Weaving knowledge and action: Integrating research and projects in 2024
‘Field Notes’ is a weekly column through which Regen Melbourne’s Lead Convenors provide on-the-ground updates and insights from their work and focus areas.
With the successful launch of the City Portrait for Greater Melbourne at the tail end of 2023, Regen Melbourne’s Research Lead, Alison Whitten, explains how we’re using research to take systemic action in 2024 and beyond.
This week, I kicked off the first RM Lab Research Council meeting of the year by asking members what trends and patterns are influencing their work and thinking in 2024. There were sober nods around the Zoom screen as we talked about anticipated shocks and ongoing environmental and social disruption.
As if on cue, the sky outside my window grew dark, and within a minute I had to turn up the volume to hear over the roar of rain and thunder. The rest of the meeting was punctuated by Council members going off-screen periodically to attend to water entering their homes, power and internet outages and loud bangs from objects blowing over in the wind. The state-wide damage from this storm event and related bushfires, off the back of a heat wave, is still being assessed.
And yet, no one really seemed fazed. Perhaps we’re all just getting used to responding to disruptions on Zoom calls. But, this group, experienced researchers all working on issues related to climate impacts in our cities, is especially attuned to the types of shocks we experienced this week. Tuesday’s chaos was no surprise to them: the risks we face and the urgent need for change are evidenced in their scholarship.
Instead, we progressed through our agenda for the Research Council meeting as planned, addressing two key questions that are shaping my work and that of the RM Lab, Regen Melbourne’s research platform, over the coming year.
The first of these questions naturally follows from the launch of the Greater Melbourne City Portrait last November: How do we visibly connect the City Portrait platform to action and impact on the ground?
As the City Portrait took shape last year, its value as more than just a one-off data view of Melbourne became apparent. It evolved the Melbourne Doughnut from a ‘compass’ into a measurement system, guiding how we can assess the health of people and the environment in Melbourne over time. We are putting this into practice ourselves, mapping Regen Melbourne’s projects to the parts of the doughnut that they are designed to influence most directly. Of course, our projects are not enough on their own to meaningfully shift Melbourne’s social and environmental performance, but this mapping can help us to understand and describe the directional impact of our work.
“If our team has one theme for the year, it’s ‘integration’ – the weaving together of wisdom and action.”
It’s been great to kick off the year with each of our Lead Convenors, thinking about how their day-to-day activities and the relationships they’re each building relate back to our purpose of moving us into the ‘safe and just space’ described by the Melbourne Doughnut. Our next step is to figure out the ‘middle bits’ – the way we talk about the progress we’re making in the near term, and whether we’re staying on course.
Looking beyond RM-led applications, the Research Council discussion focused on how we can raise awareness about the City Portrait and test various use cases for it across universities. This is part of the ‘road show’ that I have been running since late last year, which includes introductory presentations and conversations about the City Portrait with organisations from across government, industry and academia. Ideas and opportunities emerging from these range from building school curriculum materials to using the City Portrait process to downscale the Doughnut to a precinct level. I’m looking forward to supporting the progression of these case studies and sharing what we learn from them as they take shape.
The second question that the Research Council discussed shapes the other main track of work for the RM Lab this year: What does it look like to effectively integrate research into Regen Melbourne’s projects?
If our team has one theme for the year, it’s ‘integration.’ We talk about weaving together wisdom and action, and deep knowledge with change on the ground. At our team retreat to kick off the year, we refreshed our strategy to help to reframe this relationship. Rather than thinking about research and projects as two sides of the same coin (which never actually see each other), we reoriented our view to define research as one of many enablers that is necessary to both guide and be informed by our set of projects. Already, it’s made a lot of sense to partners new and old to describe the role of research in this way.
Looking at what this means in practice is much easier now that we have developed the SOIL methodology, which outlines our iterative process for developing Regen Melbourne projects. With the Research Council, we tested what it looks like to map research to each phase of SOIL: What is the role of research in each phase? What key research questions would we want to answer? How does this translate to a potential set of activities?
The conversation refined our thinking, and out of it we confirmed that bringing the Research Council together with our Lead Convenors for a deep-dive on all the projects will be a valuable approach to our second-quarter gathering. In the meantime, we will continue to test what this looks like in each of the projects, especially the Swimmable Birrarung, where research conversations have progressed most fully.
It’s an exciting start to the year, getting to the heart of my role and testing some big questions with our partners about turning research into tangible and measurable action and outcomes. I can’t wait to see what emerges.
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