experts think our major risks are from misinformation, extreme weather events, state-based armed conflict, and societal polarisation. Across the next 10 years, however, the top four major risks are all related to the negative impact of the climate and biodiversity crisis. The report concludes by outlining the interconnectedness of major global risks and the relative influence they have on each other.
“Our economy is out of balance. It is no longer in service of human and ecological thriving and is hence teetering, meanwhile lacking resilience, and an ability to adapt in response to the resulting uncertainty.”
Imagine you are the Chair of a Board, or a CEO of a large organisation, or the Mayor of a city. In a meeting with senior staff someone says “Excuse me, I’ve just received a credible report that there is a moderate, elevated, or looming risk of a major catastrophe affecting our work”. What would you do? How would you respond? Surely business as usual would go out the window at this point. But so far, it hasn’t.
These risks are no longer abstract, nor can it be argued that they are in the future. ‘Catastrophic’ events are already reshaping the world around us. Most recently we saw this reality in graphic and tragic ways in fires that entered urban areas in Los Angeles. The interconnections were also apparent – in this case between the climate crisis, the political polarisation that prompted a fragmented response, and the reality of economic inequality in southern California.
Of course, for those of us in Australia, the memories of the 2019/2020 Black Summer are vivid, with the realisation that urban environments and cities are not exempt from the flames or the economic effects of natural disasters. Our interconnected crises are creating a risk environment that is bending our environmental, social, and economic systems to breaking point.
An Economy Out Of Balance
So what is at the heart of the crisis context, sometimes referred to as a poly-crisis? To explore this question, we can turn to the fields of regenerative practice, systems thinking, and wellbeing economics, and how they reflect on the nature of balance.
Ecosystems of all kinds thrive on balance and reciprocity. Schools are most effective when children, parents, carers, teachers, and school leadership are aligned in a shared vision that supports the development of the whole child. And yet, of course, this isn’t always the case.
Anxious parents and exhausted teachers aren’t always aligned. Good schools have the ability to rapidly and easefully realign expectations, reconnect relationships, and rebalance in the interests of the child.
Healthy systems of all kinds contain these self-regulating feedback loops to maintain balance. Our human bodies contain self-regulating feedback loops that maintain body temperature, and ecosystems have self-regulating feedback loops that keep flora and fauna populations healthy.
And yet of course our schools, bodies, and natural ecosystems are not isolated systems. Instead, they are constantly impacted by external forces. Our schools experience funding pressures and debilitating administrative burdens. Our human health is impacted by our environment, our behaviours, our community, our context. And our natural systems are constantly impacted by human action.
Our systems can easily tip in and out of balance, at both the micro and the macro levels. Jenny Andersson, a leading UK-based regenerative practitioner, describes three critical macro systems that must be held in balance and reciprocity.
The first are our Life Support Systems, containing our climate, forests, oceans, biodiversity, soil, and land. In short, everything upon which life depends. The second are our Human Cultural Systems, containing language, communications, art, democracy, education, and beauty. Finally, we have our Human Economic Systems, containing our finance, business, transportation, energy, construction, and waste.
These three systems are maintained in balance by an openness to human development and a culture of creativity and innovation, both of which build resilience to shocks and an ability to adapt over time. The implicit or explicit prioritisation of one macro system over another will inevitably result in imbalance and trigger reinforcing feedback loops that lead a system towards collapse.
Another view of balance is provided by British economist and author of Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth. Raworth redefines our economy as being made up of four equally important parts: the market, the state, the household, and the commons. These parts are nested within society and the ecology, in what Raworth describes as “the embedded economy”.
In an ideal economy, each part of the economy is playing to its strength. The Market is powerful and is hence embedded wisely, the State is essential and so must be accountable, the Household is core and so needs to be deeply valued, and the Commons is our creative heartbeat and so must be unleashed.
As Raworth writes, with this framing we can ask “when and how is each of the four realms of provisioning - Market, State, Household, and Commons - best suited to delivering humanity’s diverse needs and wants?” Or perhaps, “how can these four realms most effectively work together?”
However, it is clear that in our current state of economic framing, ‘the economy’ is defined almost entirely as ‘the market’. As a result, our economy continues to prioritise narrow measures of economic success, like GDP growth and (narrowly-defined) productivity. By doing so, we tilt and incentivise our embedded economy in a particular direction. The role of the Market grows, the State is eroded, Households’ labour is undervalued, and the Commons are forgotten.
We can all intuitively feel this imbalance in our daily lives. Life often feels harder than it should be, perhaps most clearly expressed through our increasing cost of living. However, the feeling of imbalance is deeper than our hip pocket. It manifests in our mental health, the hours we work, the way we spend our time, our declining trust in institutions, and a general feeling that we’re being left behind.
Our economy is out of balance. It is no longer in service of human and ecological thriving and is hence teetering, meanwhile lacking resilience, and an ability to adapt in response to the resulting uncertainty.
What both Andersson and Raworth describe in their ideal models are resilient, collectively-aware economic systems that are able to adapt and change based on shared values; economies that are in service of thriving human systems operating in harmony with a prospering ecology. Much of this thinking builds on principles of care, reciprocity, and Country embedded in Indigenous wisdoms around the world. Put simply, this way of thinking positions the economy to be in service to life rather than the other way around.
In our current context this framing can feel naive. And yet, our current economy is the result of countless, conscious human decisions over a long period of time. If the current system is so obviously out of balance, then why does it feel so hard to chart a new course? The answer lies in a set of embedded and reinforcing pressures which are rarely named and yet underpin our current operating landscape.
The first is the effect of our cultural, economic and political separation from the natural world. It seems necessary to remind ourselves that we are, in fact, nature. We are not separate from it. We are not in control of it. Nature is not here to serve us. Human beings are an interdependent part of the natural world. And the human economic systems we have built are entirely dependent on the health and vitality of our ecology.
One effect of this cultural forgetting is a deep loss for individuals and communities who aren’t able to often benefit from the restorative and regenerative effects of being in nature. Another effect is the perpetuation of 20th century, Western, managerial worldviews that the systems around us can be controlled with levers and top-down decision making.
Of course, when we remember that we are nature, it becomes clear how laughable this worldview actually is. Our natural ecologies are made up of countless interdependent organisms each playing their role without anyone sitting in a central control booth.
Our understanding of this truth can be transferred to our complex economic systems too. Despite economists’ and politicians' self-important posturing, we can’t control the economy. Instead, as systems thinking pioneer Donella Meadows noted, “systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned…we can dance with them!”
The second is that we have a problem-solving culture that prioritises reductionism and compartmentalisation in order to find tangible, short-term ‘solutions’ to business, policy, and civil society challenges. While a solutions approach feels intuitive, it can often reinforce existing dynamics, resulting in short-term wins and long-term losses. A crude example might be applying a Band-Aid to a wound without realising that there is an internal bleed. Or addressing the housing crisis by allowing construction on greenfield sites, destroying biodiversity and increasing fire and flood risk for new inhabitants.
“ If the current system is so obviously out of balance, then why does it feel so hard to chart a new course?”
Our education system fuels this dynamic by focusing on ever-increasing specialisation rather than building skills in patterning and systems thinking across disciplines. And our finance system incentives narrow problem solving by over-simplifying complexity in order to create artificial ‘certainty’ in an increasingly uncertain context. The third is that our dominant measurement paradigm focuses almost exclusively on short-term, linear and first-order impact. This is the case across business, government, academia and the community sector. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed. And yet, we have known for a long time that this narrow measurement paradigm is toxic to holistic, systemic change. As Bobby Kennedy famously put it in 1968, in relation to measuring GDP, “it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Our separation from nature and each other, our mechanistic worldview, our problem-solving culture, and our measurement paradigm have created an entire economy made up of largely disconnected individual actors, each operating within narrow boundaries. And narrow boundaries create wide externalities.
These externalities are now manifesting as rising social, economic, and ecological risks, including urban heat, biodiversity loss, extreme weather impacts, water shortages, food insecurity, housing insecurity, political turmoil, and social upheaval.
Our 20th century model for managing such externalities was that democratic government sets the rules of the economy, actors play within those rules, and then the government manages externalised risk. Unfortunately, this logic no longer applies, and perhaps it never did.
Our interconnected risks, as outlined by the WEF above, are now manifesting in amplifying ways that go beyond any magnitude that a State can respond to or mitigate in a top-down manner. Further, the strength of government continues to be eroded by the above systemic pressures and the impacts of neoliberal, small-government mindsets over the last 50 years. This has resulted in a reduction in the size and capability of government, an inability to effectively regulate markets, insufficient ambition from political leaders, and a decline in institutional trust at all levels.
In this new context, a scary reality emerges in which our society and economy systematically externalises risk, while simultaneously eroding the government's power to effectively manage that risk. This structure becomes self-terminating by design.
We urgently need new ways of organising to manage, mitigate, and adapt to the emerging risk environment. We also need to acknowledge that with the accelerated rise of risks and systems under pressure, come significant opportunities for transformation. On the other side of risk and liability is a once-in-a-century opportunity for regeneration.
It is from this context that Regen Melbourne was born, as one example of the emerging organisational forms required to hold a metropolitan scale view of risk, resilience, and regeneration.
Introducing Regen Melbourne
Regen Melbourne is an engine for ambitious collaboration in service of the regeneration of Greater Melbourne. Powered by a community of more than 200 organisations, our purpose is to move Melbourne towards a safe, just, and regenerative future. Such an ambitious framing and purpose clearly requires new ways of thinking, doing, and being.
As a result, Regen Melbourne’s work sits at the intersection of many new models, frameworks, worldviews, and approaches. These include Doughnut Economics, mission-oriented innovation, systems thinking, regenerative practice, collective impact, and a variety of inner practices that connect our personal development to the outer change we aspire to.
Regen Melbourne was formed almost four years ago, in the wake of the Black Summer fires and in the midst of prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns. This crisis context created a pressurised environment that demonstrated the myriad of ways the polycrisis was playing out across our city. Since then, an interconnected set of elements have been developed that, taken together, form what we refer to as ‘social infrastructure’; the scaffolding required to grapple with current risks while co-creating new pathways for our city into a regenerative future.
Leading systems thinker Nate Hagens notes, “this is our Icarus moment, we have flown too close to the sun and our institutions are melting.” Our systems are so out of balance and status quo inertia is so strong that new social infrastructure is required to experiment, collectively learn, and build adaptive ways of navigating a hopeful path forward. Regen Melbourne is our example of how this new social infrastructure can be practically created.
Element 1: A new vision
Regen Melbourne emerged through a collective narrative and visioning process in early 2021. Together with over 500 individuals and more than 50 organisations, a new vision for Greater Melbourne was developed, defining the city as a place that is knowledgeable, full of life, affordable, connected through culture, collaborative, and enabled by its economic and governance systems.
This process drew on Doughnut Economics and produced a community portrait of the city, downscaling the global model developed by economist Kate Raworth. The resulting report, Towards a Regenerative Melbourne, laid out a new vision for Greater Melbourne, and charted the first steps of a roadmap to achieve it.
Element 2: A new measurement paradigm
As we got to work, it became clear that we needed to scaffold our community vision with a measurable framework, a compass to guide our progress as a city. What began as a qualitative community portrait in 2021 progressed from a conceptual model to a practical tool for measurement by the end of 2023, the Greater Melbourne City Portrait.
The Greater Melbourne City Portrait is an Australian-first platform that gives individuals and decision makers a practical and holistic way of measuring how well Melbourne is supporting people and the planet to thrive. Using Doughnut Economics as a framework, this project brought together a colossal range of partners – academics, experts, industry heads, policymakers, scientists, and community members – to examine each dimension of our Social Foundation (how well we’re looking after our communities) and Ecological Ceiling (how well we’re looking after our environment).
Ascribing quantitative data to these dimensions tells us how we’re tracking towards a safe and just future. The City Portrait now points us to the types of actions, policy decisions, investments, and mindset shifts – reflected in the City Portrait Stories – required to embrace a regenerative future for our city.
Element 3: A portfolio of Earthshots (Wildly Ambitious Projects for Melbourne)
With the City Portrait under development, we began convening dozens of partners to surface the thematic areas of greatest interest for practical collaboration towards the regeneration of our place. Through picnics, workshops, roundtables, parties and interviews, three themes emerged strongly: the regeneration of our food system, the weaving of regenerative neighbourhoods, and making the Birrarung Yarra River swimmable.
Leaning on economist Mariana Mazzucato’s ideas around a Mission Economy, we designed a portfolio of what we call ‘Earthshots’; wildly ambitious projects that create tangible pathways towards our collective vision for the city.
Systems leaders Alex Hannant and Ingrid Burkett write that, “mission-led approaches provide us with an architecture to conceptualise and orchestrate movements for intentional, systemic and structural change.” We set about testing this model on making the Birrarung Yarra River swimmable. Through a pilot process, we co-developed a clear vision, created a new alliance of partners, convened workshops, initiated integrated research, catalysed renewed government and media interest, convened design forums, and unlocked new philanthropic capital.
Element 4: A methodology for systemic transformation
As our portfolio of Earthshots matured, so did the sophistication of our underlying methodology. Drawing upon a plethora of models and frameworks, there are four main aspects, or phases, in developing and delivering our Earthshots: sensemaking, organising, insights, and leverage points. Or SOIL for short.
The Sensemaking phase involves hyper-relational pattern spotting of emerging energy and activity around an identified challenge area. Here we start to recognise how an existing ecosystem of actors is already connected and engaging with one another.
The Organising phase involves identifying the gaps or barriers across silos and sectors, which are in need of new collaborations, partnerships, and ways of working to realise the potential for transformative change. It is here that transition pathways are created within our Earthshots, defining systemic clusters that can move the work forwards.
The Organising phase is coupled with the generation of Insights that iteratively inform the roles and direction taken towards the shared goal. These organic insights are complemented by the power of research to ensure attunement to existing and emerging knowledge. This ensures our collective work is supported by, and honours, the deep knowledge held across the city.
After working below the surface (in the soil), we can then begin to explore which existing and potential projects might unlock systemic transformation. This phase involves collectively assessing which projects are (or could be) powerful Leverage Points for systems change and focusing our efforts on building a dedicated portfolio of collaborative projects.
Element 5: A Systems Lab
To support the work of our Earthshots we developed an applied-research platform called the Systems Lab. Through partnerships with six leading universities, the Systems Lab explores a set of enablers that require a deep and dedicated enquiry space. This work aims to shift long-term underlying conditions around capital flows, measurement systems, urban governance, and adaptation to climate change in order for our Earthshots to be successful.
Bringing these elements together creates a new layer of community infrastructure and a new social licence for actors to utilise in service of the city we love. Together, we work collaboratively as a coalition of partner organisations from across sectors and industries.
This ecosystem is increasingly well positioned not only to deliver our wildly ambitious projects, but also to shift the underlying conditions for change in Melbourne so that all aligned actors can be more effective in their work. While our broader economic system remains critically out of balance our layer of collective infrastructure represents a permission space for a new way of acting, being and relating.
As architect, philosopher, and inventor Buckminster Fuller dramatically noted, “to change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Islands Of Coherence And The Nature Of Change
The work we’re doing doesn’t provide short feedback loops or follow neat and simple impact logic. Our transition towards systems that have new purposes and functions, that are built for adaptation, resilience and life, are represented by long and sometimes undefined signals of change.
While we’re hard-wired to chase instant gratification and for our progress to be clearly visible, it may be helpful to think of this work as generational. Untangling and rebalancing broken systems takes time. And while our work in this moment remains urgent, and we should treat it as such, it is worth remembering that this urgency will outlive all of us.
Our current paradigm is dominated by a culture of scarcity and loss. This is understandable. We are in the midst of the sixth great extinction, we are living through the climate and biodiversity emergency, and economic pressure is significant for many, many people. And yet, lifting our gaze and, creating permission to imagine new systems, unlocks new forms of abundance. The abundance of communities who love their places. The abundance and resilience of nature, fighting for life despite human-caused challenges. The abundance of opportunity for transformation that moments of crisis can bring.
Our work is to lean into these new abundances and remember that small examples matter. It is from small and diverse examples of new systems at work that great change can occur. In our case, beacon regenerative cities can act as islands of coherence as we collectively navigate the impacts of the polycrisis. And our schools can be centres for rebuilding trust, resilience, and community as we navigate the turbulence ahead.
There is a difference between optimism and hope, as author Rebecca Solnit articulates so beautifully, “Optimism is a form of certainty: everything will be fine; therefore, nothing is required of us, which is really the same as cynicism and pessimism and despair. Hope is recognizing that the future is being decided to some extent in the present, and what we do matters because of that reality.”
What we do matters. And what we do together matters even more.
AQ: Australian Quarterly is one of the country’s oldest publications, in print for over 96 years. You can get AQ in print or digital from as little as $15 a year and you’re supporting independent, evidence-informed debate on the issues shaping Australia and the world.
Subscribe to the Regen Gazette for the latest news and views from Regen Melbourne.
