City Portraits In Practice: Lessons For Melbourne From Around The World
What are we learning from the likes of Amsterdam and Cornwall about how to put Doughnut Economics and the City Portrait into practice here in Melbourne? Regen Melbourne City Portrait Analyst Lokesh Sangarya reflects on how international practice continues to inform and evolve the Melbourne Doughnut.
In November 2023, Regen Melbourne successfully launched the Greater Melbourne City Portrait – an Australian-first initiative that mapped our city’s social and ecological performance based on Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics framework. The objective of the City Portrait as a methodology and tool is to apply the Doughnut to specific places – from neighbourhood to nation – to help each explore what it means to be a safe and just space for humanity, meeting human needs within bounds of the planet.
Since the launch of Melbourne’s City Portrait, we have been exploring how cities around the world are using the Doughnut, as well as City Portraits derived from it, in their decision-making processes. Once a City Portrait is created, what comes next? What can we learn from other cities who have embarked on a journey of adopting the Doughnut at a local level?
Kate Raworth herself has noted that moving from framework to practice isn’t easy, and that the complexity of activating the Doughnut at a local level is based on the dynamics that exist within local ecosystems. In line with this, what we’ve found is that places around the world have been taking a range of approaches to draw on the value of the City Portrait to move towards better outcomes for people and the planet. Different places have started incorporating the Portrait model at various levels, depending in part on who is leading the use of the Doughnut.
The Melbourne Doughnut
From Amsterdam To Mexico City: The Doughnut Goes Global
Amsterdam was the first city to develop its own City Portrait based on Doughnut Economics, and this experience informed the first iteration of the City Portrait methodology applied by other places, including Melbourne. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Amsterdam’s city government announced that it would recover from the crisis (and avoid future ones) by embracing the theory of Doughnut Economics. Since then, local governments including Glasgow, Barcelona, Brussels, Mexico City, Copenhagen, Cornwall Council and Grenoble have developed their own City Portraits and started using them in their decision-making processes. Each City Portrait development process has reflected complexities in creation and implementation that reflect challenges unique to each region.
Beyond municipalities, City Portraits are also being used by governing bodies at other scales, such as the Brecon Beacons National Park. As a result, the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) has shifted to referring to “Doughnut Portraits of Place” rather than “City Portraits” to reflect the diversity of places drawing on the Doughnut for inspiration.
While municipal governments in several cities have been developing their City Portraits, there is also a rapidly growing community-led movement to create them. The London Doughnut Economy Coalition is a group of volunteers who are developing the city’s portrait while also reviewing how to harness the city’s finance sector, improve food systems, mobilise youth voices and develop a social and ecological High Street.
Climate Action Leeds, a partnership of five community organisations, has developed the Leeds Doughnut, which is their first step to creating a zero carbon, nature-friendly and socially-just Leeds by the 2030s. Civic Square in Ladywood, Birmingham has developed a Neighborhood Data Portrait as part of its development of neighborhood-scale civic infrastructure for social, ecological, economic and climate transitions.
Closer to home, Regen Sydney, Regen Brisbane, and Regen Gippsland are all community-led organisations working on creating a movement in their respective regions; they are likewise using the City Portrait methodology to ground their work.
The varying approaches to the development of City Portraits showcase the model’s flexibility to be picked up and applied by different actors. Likewise, the methodology is not limited by geographic or institutional governance boundaries, but is able to be applied at regional and community scales, based on how the idea of place may be understood.
Many Doughnuts, Many Pathways
While City or Doughnut Portraits are proliferating globally, the development of a Portrait in a given geography does not dictate a particular path to link to decision-making in that place. With this global movement embracing Portraits in various forms, different kinds of follow-on activities have emerged, suggesting myriad ways that City Portraits can facilitate pathways to urban transformation. DEAL has developed a Cities and Regions: Let’s Get Started guide to assist places (and particularly municipal governments) in “playing with the Doughnut”, acknowledging that there are many points of entry and ways in which Doughnut Economics can contribute to change at a local level.
Overall, our review has identified three main ways that places are using City Portraits to ground Doughnut Economics locally:
Snapshot of a city’s social and ecological performance
Monitor of change over time
Assessment of policy impacts
Snapshot of social and ecological performance
This approach has been the most widely adopted for regions to start their City Portrait journey. Cities such as Amsterdam, Glasgow, Birmingham, Barcelona (as well as Melbourne), kicked off their Doughnut Economics journey by first developing a City Portrait that provided a snapshot of the region’s impacts. In this approach, localised data on social outcomes for residents and ecological impacts of the city’s consumption and production patterns are used to provide a profile of the city’s social and ecological wellbeing. While this may seem superficial, the challenge of collating data in this form demonstrates how much it represents a departure from conventional forms of measuring progress in a place.
Amsterdam, which was one of the first cities to embrace Doughnut Economics, developed the first City Portrait in 2020. Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic with the goal to become a circular city by 2050, the city developed a Portrait outlining the city’s impacts across the nine Planetary Boundaries and shortfalls across 24 Social Foundation dimensions. The Portrait – shown below, un-rolled – also laid out the city’s impacts at a global scale across all social dimensions and at a local scale for the ecological dimensions.
Amsterdam City Portrait, 2020
Similar to Amsterdam’s journey, Melbourne’s launch of the illustrated Melbourne Doughnut in 2021 was soon followed by the development of a data-driven City Portrait. This was a massive, collaborative effort that involved expert workshops, input from academics and industry-based learning partners, public prototyping, and months-long design iteration. The final result portrayed localised data on the city’s social shortfalls and the planetary impacts based on the city’s consumption data. However, our journey was different from Amsterdam’s because there was no formal government involvement in the process. Likewise, we have observed evolutions in the process since releasing the Greater Melbourne City Portrait, including Glasgow’s efforts to capture four lenses (social and ecological wellbeing at local and global scales) in one visualisation.
Greater Melbourne City Portrait
Monitor of change over time
Some places have moved to a deeper level of ongoing engagement with the Doughnut, using the developed City Portrait to understand the city’s progress or regress across each dimension over time. Since developing its City Portrait and subsequent Circular Economy Strategy, informed by the Portrait, Amsterdam has leveraged the use of the Doughnut Economics principles to measure the impacts of the city’s circular economy activity. Its Circular Monitor measures the impacts of 70 actions between 2023-2026; while the City Portrait provided an initial snapshot of the impact of Amsterdam’s economic activity, the Monitor aims to provide continuous insight into social and ecological progress.
The Monitor measures the city’s material consumption data across the built environment, consumer goods and food and organic waste, to provide insights into planetary impacts of these sectors. The social foundation in the Monitor, shown below, provides a time-series view of the City across different dimensions, helping decision-makers understand progress and regressions across each social dimension.
It is worth noting that the City Portrait in itself does not drive ongoing decision-making. However, its development has created the political will and foundational view of Amsterdam’s social and ecological wellbeing to support the city’s Circular Economy strategy and to identify which sectors to focus on in policy and investment. The metrics applied in the Monitor, link back to the Doughnut directly, drawing a strong connection between data and action.
Amsterdam’s circular monitor
Assessment of policy impacts
A third method for localising the Doughnut involves embedding the model in decision-making processes. This is being used in places such as Cornwall, Grenoble, and Valence-Romans. Municipal governments there have been using a framework developed to apply Doughnut Economics principles to assess environmental and social impacts of individual projects across their portfolios.
Cornwall Council, located in southwest UK, has developed a Climate Change Decision Wheel, based on the principles of Doughnut Economics, to assess the impacts of policies and strategies. The wheel was developed and deployed for all cabinet decisions from late 2019. In 2020, the Wheel was extended to also assess impacts across equality and inclusion.
The Decision Wheel asks Council officers to assess the impacts of a policy or strategy across three lenses – environmental, social, and equality and inclusion. The officers then use a five-point scale to assess the impacts, and this is captured in a graphic form that is included in reports to the respective committees:
The Climate Change Decision Wheel showcasing the ecological and social impacts of a policy or strategy
The wheel also shows the impacts on equality and inclusion
Combined, these two decision wheels allow Council members and the broader public to see the potential impacts of decisions, providing better communication and transparency in decision-making. In 2024 alone, using these decision wheels resulted in changes to 40% of all policies that were assessed, resulting in better outcomes for the environment, social well-being and equality and inclusion.
Cornwall Council is now embarking on developing a platform that displays the cumulative impacts of all policies and strategies that could help in better decision-making at a budgetary level. Other places are likewise testing how the Doughnut can be applied to track and inform policy changes.
The Future Of Melbourne’s Doughnut
In Melbourne, the development of the City Portrait has never been seen as an end goal. The key purpose of the City Portrait is to help to articulate a vision for a regenerative city and support work on the ground towards this vision. As such, the City Portrait is a valuable tool that can facilitate systems change toward a more viable future than our current trajectory offers. In expanding our understanding of the potential of the Doughnut to guide action, other cities such as Amsterdam and Cornwall have paved the way for multiple forms of adopting the Doughnut, while also showcasing that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach.
In 2024, Regen Melbourne began to evolve the City Portrait development process by shifting focus from the City Portrait as a “tool” to extending it into a “service”. This exploration aims to move up the S-curve of adoption of regenerative practices, intending to shift from “experimentation” with the model towards “acceleration” and “emergence” of a broader understanding of its value. This approach is informing our efforts to apply the Doughnut as a snapshot – a means of monitoring progress for Regen Melbourne’s work and as a mechanism for assessing policy
Completing A “Full” City Portrait
The Greater Melbourne City Portrait offers a robust representation of our city’s social health, as well as our impacts on ecological wellbeing globally. To complete a “full” City Portrait, we need to complement these lenses with representation of our city’s local ecological wellbeing, as well as our city’s impact on social wellbeing globally. We ran a workshop series on the latter theme in 2024, and are now considering what it looks like to incorporate the information developed through the workshop into the City Portrait platform. Likewise, we are beginning to explore how we can establish a suitable view of local ecological health, ensuring that this connects with local Indigenous understandings of what constitutes healthy Country.
Monitoring Melbourne’s Change Over Time
Our aspiration is for the City Portrait to be able to tell a story of Greater Melbourne’s change over time. As the first step, we have gathered historical data on each of the Social Foundation dimensions, which we will publish this year. Periodic updates will also be added as new social and ecological data sources become available.
Beyond monitoring change on the City Portrait directly, we are strengthening links between the Doughnut and each of Regen Melbourne’s Earthshots, identifying indicators that are suitable for tracking progress of these initiatives. It is clear that each Earthshot is not positioned to shift city-level outcomes on its own, but we can identify “lead” indicators for each which tell us whether we are moving towards the safe and just space described by the Doughnut, or away from it. For this work, we are also drawing on the idea of cornerstone indicators, which can represent systemic relationships, including multiple dimensions of the Doughnut. Like Amsterdam, this approach connects back, but does not link directly to, the City Portrait, as it tracks near-term change within specific streams of activity.
Assessing Policy Impacts Through The Doughnut
While Regen Melbourne cannot change policy directly, we have begun to use the Doughnut and our City Portrait to inform policy advocacy and to encourage new ways of understanding the goals of policy-making. In 2024, we submitted responses to two key urban policy initiatives, the Draft National Urban Policy and Plan for Victoria. Now that these policies have been released, we can more fully assess the extent to which they align with the goals set out in the Doughnut, and how well their actions align with the holistic scope of the Doughnut.
As part of this work, we introduced the “City Portrait Impact Visualiser” tool. Created under the leadership of Dr.Michael Dunbar at RMIT University, this prototype enables anyone to qualitatively consider a project or policy (and its impact) in relation to the Melbourne Doughnut. While this is an imperfect tool, it presents a first step, encouraging policy-makers to broaden their understanding of the direct and indirect impacts of their decisions.
City Portrait Impact Visualiser
Connecting the Doughnut as a model to activity on the ground is not simple and straightforward. Our focus in 2025 is primarily internal, demonstrating how the Doughnut shows up in our own work to shape its direction. At the same time, we are encouraged by the increased interest in the Doughnut as a model to guide economic development and decision-making across our city – driven in part by the release of the City Portrait just 18 months ago. We therefore look ahead with optimism, supported by the journeys of other cities, that our investment in playing with, and learning from, the Doughnut will have lasting effects in practice across Greater Melbourne.
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