A new participatory path: The evolution of the Participatory Melbourne project
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.
Participatory Melbourne began as a collective research and action project designed to nurture and scale resilient communities, unlocking their collective potential and moving our city towards a regenerative future.
As a collaboration between the Coalition of Everyone, Swinburne University’s Australian Leadership Index, Menzies Foundation and Regen Melbourne, the goal of this work was to understand the ecosystem and landscape of participation activity across Greater Melbourne, then use these insights to build experiments and create systemic interventions that could generate greater community agency, increase trust and resilience, enhance connectedness, and inspire action. Taken as an ecosystem of interconnected activities, we held the belief that this could support the pursuit of the common good – the shared desire for an ecologically safe and socially just future.
Participatory Melbourne: Phase one
At the outset, we knew that there were many existing actors working on these fundamental questions, and plenty of local research to support this work. Participatory Melbourne built on this ecosystem, following a hunch that we could provide value by leveraging a systems lens and deeply collaborative approach to better connect actors, increase ambition, deepen systemic impact and scale tangible solutions.
As such, the first six months of Regen Melbourne’s work entailed a series of activities and conversations with our alliance partners and known actors in the participatory ecosystem to uncover the state of participation in our city. This included workshops, a mock citizen’s assembly, design forums and co-design sessions – culminating in an in-depth Insights and Activation Report surfacing key insights as well as the barriers and enablers impacting greater social cohesion and more resilient systems.
These insights were elaborated on in this report in a few ways. Key insights were synthesised into a set of four Creative Pathways, allowing us to be more targeted in how we could then interrogate and address the systemic challenges that came up. The barriers and enablers were framed as a suite of Co-existing Forces that both constrained and divided us while also showing how we might enable our collective pursuit of a shared future. Through our collaboration, we also recognised the need for a Model of Activation that could help us better understand the participatory landscape and how to influence it across the different layers and intersections of society.
Creative Pathways and the Model for Activation from the Insights and Activation Report.
What was clear even at this early stage was that:
A more robust and resilient participatory city requires people to be re-empowered to make their own active decisions across all aspects of their lives – including in their communities, their work and how they are governed;
Active participation is a necessary component for us to feel part of society, to reconnect to those around us, to walk side by side with those we disagree with, and to improve our economic and democratic systems through a lens of plurality and diverse world views;
New forms of collective leadership are emerging but require significant and active support and systemic infrastructure to thrive.
It also solidified our position that in order to cultivate the conditions for a thriving democratic life, we need to recognise and support the many actors working towards this goal – as well as recognising that these diverse actors make up a definable ecosystem. In response to this, and off the back of various interactions and conversations, we worked with Coalition of Everyone (CoE) to develop a prototype Interactive Participatory Ecosystem Map, inspired by the ecosystem mapping CoE had already done for Regen Places. This would enable the system to see itself while also helping us understand what was impacting, driving or hindering participatory activity in Greater Melbourne through a range of systemic lenses.
This culminated our first phase of work and opened up opportunities to progress from insights into action. This was geared to both outlining a foundation of research on the state of democracy, alongside building out a framework for organising activity in service to the challenges faced in our first phase of work. By the end of 2023, a report was developed by Australian Leadership Index in collaboration with OurVoice on The Civic Health of Australia. The report gave us a strong evidence base that validated many of the insights from our earlier work – particularly highlighting the fractured trust in our society and the ensuing social isolation being experienced.
We were also clearer on the opportunities for collaboration around building the systems infrastructure and cultural capabilities needed for a more robust and resilient, participatory city:
Existing activity needs further amplification. Projects that create opportunities for inclusive, collective decision making are endlessly inspiring. However, in light of the structural challenges, many examples remain local in nature and their potential for systemic influence is low.
Connectivity between initiatives can deepen impact. Unique alliances across sectors can enhance the ability for participatory activity to have meaningful systemic impact. And, there is a need to build collective power across participatory activity.
New resourcing is required to unlock the potential. The convening and collaboration required to support systemic work is rarely resourced well. This is the case in the participatory ecosystem too, and new mechanisms and pathways for funding are required to create real systemic change.
There is a need for a model that connects and expands the diverse range of participatory activity across the economic spectrum (household, commons, market, state). The idea of a robust and resilient participatory city speaks to a systemic reset of how we organise and govern the commons, the market and the state, while shifting how we value household activity.
There is a need to identify new collective and potent intervention points and demonstrations to tilt the system towards participatory engagement in pursuit of the common good. In a noisy system and a culture of busy-ness, it can be difficult to identify the most potent work required.
Participatory Melbourne: Phase two
Into 2024, our focus shifted from insights to action. This was centred on how we might organise around targeted activities and experiments to surface more transformative, scalable projects. We framed this organising structure through Fields of Action and re-engaged with both existing and emerging actors who believe in the potential of a more robust and resilient participatory city. These Fields of Action were developed from our foundational insights from Phase 1, along with validation from our research activity and consultation with actors, leading to them being:
We continued to test and validate these in early 2024, while also expanding our mapping of the ecosystem and testing whether these fields of action were a helpful lens to make sense of activity. There was a lot that was resonating in the framing of these fields of action – yet a tension remained in the diffuseness of the goal. Despite the consistently shared acknowledgement that a participatory ecosystem is required, it became increasingly clear that exploring participation, new forms of democracy and community activations might be best served through the lens of an enabling mechanism rather than a stand-alone project.
Alongside this growing lesson in crafting the right type of architecture to respond to a systemic condition rather than a project goal, the work also brought a growing lesson in collaboration around these kinds of earthshot ambitions. With a few resets along the way, and some challenges in being able to all land on the versions of the work that felt right for us, Coalition for Everyone and Australian Leadership Index decided to step away. There is a story and some learnings here on the complexity and nitty-gritty reality of collaboration in complex, passionate spaces – but this is a joint story to tell, for another time.
What held true was that we still felt very strongly that there was more Regen Melbourne could contribute to this field of work, and with the continued support of the Menzies Foundation, we could see a clear path in taking these learnings and reframing this participation question as an overarching enabling function of Regen Melbourne’s portfolio of projects. Thus, Participatory Melbourne, as a project in and of itself, came to an end.
At this point, we’d like to send out a big thanks to Willow at the Coalition of Everyone and Sam at the Australian Leadership Index at Swinburne University for their dedicated work on Participatory Melbourne. We’d also like to thank Liz at the Menzies Foundation for her trust and bravery in supporting this emerging work and its ongoing evolution.
What’s next?
So where does this leave us? Our long-term work with Regen Streets, Swimmable Birrarung and Regen Food will be built on a foundational layer of enhanced participation, activated imaginations, increased social cohesion, new forms of leadership and democratic innovations. In short, all of our work is dependent on a participatory Melbourne! As such, we’ve already begun funnelling our learnings from the Participatory Melbourne project into our other existing projects, as they’re perfect sandpits for seeing participation and community resilience in action.
Regen Melbourne has also recently formed a Systems Lab as a way to recognise the entrenched dynamics of our current system, which require a deeper and different inquiry space in order to prime the environment to respond to the transformative action of our projects. We know from our explorations and from case studies around the world that transformational work cannot be successful without a change in fundamental enabling conditions. These include how research and knowledge are developed and disseminated, how capital moves through a city, how democratic health is supported across policy landscapes, and how the big stories of our places are told, and believed.
As such, our work around participation and community activations will carry on with its new home in the Systems Lab, as an exploration of New Urban Governance. We’ll funnel our activities through three primary themes, each with dedicated interventions over the next six months:
A new community story: what is the changing story of community and community resilience in these urgent times?
New systems leadership: what new forms of leadership are required to shift us to the future we need, not just the future that’s currently possible?
Urban governance in action: what new mechanisms and prototypes do our projects need to enable democratic involvement and collective action?
It is clear to us that a more participatory Melbourne requires a new story, new forms of leadership and new prototypes of urban governance. Only then can we truly hope to see resilient and adaptive communities that can nurture the social fabric of a cohesive and thriving city.
So with that, we say farewell to the project that is Participatory Melbourne and also a big thanks to everyone who's been on this journey with us to date.
See you in the field,
Caro
Lead Convenor (Participatory Melbourne)
New Urban Governance Lead
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