The subtle art of bringing the Melbourne Doughnut to life
‘Field Notes’ is a fortnightly column in which Regen Melbourne’s Lead Convenors provide on-the-ground updates and insights from their work and focus areas.
In November 2023, Regen Melbourne successfully launched the City Portrait for Greater Melbourne – an Australian-first initiative that mapped our city against our social and ecological boundaries (per Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics framework). Now, our focus shifts to using the doughnut to inform our work, inspire action, and catalyse change.
“So, where have City Portraits successfully been applied in other cities to shape action?”
This is the question that comes up the most when I introduce organisations to the City Portrait for Greater Melbourne and mention that many other cities globally have undertaken similar measurement exercises. It’s an excellent question with a less-than-straightforward answer, as we’ve discovered.
For anyone unfamiliar, the City Portrait is a project we launched in November 2023 that maps Melbourne against Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics framework. It ascribes data to dimensions of our Social Foundation (e.g., Mobility, Food, Housing) and Ecological Ceiling (e.g. Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss, Land Conversion) and illustrates, as well as we can, where Melbourne is tracking against each dimension. It provides a compass for us to orient organisations and individuals across Greater Melbourne to understand what is required for people and environment to thrive here.
Lokesh, who volunteers with our team on a weekly basis, has looked at how other places are putting their City Portraits into practice. He’s learned that each city approaches it differently: for some, the process has formed a broad baseline understanding of the city’s performance, paving the way for strategies to be developed. For others, the City Portrait is the first step in creating a holistic decision-making framework about how to prioritise and design projects. But, because the concept of a City Portrait is still fairly new (Amsterdam’s City Portrait, the first global example, was published in 2020), we’re all still on a learning journey.
For us, the City Portrait forms the core of our measurement system. It defines Regen Melbourne’s long-term aspiration of the city, what we mean by the ‘safe and just space for Greater Melbourne.’ Applying data to the Melbourne Doughnut has helped us to describe the outcomes we seek to see across our city’s systems.
Now, we need to work backwards to today, and the role our ‘wildly ambitious’ projects are playing in moving us towards that safe and just space. Are we doing the right things? Are we seeing signals of positive change?
“We [now] have a deeper understanding of how our work relates to the Doughnut. We can start to work backwards from here, identifying how to meaningfully describe (and possibly measure) progress in the near term.”
We started to do this last week by mapping each of our four projects (Swimmable Birrarung, Participatory Melbourne, Regen Streets and End Food Waste) on the Doughnut. This allowed us to get a better sense of the Social Foundation and Ecological Ceiling dimensions most relevant to each project, and which must be reflected most fully in the work. Conversely, it also enabled us to start thinking about the parts of our system that we want to start to nudge through the projects.
Of course, being true to our workshopping style, this included hand drawing, lots of Post-It notes and an energising balance of thoughtful reflection and fun. We had bonus contributions from Whiskey the dog, who communicated her approval of the final mapping by taking a nap once it was complete.
In some ways, this was an obvious exercise, arguably long overdue. In other ways, though, it wasn’t. For one thing, each of our projects is at a different stage of development and maturity. This means that we are still defining boundaries in some of our work: does Regen Streets include a focus on housing? Does Participatory Melbourne relate to Education? These were some of the questions that came up in our discussion.
Whiskey approves.
Similarly, it’s only been through the collaborative and detailed development of the City Portrait that we’ve been able to more fully understand the meaning and implications of each dimension of the Melbourne Doughnut. Considering the definition and sub-outcomes for each dimension helped us to be more discerning in our understanding. For example, digging into the difference between ‘Water’ as represented in the Social Foundation and ‘Freshwater Withdrawals’ on the Ecological Ceiling helped us to determine what is most relevant to the Swimmable Birrarung work vs. the End Food Waste project.
We now have a great big white board with a hand-drawn Doughnut and a rainbow of Post-its as our artefact from this internal workshop. Beyond that, though, we have a deeper understanding of how our work relates to the Doughnut, including where gaps exist (Education, possibly) and where there is considerable overlap (Social Equity). We can start to work backwards from here, identifying how to meaningfully describe (and possibly measure) progress in the near term.
It’s a big leap from our current vantage point to the safe and just space, but our mapping helps us to see the other side. Now, we can more confidently and clearly find our stepping stones to get there.
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