The Greater Melbourne City Portrait is a practical and holistic compass to track how Melbourne is performing as a place that supports people and planet to thrive. Co-developed with dozens of partners, including experts from across academia, government and industry, the City Portrait points to the types of actions, policy decisions, investments and mindset shifts required to embrace a regenerative future for our city.

Insights

What does the City Portrait tell us about Greater Melbourne? The 2023 release reveals six key insights:

1. The liveability that we have achieved has not been evenly distributed.

For all that we have to be proud of, deep-seated inequalities in our city persist. Out of the 14 dimensions that make up our Social Foundation, many of our targets are within reach, but only one dimension, Water, is edging into the sweet spot. With our population rapidly increasing, the pressures on our social systems will only intensify.

2. The liveability we have is a result of us living beyond our means.

We consume too many resources, convert too much land for human use and produce too much waste. In scientific terms, we’ve been exceeding our ‘Ecological Ceiling’, pushing the limits of what the planet can sustain. And, if those excesses aren’t reined in, we’ll be facing more than just ecological disaster, as the effects of climate change widen the cracks in our already fragile systems.

3. Greater Melbourne isn’t a bubble.

It is overly simplistic to try to understand our city without acknowledging our relationships with the surrounding regions and with people globally. This includes acknowledging the impact that our lives have on these people and places. In particular, the cheap goods and services we frequently take for granted are too often produced by people without the rights and income to meet their basic needs.

4. Our social and environmental challenges are deeply interconnected.

The City Portrait reveals the positive and negative feedback loops between dimensions and between the inside and outside of the Melbourne Doughnut. For example, building more housing on green wedges may temporarily relieve pressure on the market, but will permanently displace wildlife and reduce our ability to grow food locally.

5. We have the resources we need for our city to thrive.

The City Portrait reveals the many strengths that we have as a city, including deep expertise from global leaders in urban resilience and the future of cities (many of whom contribute to its development). We have the financial, technical and natural resources, and insight we need to meet our human needs within the Ecological Ceiling. Now that we have the City Portrait to guide us, we just need the will to elevate our ambition to make it a reality!

6. We have a global responsibility.

Melbourne is a wealthy and privileged global city and is a disproportionate contributor to planetary breakdown. This combination of factors leads to global responsibility to understand and respond to our urgent times, build on our strengths, and become a beacon city for regeneration.

Recommendations

What needs to happen to make the Safe and Just Space for Greater Melbourne a reality? Success is far from assured, but it is in sight, and thanks to the City Portrait the path forward is clearer than it has ever been before.

Emerging from the City Portrait insights are six core recommendations for government, business, civil society and other actors committed to serving our city:

1. Create, support and adopt more holistic measures of progress.

In order to tackle the systemic challenges in our city, we need to go beyond first order effects and simple measures of progress. Governments at all levels should support and accelerate their own efforts to create holistic measures of progress. Businesses and civil society should adopt a systems lens and a multiple-stakeholder approach to success, to more holistically understand their positive and negative impact. Efforts should also be made to increase accessible data pools that can catalyse new ways of organising and presenting progress across the city.

2. Engage in (and invest in) deep collaboration.

None of our major challenges can be solved by single actors, whether government, business or civil society. However, our current economic and political system is built on siloes and departments, hence cross-sector collaboration is difficult. Government, philanthropy and business need to significantly invest in well-oriented collaboration and strengthening social infrastructure.

3. Normalise integrated decision making and internalise negative externalities.

With the City Portrait as our holistic compass for progress, the responsibility now sits with government, business and civil society to understand systemic interconnections, internalise negative externalities, and publicly acknowledge trade-offs in our decision making. This includes more integrated government approaches to policy and planning (and other issues across government), business going above and beyond baseline environmental regulations, and cross-sector collaboration in civil society.

4. Shift capital towards systemic interventions.

The City Portrait reveals the interconnected nature of our systemic challenges. However, government, philanthropic and investment capital largely focuses on single-point solutions with narrow and short term frames of success. This incentivises community, civil society and entrepreneurs to focus on the alleviation of immediate harm and solve narrow, short term problems. In order to create pathways to a safe and just future, capital must now also invest in complex systemic interventions, with long-term multi-order effects. This requires a new investment paradigm built on long-term horizons, principles of diverse experimentation, portfolios rather than single investments, and an embrace of holistic measurement systems.

5. Increase our collective ambitions.

We have choices to make as a city. The shortfall and overshoot apparent in the City Portrait reveals the need for action on many fronts, but above all we need to dramatically increase our collective ambitions. In the face of rising inequality, the climate emergency and many other systemic threats, iterative improvement is no longer enough. We do not have the luxury of time. Building on the knowledge we have in this city and the City Portrait to guide us, it’s time for collective action on a grand scale.

6. Go out and smell the wattle.

Take a moment to truly reconnect with nature. Remember, for all of our modern hubris, we are all part of one living ecosystem.