Regen Streets
the vision
Imagine walking out of your front door and hearing the twinkling of bird life instead of the hum of traffic. Imagine walking a few steps to your local e-bike sharing hub and tapping your phone to access your ride to work. Imagine if our streets were designed to bring us joy, connection and creativity.
What if we allow our streets to play the vital role in life they are intended for — to animate the social, environmental and economic aspects of communities? What if the streets were our change agent for climate and social action?
The streets are for everyone; therefore they are the best place for us to start designing the future we need – one that is resilient, adaptable, thriving and built around community. Regen Streets exists to help catalyse this wave of regenerative streets across Greater Melbourne.
Collaboration Partners
We have been working with a vast array of partners who have engaged in different ways from Sensemaking, to active partnership on projects and initiatives, to multiple walks along the streets of Greater Melbourne sharing stories of what we value about our places.
We thank and recognise our many collaborators:
BAYSIDE CITY COUNCIL
VILLAGE ZERO
UNCOMMON FOLK
STREAT
I2C
GREEN COLLECT
Arup
Better Streets
Bike West
Centre for Cities
Centre for Just Places
City Compost Network,
City of Melbourne
City of Stonnington
Clear Horizons
Earthwatch
Good Cycles
Good Karma Network
Greater Western Water
Hatch
Hosier inc
i2C
Irregular
Kingston Council
Maribyrnong Council
Merri-bek Council
Movement and Place
Municipal Association of Victoria
Renew Australia
Repower
RMIT Future Play Lab
Streets Alive
Swinburne University
Tamarack Institute
Transition Towns
VicHealth
Village Greening
Village Well
Village Zero
Woodleigh School
BAYSIDE CITY COUNCIL VILLAGE ZERO UNCOMMON FOLK STREAT I2C GREEN COLLECT Arup Better Streets Bike West Centre for Cities Centre for Just Places City Compost Network, City of Melbourne City of Stonnington Clear Horizons Earthwatch Good Cycles Good Karma Network Greater Western Water Hatch Hosier inc i2C Irregular Kingston Council Maribyrnong Council Merri-bek Council Movement and Place Municipal Association of Victoria Renew Australia Repower RMIT Future Play Lab Streets Alive Swinburne University Tamarack Institute Transition Towns VicHealth Village Greening Village Well Village Zero Woodleigh School
Transition pathways
We launched the wildly ambitious Regen Streets project in 2024. Following a Sensemaking process involving 100s of streets a series of pathways towards regenerative streets were collectively identified. Taken together these channel our activities and questions towards new opportunities for streets based change.
1.Collective Imagination
Well meaning efforts to tackle complex issues in relation to the streets will often focus on single issues and are driven by individual actors giving a narrow view of the overarching problem. Single issues and community initiatives often lead to duplicated efforts while we try to solve in silos and get stuck in pilots. The opportunity is to move away from strategies that seem unattainable to helping people feel how these issues can be tackled in the street.
3. Adaptive Streets
We know that the street-level infrastructure that exists today leaves us vulnerable to predicted, altered conditions and weather patterns. We must reimagine what healthy streets that support thriving communities and generations to come look like.
2. New Urban Governance
Current leadership structures serve top-down approaches. We must shift to more distributed leadership that captures the voice and essence of streets and communities to better serve decision-making. There is not enough participation of diverse publics in how we imagine our future places, or enact the pathways to get there.
4. Investing in what we value
We must move resources to help our streets transform and to allow what we value (social connection, green spaces) to be abundant. To move from short term, small community grants to significant resource flow. A new form of value is emerging - yet we don't have the practices, mechanisms and 'proof points' in order to match our funding pathways towards it. One that shifts from a purely financial view of value to one which captures the value of what we imagine for our streets.
HOW WE WORK
Nina Sharpe
Regen Streets Convenor
nina@regen.melbourne
We are working towards the goal of catalysing a wave of regenerative streets across Greater Melbourne. There is a shared ambition to shape a better future and to do this using the streets as the unit of action.
In order to be effective in this space we need to stop viewing the challenges from single sector perspectives and stop solving solutions drawing on single actor expertise. We need decisions to be made using expansive consideration and broad consultation.
We need the decisions to reflect the needs of our community today, and for generations to come. And this needs to look different to now. We have the solutions we need to move at the scale required. Now is the time to give potency to the good work already underway and move faster towards the wave of regenerative streets.
But there will not be an immediate, single solution. Instead we must continue to learn about the types of activities and relationships we need to shift in order to lead to more transformative impact.
We will begin the next phase of work by connecting people, information and resources in relation to street regeneration, making meaning in what is happening in our city and setting directional ambition for collaboration. These efforts will expand the scope of what is possible, accelerate adoption of best practice and connect expertise areas to drive change and collaboration.
If you are interested in getting involved in regenerating the streets of Greater Melbourne or are already doing great work to achieve this, get in touch with our Streets Lead, Nina Sharpe, today.
our latest report: Catalysing a wave of regenerative streets
Our latest report captures the findings of Regen Streets’ exploration so far. It also shares some provocations around the challenges and opportunities that exist and opens the next phase of the work to be done. We hope you find the report useful in better understanding the power and potential of our streets. And that you join us in making practical change using the insights here!
