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.  

When we launched the Greater Melbourne City Portrait last year, tucked away behind the data and stories was a set of recommendations suggesting what is required to move towards the “safe and just space” for our city.

These recommendations are not easy, quick wins. They are clear, but they are also multi-faceted and based on new ways of working, calling on government, the market, civic society and each of us to contribute to meaningful change. 

This year, we started to unpack these recommendations by delving into government policy analysis and submissions. We wanted to understand how applying the City Portrait model to government policy and planning could contribute to more holistic approaches that centre human and ecological wellbeing. How do housing construction targets and carbon emissions reductions targets line up? What are the trade-offs that come with different approaches to planning, and how well are these acknowledged in decision-making? How can a community-based approach help to inform policy implementation at a local level?

A Portrait for Victoria’s Future

In collaboration with Navam Niles and Professor Sarah Bell at the University of Melbourne, we began with a comparative analysis between the City Portrait model and Infrastructure Victoria’s Choosing Victoria’s Future (CVF) scenario modelling. Infrastructure Victoria released this work just a month before the City Portrait launched. The CVF report compares the economic, environmental and social performance of five different approaches to future development across Victoria. With the Victorian State Government as its primary audience, the work emphasises that a more compact model of planning can best serve people, planet and the economy in the long run.

Titled A Portrait for Victoria’s Future, our analysis corroborates this assertion, going further to suggest an important opportunity for the City Portrait to augment the CVF report, and other research-based initiatives like it that are informing current long-term government planning initiatives like Plan for Victoria and the National Urban Policy.

Comparing the Pair

In the analysis, we first identified key differences between the two methodologies and frameworks, noting, in particular, the more expansive set of indicators and metrics applied in the City Portrait. This comparison highlighted the following:

• Scope and remit

The scope and remit of Infrastructure Victoria and Regen Melbourne differ, influencing the methodology applied to each framework. It is important to acknowledge IV’s specific remit, which is to provide apolitical advice to the Victorian government on infrastructure-specific questions.

• Selection and availability of datasets

The two frameworks draw on different types of data: the CVF report focuses on economic metrics while the City Portrait reflects a diversity of social and ecological measures.

• Political landscapes, data and decision-making

The distinction between frameworks offers a useful reflection on the relationship between data availability and policy appetites for holistic decision-making. Even in the midst of serious political, social and environmental challenges facing us today, most data sources disproportionately emphasise economic productivity, reinforcing policy and investment models that prioritise GDP over social and ecological outcomes.

We then considered the expected performance of the five CVF scenarios if we were to apply them to the City Portrait framework. This highlighted the following:

• Partial doughnuts

The ‘possible future City Portraits’ produced by our analysis illustrate the gaps in the CVF framework and indicators relative to the City Portrait model. This suggests that additional work is required to fully understand the kind of places that could emerge through each of these scenarios more holistically. 

• Appetite for change

The differences between the scenarios’ performance as visualised through the City Portrait imply different assumptions about political will for change in each. To move towards a more regenerative social and ecological future requires considerable changes from business as usual.

• Limits to growth

Visualising the scenarios as Doughnuts illustrates an important difference between the composition of the CVF indicator framework and the City Portrait: the CVF analysis seeks to maximise better-performing scenarios without setting targets or creating a hierarchy to the set of measures. The City Portrait, on the other hand, places social and ecological dimensions in tension, and sets targets that highlight science-based limits to growth.

A clear picture emerges

We concluded that applying the City Portrait as a means of building on the CVF modelling – or other planning analysis like it – can help to ensure that holistic social and ecological outcomes are more fully accounted for in planning and policy-making about Victoria’s future. The assumptions embedded in the preferred CVF scenario suggest a substantial shift in the values underpinning current city-shaping practices. In this sense, IV’s work represents transitional thinking, aiming to shift our current system without naming a fundamental reorientation – basically, moving towards a future more aligned with the aspiration of the City Portrait, but without explicitly changing the goal away from one that centres economic growth. In reviewing the CVF scenarios and the City Portrait together, it became evident that a synergy between these frameworks can enhance the effectiveness and inclusiveness of urban development strategies.

In summary, this work made clear the value of taking up the City Portrait as an alternative or additional approach to measurement, identifying three key opportunities:  

1. Changing the goal of why we measure;

2. Changing what we measure to be more holistic; and

3. Changing how we measure to support more collective approaches.

The full analysis is available to read here:

This work provided a foundation for us to develop formal submissions to two major planning processes, the Draft National Urban Policy and Plan for Victoria. Each of these submissions outlines ways in which the City Portrait can serve as a valuable tool for grounding high-level ambitions for future development in place-based, community-led approaches that are oriented around wellbeing.

Draft National Urban Policy submission

Led by volunteer research assistant Lokesh Sangarya, we developed a response to the Draft National Urban Policy (NUP), the Australian Government’s approach to supporting urban environments across the country to be “liveable, equitable, productive, sustainable and resilient.” These goals are supported by a set of principles to guide the policy’s implementation. It is the first National Urban Policy to be developed since 2011. 

The submission began with mapping the social and ecological dimensions of the City Portrait to the elements of the NUP framework. This helped to surface three key findings:

First, we found that all elements of the NUP framework are represented in the City Portrait, and that the City Portrait’s dimensions are more comprehensive than what is represented in the NUP. Generally, the intent of the two frameworks closely aligns; however, while the National Urban Policy aims to deliver a breadth of social and ecological issues, the City Portrait takes account of a larger number of elements relevant to urban systems.

Two key elements of the NUP are less evident in Doughnut Economics and therefore the City Portrait:

1. The City Portrait does not focus extensively on climate risk and resilience in relation to public infrastructure, as the model is most focused on operating within ecological limits (largely a climate mitigation frame).

2. The City Portrait only lightly covers the NUP’s objective focused on productivity. This is because the Doughnut Economics model is oriented around the economy being in service to people and planet, not something that must be serviced in and of itself.

Second, the City Portrait, and Doughnut Economics more broadly, is designed to illustrate the relationships and tensions that exist between social and environmental objectives. In contrast, the NUP focuses on improvement across multiple goals without demonstrating deeply how they might impact one another.

Third, the City Portrait defines measurable indicators for each outcome in the framework and applies targets to these; the NUP does not (yet) have measurable elements articulated, although the need for appropriate target-setting and outcomes measurement is identified in the National Urban Policy principles.

Our recommendations for government

Following this review, our submission concludes with a set of recommendations for the Federal Government:

1. Expand the scope of the National Urban Policy to incorporate all City Portrait dimensions and outcomes;

2. Utilise the City Portrait to identify and reconcile conflicting goals, objectives and interventions;

3. As an international first, apply the City Portrait model as a place-based, collaborative approach to roll out the National Urban Policy to specific urban areas; and

4. Use the example of the City Portrait to develop targets to drive ambitious action.

Read our full submission here:

Plan for Victoria Submission

Finally, we provided a submission as part of the consultation on Plan for Victoria, the Victorian Government’s 2050 state-wide plan that largely replaces Plan Melbourne. It is mostly oriented around a set of big ideas for Victoria’s future.

• Affordable Housing and Choice

• Equity and Jobs

• Thriving and Liveable Suburbs and Towns

• Sustainable Environments and Climate Action

As noted in the plan’s background documents, 80% of Victoria’s population resides in Greater Melbourne. With this in mind, for the purposes of the submission, we suggested that the City Portrait is highly relevant to the scope and considerations of Plan for Victoria. Our submission therefore opened with a reflection on the city’s current social and ecological performance in relation to the big ideas, acknowledging that this. Largely, the data and insights in the City Portrait corroborate the needs and opportunities identified in the big ideas and associated public consultation.

Following this reflection on City Portrait data, we appended the Portrait for Victoria’s Future analysis to highlight the ways in which the City Portrait could supplement and strengthen more traditional and top-down forms of analysis and target-setting.

These two parts of the submission came together in a number of recommendations for planners and policy-makers contributing to Plan for Victoria; many of these are derived from the original City Portrait recommendations, but focus on government’s role:

1. Create, support and adopt more holistic measures of progress, drawing on the City Portrait model and methodology.

2. Engage in (and invest in) deep collaboration, developing multi-sector governance structures to guide Plan for Victoria’s completion and implementation that are designed to prioritise wellbeing for future generations.

3. Normalise integrated decision making and internalise negative externalities, applying the City Portrait, or a similar model, to inform decision-making as Plan for Victoria’s directions and actions are developed.

4. Shift capital towards systemic interventions by shaping new government and multi-sector investment architectures.

5. Increase Victoria’s collective ambitions, creating mechanisms through the planning scheme and related policy to enforce and continue the Plan for Victoria’s future-oriented aspirations. 

6. Go out and smell the wattle, and create a plan that enables everyone in Victoria to spend more time in nature connecting to the places where we live, work and play. 

Read our full submission here:

We look forward to continuing this exploration next year of what it looks like to bring the City Portrait to life in practice. Please reach out to alison@regen.melbourne if you are curious or would like to discuss this work.

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