One year on: The Evolution of Melbourne’s City Portrait
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.
As we prepare to celebrate the second-ever Global Doughnut Day (a new annual celebration of Doughnut Economics) we’ve been reflecting on what has happened since we marked this occasion last year with the launch of the City Portrait for Greater Melbourne.
On 14th November 2023, Kate Raworth joined Regen Melbourne (virtually) to publicly release the City Portrait for Greater Melbourne. The City Portrait is an Australian-first project to create a new compass for measuring our city’s social and ecological progress – a platform that gives all of us a practical and holistic way of visualising how well Melbourne is supporting people and planet to thrive.
The City Portrait design team took a much needed summer rest after what was an epic amount of collaborative work to bring the platform to life. We then regrouped in early 2024 to plan out our approach to this year, energised by the interest and curiosity the City Portrait had generated. Our plans for the year included: developing two new lenses, adding in time-series and spatial data, local councils immediately adopting the City Portrait as their measurement tool and more…clearly aspirational, and perhaps exceeding the scope of what we’d created last year.
However, guided wisely as ever by Miek Dunbar, our partner at RMIT University, we started by stepping back, interrogating the relationship between the City Portrait’s fit, purpose and application. Thinking in business terms, we started to consider what it would look like to shift the City Portrait from a ‘product’ to a ‘service.’ What did we need to do in order to understand how this ‘product’ could be brought to life in service of our place? It became clear that if last year was all about building a thing, this year needed to be all about exploring its usefulness and application in practice.
March 2024 - designing the focus for the year ahead
And so, instead of immediately diving into upgrading the City Portrait’s digital functionality and extending it to include the final two lenses, we spent time developing better questions that would allow us to better connect the audacious goal that is represented by the City Portrait (an economy centering life, not growth) and what it actually takes to shift a system towards that.
Part of this required us to reflect on where we realistically were in the change-making process. Miek and Chris Speed, Professor of Design for Regenerative Futures at RMIT, had developed a paper that placed the City Portrait on an S-curve representing adoption of regenerative approaches. Realistically, we were still sitting in the ‘Experimentation’ or ‘Activation’ phase, starting to creep towards ‘Emergence.’ We had a long way to go before we could expect the City Portrait to show up as a mainstream tool, such as in council plans and business models.
The S-curve was comforting: while it illustrated that we still had a big adoption hill to climb, it also highlighted the value of just putting the City Portrait out there. We had started by starting, and simply suggesting a new goal for our economic system was significant. Countering the momentum in our current economic system was no small task.
With the S-curve framing to support us, we took an iterative approach to surfacing our central design questions. This involved responding to the requests and interest we were receiving about the City Portrait and its function (“It’s great, but how do I use it in decision-making?”), feedback on what we were up against (“you need to better understand the beast that is government”) and our own aspirations to enhance the City Portrait.
We landed on these guiding questions to help us orient the activities and development across the City Portrait work:
A new model of progress: How is Melbourne tracking as a place that supports people and planet to thrive?
Data and practices: What measurement practices and data facilitate a new understanding of progress in Greater Melbourne
Adoption and capability: How might we build capacity for measurement to accelerate a transition to a regenerative future?
This set of questions helped to inform how we organise the work over the past few months. So, what have we been doing? And what have we learned from it?
A new model of progress
Our activities in this stream have focused on further developing the City Portrait tool, including extending existing content. We were grateful for the contributions of multiple student research assistants to progress this work and provide new perspectives on these elements, which also generated some valuable insights:
Time series data - Mohana, a Monash Urban Planning Master’s student, led the charge on wrangling historical data to be able to visualise time-series trends on the City Portrait’s Social Foundation indicators. Addie, a research assistant at RMIT working with Miek, tested options for how this information can be visualised on the City Portrait platform. This will be published early next year, building on our initial point-in-time snapshot to tell us (where possible) whether we are making progress socially or backsliding on some dimensions. Interestingly, Mohana found that many datasets we’ve been using only emerged after relevant policies were enacted - in other words, ‘measuring what matters’ often means ‘measuring what’s been legislated.’ This insight was a reminder that we continue to lack some key measures that could help to inform policy in the first place.
A view of the upcoming time series data
Systems stories - Gypsy, an RMIT Bachelor of Environment and Society student, developed two new stories for the City Portrait, helping us to stretch our approach to this part of the platform. Gypsy brought her personal student experience and her photography skills to the task, demonstrating how our experience of the city depends on our vantage point. Visualisation of Gypsy’s work was further developed by Vera, an RMIT Communication Design student. The stories will be live in the coming weeks.
Data and practices
We explored new forms of measurement through the progression of the two remaining lenses of the City Portrait, the Global-Social and Local-Ecological lenses, which we intend to publish in full next year.
Visual prototyping - This work began with prototyping a visual relationship between these lenses and the existing City Portrait - a challenging visualisation task that cities globally are currently grappling with in different ways. We haven’t landed a solution yet, but the design process has reminded us of the complex relationships among the four lenses. It has also surfaced the ways in which Melbourne’s general prosperity and social wellbeing have affected the other three lenses - human wellbeing globally, as well as health of our ecosystems locally and globally.
A work in progress view of the four lenses visualisation ideas
Global-Social workshops - In August, we ran a ‘sprint’ series of workshops on eight dimensions of the Global-Social lens. The series highlighted the value in bringing people together for reflection - the process continues to be as important as the output that it generates, and will make that output stronger, too.
Adoption and capability
The biggest addition to City Portrait activities this year was the start of a shift from tool to service - helping to move up the S-curve from ‘Experimentation’ and ‘Acceleration’ towards ‘Emergence.’
Ongoing awareness raising - We continued to raise awareness about the City Portrait, knowing that its initial attention only really scratched the surface across Greater Melbourne. Along these lines, we had the chance to speak about its development on the Modern Maze podcast and host a session on the theme of ‘Measuring What Matters’ at the 2024 National Economic Development Conference. Reaching new audiences reminded us of the big first step that the City Portrait’s release represents.
Engaging with public audiences - We know that actually playing with the Doughnut is much of the fun of it, so we built this into our activities for the year. Rather than expecting immediate and institutionalised uptake of the City Portrait, how can we make it an inviting model to explore? We released the Impact Visualiser as an interactive tool to apply to mapping the Doughnut to projects, strategies, policies or places - it’s not set in stone, and we keen to understand how it’s useful - or could be more useful - in practice. We’ll continue our engagement work next month, with the ‘Walking Together’ event (come along!) that links the Melbourne Doughnut and Indigenous Doughnut - an exciting point of departure for an ongoing stream of work.
Targeted learning - We have learned a lot through the development of the City Portrait and want to extend this to partners within our palace and beyond. Locally, we have been exploring the way that the Doughnut and City Portrait can inform training for local government. We are also contributing to academic research on the City Portrait as an example of a risk-and-sustainability decision model. At the same time, we are in conversation with places from Gippsland to Oxfordshire about how our experience can inform their approaches to localising Doughnut Economics - and learning from them along the way.
Policy alignment - Finally, this year we delved into policy advocacy, drawing on the City Portrait to inform submission to the National Urban Policy and Plan for Victoria consultation processes. These were underpinned by a rigorous analysis comparing the City Portrait model to Infrastructure Victoria’s Choosing Victoria’s Future; this highlighted ways that new forms of measurement can complement and extend current forms of modelling that guide policy and planning. We are continuing to learn from how other cities are applying the City Portrait to policy and decision-making, as well, and will publish on this at the end of the year.
So, what has all this activity shown us?
First, the fundamental goal reorientation offered by the City Portrait should not be underestimated. At a paradigm level, this new goal changes everything. It is still worth naming this and continuing to raise awareness about it.
Second, starting at this level means it can be difficult to offer a 1:1 alignment with current policies, decisions and mindsets that are operating towards a goal of growth. Because the City Portrait is intended to be digested in full, it is not easy to respond to it in practice through incremental and siloed policies. It is how these policies are understood together, and in relation to one another, that matters most. In policy settings, the City Portrait and Doughnut Economics framing therefore generally offer the following:
Expanding the scope of policy areas of focus to incorporate all City Portrait dimensions and outcomes;
Using the City Portrait model to identify and reconcile conflicting goals, objectives and interventions, including negative externalities that may emerge from a given intervention;
Applying the City Portrait model as a place-based, collaborative approach and process to shape and roll out policies in specific urban areas; and
Offering targets to drive ambitious action.
Third, the City Portrait’s orientation towards outcomes means that it must be understood in relation to other forms of measurement, connecting to the likes of liveability indicators, built-form measures and other more output-driven data that can tell us if our near-term decisions are moving us towards the big-picture change we seek to achieve.
So, it turns out that it’s been another big year. We are again ready for rest at the end of it, and then ready to keep learning and exploring how a big idea can continue finding its way.
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