What does Regen Melbourne do?

Our context

Systemic Challenges demand systemic solutions

Despite the many strengths of our beautiful city, we’re facing a web of immense social and environmental challenges. Challenges that threaten to undermine the very fabric of our city.

Every day, Regen Melbourne challenges ourselves to answer a simple question: what do we need to do now to ensure the long-term health and prosperity of all life within Greater Melbourne?
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From climate impacts and food security, to cost of living, loneliness and declining trust in our institutions – the future is precarious and volatility is perhaps the only constant. We can all remember the smoke that covered Melbourne during the Black Summer in early 2020, and the unequal way different parts of this city suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We live in a metacrisis of interconnected and systemic challenges. And single actors don’t solve systems problems. We need coherent action by alliances of unusual actors, from business, non-profit, government, universities and the general public.

The trouble is that our current system is not built for this type of epic collaboration. We need new approaches. The moment demands it.

Regen Melbourne is our response. This is our way of breaking out of our siloes, reorganising our systems and increasing our collective ambition. Together, we’re working across sectors to chart an ambitious and tangible path towards a regenerative future for all Melbournians.

Our response

TENDING TO THE SOIL

At Regen Melbourne, our unique approach to transitional infrastructure sits at the intersection of theory, practice and place, scaffolded across three core layers:

Transitional Infrastructure

Strategic direction

collective vision

A community-defined direction with holistic measures which sets the agenda for change and enables our civic mandate.

Action pathways

Earthshots

Wildly ambitious orientations for our city, strategic action-oriented pathways to transition to a resilient and regenerative future.

Action-oriented research

Systems Lab

An action-research platform which uses knowledge and exploration to enable new systemic conditions.

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‍The way we solve problems is fundamentally broken

In a garden with poor soil health, you don’t just tend to individual plants – you fix the soil. And if you fix the soil, every plant in the garden has the greatest opportunity to thrive.

This same logic applies to human systems, communities and cities. We must remember our inter-dependent nature, and our non-negotiable need for healthy soil – the systems we depend upon.

The size and scale of our current challenges cannot be solved by independent actors working on individual problems. We need to shift the enabling conditions, the infrastructure we are bound to and the very systems our economic and social lives are governed by in order to create tangible, lasting change.

We need to fix the soil.

Our work at Regen Melbourne is to articulate, influence and reorient prevailing systems so that Melbourne can become a beacon city for resilience and regeneration. This includes rebalancing the economy to ensure social justice and equity is the foundation of our city’s future. For a transition of this scale, we need new types of institutions to bridge the current state to the future potential.

Each of the layers of our transitional infrastructure contributes to an ecosystem of portfolios that create tangibility, momentum and many angles of entry into our collective work.

Each and every one of us forms a small part of the system we are hoping to change. Through our work, we seek to activate as many Melburnians as possible towards the regeneration of this great place.

Our role

What we do and how we do it

Regen Melbourne exists to organise business, non-profits, government, universities, communities and critical infrastructure towards a safe and regenerative future for our city. This is complex work that transcends traditional understandings of roles and responsibilities. However, across our diverse team we navigate three distinct modes that provide a way of understanding what we do in practice:

Sensemaking in a living city

This is where we make sense of the issues at hand, and where to focus our efforts. We undertake a rigorous systemic analysis of our field of interest.

This includes data collection and research, intensive convening with key stakeholders, connecting nodes of the system to unearth new information, and mapping our findings to help us chart the most effective way forward.

Developing a portfolio of projects

We focus on identifying critical gaps in the ecosystems we are part of and stepping in where coordination, capability or leadership is required. Our role in each project is dependent on the context.

Sometimes we convene and orchestrate partners, sometimes we amplify existing work, and sometimes we actively lead a new project as an acupressure point in the system. These are not stand-alone projects, they come together as nested portfolios.

Orchestrating new collaborations

Collaboration is at the heart of what we do. Systemic problems need systemic solutions. This requires coherent action by alliances of unusual actors, from business, non-profit, government, universities and the general public. Since our founding in 2020 dozens and dozens of partners have come together bound by a desire to be in service of our place.

Over time collaborations have formed in a myriad of ways. Sometimes we are invited to support other people’s work, sometimes we convene actors to develop new opportunities for action, and sometimes we actively lead a collaboration around a defined project.

Our role

Our methodology

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.

Ultimately we believe that in transition work we must develop alternatives for our systems to move towards. And we must also work with and confront the system as it is. These can feel like conflicting worldviews at times. And there is no single reliable model that can cure our world or build anew. Instead we centre our work on our place, and on the future of Greater Melbourne and draw on a plethora of models and approaches as needed.

This way of working constantly remixes approaches, mindsets, methods and tools at the intersection of place, theory and practice:

Community picnic gathering under large trees in a Melbourne park

Place

Understanding what’s possible here. Grounded constantly in the context of Greater Melbourne. Recognising we are embedded in a wider system, and yet action will take its own flavour by nature of working in a living, breathing city.

Participant reading the City Portrait doughnut diagram booklet at an outdoor park event

Theory

Understanding how systems work with multi-level perspectives, horizon scanning and foresight, research partnerships, and publicly available datasets. We draw on and adapt mission-oriented innovation and challenge led approaches through our Earthshots and we draw on and adapt transition theories through our Systems Lab.

Participants collaboratively building a circular ground art installation in a Melbourne park

Practice

Dynamic systems don’t change by thinking about them, change must be enacted and in relationship to the world. We are constantly translating, probing, developing and sharing capabilities for moving in and learning through uncertain environments.

Our compass

HOW WE STAY ON TRACK

We began our journey using Doughnut Economics to guide a large, collective visioning process for our city. Between October 2020 and April 2021 more than 500 people came together to explore what they loved about our place, what challenges we face and what our city could become. Over the course of the following two years, and together with countless partners and academics, the Melbourne Doughnut has progressed from a conceptual model to a practical tool for measurement.

The Greater Melbourne City Portrait is an Australian-first project to create a new compass for progress for our city – a platform that gives all citizens a practical and holistic way of measuring how well Melbourne is supporting people and planet to thrive. The City Portrait now points us to the types of actions, policy decisions, investments and mindset shifts required to embrace a regenerative future for our city. It acts as a compass for all our work.

Explore the City Portrait

Our strategy

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

How do we bring these ideas together in a strategy for systems change, when so much is uncertain, relationships are as much of a focus as projects, and feedback loops are so long?

For some answers we turn to nature itself. Nature is beautiful, messy, non-linear, distributed and emergent. It is the most perfect and intuitive system known to us. With such brilliant complexity and inter-connectivity, how do you even begin to find understanding, or navigate to where the most potent points of healing and reconnecting might be?

As children, our understanding of nature might begin with awe and curiosity. As we get a little older, we discover the periodic table of elements: the distillation of the fundamental building blocks of life itself. It turns out we can understand our natural ecosystem by diving into the foundational elements that interact to create our universe.

These elements don’t all behave the same way. Some are abundant, some are scarce. Some are incredibly stable and strong, others are reactive and dynamic. The reality that our messy, complex, beautiful, inter-relational natural world is made up of mappable, powerful, discrete elements makes the periodic table an enticing metaphor for new strategic thinking.

We believe that our strategy should be in conversation with the principles of systems thinking and regeneration. As such, we have built our strategy using the analogy of the periodic table.

There is a lot here. Take a look.
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Large crowd at the City Portrait for Greater Melbourne launch in a heritage brick venue with purple lighting