From our food systems to our streets, Melbourne has so much potential to become a world-leading regenerative city – one capable of ensuring environmental and economic resilience while allowing our communities to thrive. Here, Regen Melbourne’s Food Systems Lead, Dheepa Jeyapalan, explains how community holds the key to unlocking transformative change in this place.

How can the recommendations from the Greater Melbourne City Portrait begin to influence policy and planning decision-making across the city? Director of Regen Melbourne’s Systems Lab, Alison Whitten, explains how the City Portrait is shifting gears through 2025 and beyond.  

How do we begin to grasp the interconnected pickle we’re in without falling into despair? Is there a way for us to grasp the challenges we’re facing in a manner that moves us towards beauty, and away from apathy? Regen Melbourne’s Yasmina Dkhissi explores all that, and more, through the lens of mosaics.

A year on from the City Portrait launch, Regen Melbourne’s Director of Systems Labs, Alison Whitten, reflects on how our understanding of the platform’s purpose and value has evolved. TL;DR: If last year was all about building a thing, this year was all about learning its usefulness and application.

If we want to fix the deeply rooted issues in Melbourne’s strained food system, first we need to make sense of it. How did we get here? What have we come to accept as ‘status quo’? And what’s standing in the way of meaningful collective action? In our latest report, ‘The Foodie City we need to become' our Food Systems Lead Dheepa Jeyapalan explores the challenges and abundant opportunities that lie ahead.

We often talk about “altitude sickness” in our work at Regen Melbourne, and for good reason – it’s complex! Sometimes though, the framing of altitude sickness has its limits (in the logical, vertical layering it implies). Here, Nicole Barling-Luke explores a reframing of this feeling, and asks: what if we started thinking about the jolt we receive when we’re overwhelmed with complexity as an invitation for seduction instead?

When it comes to regenerating our city (and planet!), we need to look at what makes us human: our ability to learn and transform, and our connection to nature and each other. In her first Field Note, Yasmina Dkhissi, Regen Melbourne’s new Adaptive Futures Lead, explores what it will take for us to work together, find common ground, and ask the right questions as we make our way through the climate and biodiversity crises.

There is no shortage of models for change in the world, so this year we’ve been reviewing how this plurality of approaches can coalesce into a coherent living strategy for Regen Melbourne’s work. Kaj and Nicole explain why we’ve chosen – of all things – a periodic table to help us make sense of our unique alchemy.