This is part one of a five-part series by our Research Lead, Alison, on developing a City Portrait for Greater Melbourne. You can read more about what a City Portrait is and why we are creating one here. 

The old riddle, ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time…’ seems fitting when I think about the approach we’ve taken to constructing a City Portrait for Greater Melbourne.  It’s a daunting task in many ways, trying to capture the essence of our city’s social, environmental and economic wellbeing through a handful of metrics.

So, when we started on this work in October last year, we agreed that starting with one bite was the best way to begin this doughnut-shaped-but-elephant-sized task. This could allow us to test ideas and approaches and change direction as needed. But what was the best first bite?

Working from the inside out: Starting with the Social Foundation

Trying to eat an actual doughnut from the middle may seem a bit silly, but this is where Doughnut Economics starts to differ from its sugary counterpart. The inside of ‘the Doughnut’ is made up of the ‘Social Foundation’, which describes the conditions required for individuals and society as a whole to thrive. These conditions are broken down into 12 dimensions and include such things as housing, food, health and peace and justice. 

So, as we developed our plans to build a new way to measure our city’s progress, it seemed silly not to start with the Social Foundation, the inside of the Doughnut. We can relate to each of the dimensions in our own lives because we rely on them to meet our basic needs, and beyond that, to thrive. In addition, our original exploration of Doughnut Economics in Melbourne two years ago focused most on the Social Foundation, so we wouldn’t be starting from scratch. Now the task was to apply data to our conceptual understanding of the Social Foundation.

Why and how does the Social Foundation of the Melbourne Doughnut differ from the original Doughnut? 

The 2021 community-based research process that led to the formation of Regen Melbourne produced both a long-term vision for a regenerative Melbourne and the ‘Melbourne Doughnut’, a localised adaptation of the original. In the Melbourne Doughnut, we primarily modified the Social Foundation dimensions to more fully reflect our city’s systems and character.

First, we divided the ‘Networks’ dimension into ‘Mobility’ and ‘Access to Information’ to distinguish between different types of networks based on their purpose and physical characteristics. This seemed particularly important at a time where our physical mobility was severely constrained by COVID-19 lockdowns, but digital connectivity and new information sharing channels were rapidly evolving.

Second, we extended the scope of ‘Gender Equality’ to explore diversity and equality in multiple forms. We now refer to ‘Equality in Diversity,’ which feels important given Greater Melbourne’s cultural diversity and the need to ensure that all people have the opportunity to thrive in our city.

Finally, the links between arts and culture and Melbourne’s identity were referred to more often than perhaps any other theme throughout our early workshops and interviews. It became clear that a Melbourne Doughnut would be incomplete without an ‘Arts & Culture’ dimension, including a nod to both the sector in a formal sense and the ways in which cultural experiences are baked into our daily lives.

Throughout our workshops, it became clear that strong and vibrant communities and interpersonal relationships are part of all dimensions of the Social Foundation. Even if we deliver on each dimension of the Social Foundation in a technical sense, we won’t thrive as a society without strong social connection - especially as we consider the severity of the challenges we currently face and expect to see grow. As such, we included ‘Community & Relationships’ as part of what is required to enter the ‘safe and just space’ for humanity that the Doughnut seeks to achieve. In the Melbourne Doughnut, this is shown on the interior thick green line, forming a threshold between meeting basic needs and entering a truly regenerative space.

Doughnut Dimension deep dives

The City Portrait’s purpose is to bring greater depth to our understanding of each dimension of the Melbourne Doughnut and to start to ascribe quantitative data that tells us how we’re doing as a city in relation to the safe and just space. It’s progressing the Doughnut from its starting point as a conceptual model or compass to being a tool for measurement. In doing so, the City Portrait can point us to the types of actions, policy decisions, investment and mindset shifts required to embrace a regenerative future for our city.

We wanted the City Portrait development to taste like the initial Melbourne Doughnut development:  collaborative, inviting and participatory, drawing on varied perspectives and ways of understanding the city. 

With this in mind, to shape a deeper understanding of the Social Foundation, we held 13 ‘dimension deep-dive’ workshops between November 2022 and May 2023. Separating out the dimensions allowed us to get more specific about how we define each, and to target participation from sector-specific experts (including connections to key researchers through our Research Council).

Dozens of people joined these workshops, with attendance varying from two to upwards of 30 in each session. Participants included leaders from academia, industry, government and community organisations. Whoever was in the virtual Zoom room, it always felt like the right mix to stimulate challenging, yet motivating, conversations that could have lasted well beyond the hour. 

Each workshop explored a set of questions to inform profiles of the Social Foundation dimensions in the City Portrait. These questions included:

1. What is the role of the dimension in Melbourne?

2. What are the values and principles that must underpin the dimension in a regenerative Melbourne?

3. What are the outcomes / where do we want to be in relation to this dimension?

4. What are the indicators or metrics that we can apply to measure how we’re doing in relation to the outcomes identified?

This was a lot to cover in a short time, but we weren’t starting from a blank slate. We used the workshops to review and test language about each dimension first developed in the 2021 Towards a Regenerative Melbourne report. Likewise, we prompted conversations about outcomes and indicators with draft options and examples drawn from both a desktop review of possible data that had been undertaken by our partners at Point Advisory earlier in 2022, and the City of Melbourne’s Voluntary Local Review (localisation of the Sustainable Development Goals).

Still, we didn’t expect our workshops to resolve everything neatly, and knew that they were also likely to raise new questions. In a perfect process, we’d work out principles, outcomes and indicators sequentially - which wasn’t possible in an hour. Aiming for a perfect process would therefore create a time barrier limiting how many people could participate, so we prioritised keeping the sessions brief and making the most of the time we had with fantastic groups of attendees. The groups still managed to surface an immense amount of knowledge and meaningful reflection. 

Following our workshops, we synthesised what we had heard into first drafts of ‘dimension profiles’ for the City Portrait and fed these back to participants. Some workshops largely affirmed our understanding of the dimension we were exploring, while others turned it on its head or took it in new directions. For example, our ‘Access to Information’ workshop identified the need for two-way flows of knowledge, not just distribution of information from decision-makers to the general public. Together, they reinforced some key lessons:

• The boundaries between dimensions are useful for the Doughnut as a framework, but in practice are blurred.  We need our City Portrait to communicate about each dimension and how the city works as a system.

• Describing what it takes for people to thrive at a metropolitan scale dilutes the diverse experiences of individuals - stories matter in helping each of us relate to data.

• Similarly, the Doughnut is a valuable compass, but needs a spatial map to accompany it. Mapping and spatial data will therefore be part of future City Portrait iterations.

• There is a tension between describing each dimension in its current state vs. its regenerative potential. We need to consider how we acknowledge both where we are and where we want to be.

We are now refining the dimension profiles profiles based on feedback received from workshop participants. We don’t expect these to ever be final, just as our relationships with these dimensions in our own lives are always evolving. Our threshold is instead to ask:

Getting to the data

The words for the Social Foundation dimension profiles are largely written and meeting this threshold, representing the collective effort of the many people involved in this phase. This leaves us with the question of the data itself. It’s a big question, sometimes making even this first bite of the City Portrait feel too big. Why is this the case?

Well, first, very practically, finding data at a scale of Greater Melbourne is tricky. It’s a lot easier to find numbers and statistics on many topics we’re interested in at a state or national level, or associated with individual municipalities. And, second, the things we’ve identified as important to measure are, not surprisingly, not the things that get measured regularly, if at all in some cases. That’s the point of the City Portrait, after all. 

So, what do we do with this? We are continuing to rely on the expertise of our network to shape the Social Foundation data, making the initial Portrait as complete as possible. We also return to the Melbourne Doughnut as a compass, helping us to determine what data will be meaningful for the story we’re trying to tell. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just a start.  One bite at a time.

Coming up in the next part of this series, Alison explores the outside of the Melbourne Doughnut, the ‘Ecological Ceiling’, and using the City Portrait to understand whether and how we are living within the means of our planet.