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.

Caroline Sanz-Veitch shares the maturing of Participatory Melbourne into cross-cutting work focused on New Urban Governance (aka how we enable better relationships between communities and our democratic systems). Caro reflects on the insights from the last year and what led us to the realisation that we must pave a new path through the lens of participation as an enabling condition, not a stand-alone project.

Three years ago, Regen Melbourne was established as a community project following the release of our foundational report, ‘Towards a Regenerative Melbourne’. This year, after a successful incubation by Small Giants Academy, we’re celebrating by becoming a registered charity and an independent entity in our own right.  

We talk a lot about the vision for a Swimmable Birrarung. But what does the full extent of this vision look like? Is getting in the water enough? (hint no). Nicole dives into the different ways in which ‘swimmable’ could come to life over the next few years (and decades).