Regenerating Melbourne
At the end of 2020, a combination of Covid lockdowns and “Black Summer” bushfires across the Australian state of Victoria meant that Melburnians were confined to their homes for weeks on end. But instead of staring into crisis, a group of citizens came together determined to start reimagining and rebuilding their city out of it. Jon sat down with Kaj Lofgren and Charity Mosienyane to hear the story of Regen Melbourne, an organisation born in that moment to catalyse work across the city towards three “earthshot” goals, including making the Birrarung river swimmable from source to sea.
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Transcript
Welcome to How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know it needs to change. I'm John Alexander, and earlier this year, I was in Australia to learn about some of the most exciting, pioneering work that's going on anywhere in the world. While I was there, I had the chance to talk with Kai Lofgren and Charity Musianyani, two members of the team at Regen Melbourne in the beautiful city of the same name. This is a story of people from across sectors in one major city coming together to create a space for their politics to move into. It's something I truly believe could become a template for cities everywhere.
So my name is Kai Lofgren. I am currently the CEO of Regen Melbourne, but I'm also the father of two glorious children, Oscar and Otis, who are about to turn 12 and eight. And I am someone who was born and raised in Melbourne, the great city of Melbourne, but I also had a a Swedish father. And so I've spent a lot of time in Scandinavia growing up and studying and and working and have a deep connection to that part of the world. And I've said it before, but I do think that there is a real, connection in the work that I've been able to do, had the privilege to do, and the kind of cultural context of Sweden and Scandinavia. And so, I'd like to think that some of that aesthetic flows through the work at at Regen Melbourne now. I'm an engineer by training, but I've also, had the fortune of studying, the arts and, in particular, history. And within that economic history has been my kind of hobby, I guess, on the side. And so the main driver for that has been thinking about sort of the the long arc of change. How do economic systems shift and move over time, and what do previous epic transitions tell us about the current context that we all find ourselves in? And I guess I've always found it very, I guess, comforting, humbling, and also enabling to think about the current moment through the lens of slightly historical vantage point and seeing our roles very much as sort of how do we play our roles in trying to, I guess, create the sort of economic shift of land somewhere slightly better than it otherwise would have rather than as somebody who's creating any change at all. We're here to kind of shepherd what's going on around us so that it lands somewhere slightly better than it otherwise would have.
Charity. My name is Charity Wusignani. I am a Botswana Australian. I've probably been living in Melbourne for about twenty years, come from Botswana, and I currently lead the work, on the Swinburne Bureau, here at Regen Melbourne. And I similar to Kai, I have an engineering background, so quite passionate about water. And I've seen the work take me across the country and to The UK, looking at how do we actually what role can we play in making sure that we continue to supply humans and nonhumans with the water they need to stay alive and to thrive. Because we need water to stay alive. We are 70% water, you know, or more. But, yeah, like, I I've so I've got a really like, I've got a twenty year career in in in looking at the technical the the heavy technical side of of of engineering, the infrastructure side of things. And, I think now I'm looking at the side that how do we actually understand what water means, the role we can play, how do we how do we actually play a role in the longevity, our longevity, the longevity of nonhumans as well as our place using water as a conduit for that. And we're gonna get into
the swimmable Birrarung as one of the Regen Melbourne Earthshots Yeah. In a little bit. So, but let's start with, like, the hardest question of all. What is Regen Melbourne?
It's a wonderful question, and we have grappled with that for now five years. And the way that we would currently describe Regen Melbourne is as an engine for ambitious collaboration in service of our city. And that's both an excellent short elevator summary of what we do. We we are in service of our place fundamentally, and we also act as a a catalyst, an enabler, a facilitator, a convener of unique clusters of organizations to work together in service of place. And it is also a hopeless explanation of what we're trying to do because it acts on so many different elements of the system in so many different ways that, there are also many other ways that we can describe our work. But if you ask me today, what is Rejed and Melman? I would say it's an engine for ambitious collaboration in service of place.
And it was created from outside of it's not a government body?
No. So we're we're a nonprofit organization. It's an independent nonprofit organization. We have 10 staff. We are philanthropically funded, by, both large foundations here in Australia as well as a family offices and some private donors. And I think there's a range of reasons why they invest in what we're doing. But, primarily, it's an understanding that the way that we have thought about social and environmental change for a long time hasn't been away. Hasn't been enough. Yep. Hasn't been enough. It's not that it's been bad or ineffective. In many cases, there's profound positive change happening in this country and around the world. And, also, there's an understanding that in the face of the many, many effects of the meta crisis or the poly crisis or whatever language you wanna use, we need to find ways to work across silos much better.
And regen is a shorthand for that in a sense? Yeah. I mean, regen obviously comes from regenerative,
and and creating a regenerative Melbourne is is ultimately our vision. And so regen is the descriptor. I would also probably say that there are many, many ways of describing, you know, a better world. We're actually all striving for, a healthy democracy, a thriving environment, a sustainable, social baseline that, you know, brings everyone up to the to the right level, etcetera. And RayGen is a really nice way of capturing a holistic view of place rather than thinking about it as just an environmental project or just a social project. It captures both. Lovely.
And, Charity, if you could, just give us a bit of a picture of the the structure of Regen Melbourne at the moment. So there's two key as I understand it, there's two key functions. There's the there's the Earthshots and the systems lab. Is that right?
Yes. So what Kai has just, described, like, our ambitious collaboration and, I think ground, we do a lot of the work, Regent, Melbourne's work through, what we call the Earthshots. We've got three Earthshots. And I lead one of them, the small bureau, which is about how do you worked collectively with a broad, group of actors to actually clean up the river, make it healthy, thriving, and swim all way appropriate, and all in service to, again, a healthy, thriving community and place. Right? And we'll dive deeper into that in a little moment. And then we have nourishing neighborhood and which is about how do you have, resilient, and nourishing food systems at a very local place. Like, what does that look like? And then 300 streets, which is 300,000. 300,000 streets. I forgot the k, the thousand. 300,000 streets, which is, like, the the the it's about the number of streets we have in Greater Melbourne. It's about how do you use the street as a unit, for for agency, for participatory democracy. How do you get community really engaged and fired up? And and and and actually have a regenerative straight, like take back the streets for the people in place. But we also have what we call the systems lab where this is where we like, if the earthshot is where we we the work is implemented through or the vehicle for doing the work we do, the systems lab actually is an enabler for that work. So we test things like what does systemic invest how does systemic investment enable, like, 300 streets? Like, what do that inter those interventions look like? How does story and narrative actually enable, you know, power up these these this the work that is required.
What are the other ones that I'm forgetting? There's so many Yeah. I mean, there's there's there's a suite of enablers. Yeah. And I think that the kind of the summary is that we've always felt like there's a dance between knowledge and action or wisdom and action when we're thinking about place based work. And so the earth shots really act as these tangible pathways towards our vision. Yep. And the systems lab and the enablers that sit within the systems lab, that's about how do we think about organizing knowledge in service of place. Mhmm. And so, you know, we're looking at governance, about capital, about narrative, about measurement systems, all the things that sit below the soil line. You know, know, you've got the activities that sit above the soil, the beautiful ecosystems that we're thriving, and striving towards. And then you've got the soil conditions themselves. Yeah. And we always talk about in systemic change or regenerative work. How do we shift the conditions in a place? Yeah. So the systems lab is really about actively seeking to shift the conditions of place.
And all of this is integrate I just wanna make sure that all of this is integrated. All of this has to work together. Like, we actually have to demonstrate the things that we are seeking external to organizations are the things that we need to be, like, practicing. So the weaving together, the cross sectoral avoiding silos, we are consistently practicing that.
So let's let's take the the swimmable barrier in this, the river that some outside of Melbourne might know know as the Yarra Yes. The Yarra River. Which we can, I might ask you to say a word about that in just a moment? But but take us into that earth shot and, where it came from, what you're doing at the moment. Like, make it real for us. Like, what what does it mean that you you guys have adopted the swimmable bittering as a as an earth shot? Yeah. So I think the story of the swimmable Birrarung,
earthshot probably starts not probably. It starts during, like, a a really dark time, I guess, for Melbourne when we were, like, COVID lockdown and, like, the black summer fires. And and so it was a time where there was no movement. We were all, like, terrified, lack of hope. And during that time, I think Kai and a few, like, collaborators in Melbourne got together and said, we can't accept this as, you know, the future of our city. Like, we know that they're gonna be, like, quite drastic. Like, we we we know that we're gonna have these types of events happening more regularly. Like, so how do we how do we take back hope? How do we give back hope to a place? And how do we change the story for place? So the beginning of the swimmable bearing is actually the beginning of Regen Melbourne, because that's the that's the point where you started. Right? Yeah. So, as Charity is describing,
pretty disruptive time. Mhmm. And the world has seen lots of disruptive times, but Melbourne had a pretty pretty unique experience of 2020. And so in that context, there were a bunch of organizations that got together to ask this question of how do we serve place better. Mhmm. And we kicked off Regen Melbourne by using doughnut economics as a organizing framework, and we downscaled the doughnut. So we did a big visioning process with 500 people. I think 50 organizations were involved to set a new vision for Melbourne. Mhmm. And that was published in April 2021 in a big report that was kinda like this piece of research, community research that happened during lockdown. When that report landed and people got a bit excited about this new hope that was being described, this ability to create agency in place and organizations had this kind of re understanding or relearning that they had a really significant role to play in service of place, there was a bunch of energy released. Lots of people were like, okay. What do we do next? How do we actually organize in service of this vision that we've just created? And so we started doing some pretty experimental convening. We started with things like silent discos and picnics and boardroom lunches, and we did a huge array of, yeah, really sort of experimental convening. And the whole purpose of that was to just lean into what is the place asking for, what are they asking for in terms of, the themes that they're most interested in. And one of the themes that kept coming up again and again and again was the role of water in this place and, in particular, the role of the Birrarung, the Yarra River as a life force of this city and the fact that people felt like it had been neglected for a long time. Mhmm. And that there was a sense that this was a kind of iconic symbol of what a sort of a rebirth or a generation for the city might look like if we centered the waterway. And so the Swinmore Birrang project became the sort of epicenter in the early days of this is kind of what we mean by systemic change, by transformational change. And so over the course of twelve months, we did some beautiful and quite considered convening with actors that were already in service of the river. So First Nations groups, the city council, the, group called the Yarra Riverkeeper Association, a whole bunch of organizations that were kind of already set up to serve the river. And we brought them together and and sort of asked how can we do this better together. And by the end of that year of convening, it became clear that this idea of swimability for humans and for all life was a kind of orientation that we could all align around. Mhmm. And that's when we organized a big design forum where we invited a whole bunch of other actors in, and that was when you were joining the team, Charity. Where I come in. Yeah. Because from that design forum, there was a real sort of momentum created that went beyond just the existing cohort of organizations that were passionate about the river. Yeah.
And I I think at that design forum, it it became really clear, like, the understanding of what the challenges and barriers were towards having a healthy, thriving river that is swivel. Right? Like, because you had policymakers in the room, like, you had technical experts in the room, First Nations representative, like water authorities, people in the water sectors. Right? So we could just think And you were working in this system at the time? So I was still in the private sector. Like, I as I like, I so I've got a I was working at, one of the engineering consultancies, at the time. So you could say I was a technical expert at the time. And so I got to be in this room. And and it was an interesting room because I think a lot of those people, again, had not been in a room in a space like that where they were talking about something that was common to all of them that actually brought them towards a very collective vision where, like, I think it cut through the noise of, oh, no. But I work for this state government department or I work for this.
I'm just gonna pause you there because it's very interesting to hear this as a Londoner. I'm thinking about the politics of London. Londoner the mayor of London, Sir Nikon, has declared an ambition to make the Thames swimmable. But that doesn't feel to me like it belongs to anyone much more than the Greater London Authority at most. And maybe I'm I'm one I read at one point a report that, on the mayor's environment strategy that said had the sentence, the mayor will plant 300,000
trees. The mayor will plant it. And and so I'm I'm just reflecting in the context of this podcast and the
arose was as a was out of a collective desire. And your role,
your role, Charity, isn't to do this for the city. No. No. So my role is to bring this broad, diverse group of actors and stakeholders. There are people who've been doing work to clean up the river for decades well before me. Like, that's the reason why there's, like, you know, very important law like the Birrarung Act, which is a a a legal instrument that is all about how you protect the river and how the river has a living entity. Like, I'm you may have heard about how more natural entities are getting personal status and stuff like that. Well, the Yarra River, the Birrarung, is, like, the first river in Australia to get, living entity status. So my role is to bring this policy, these strategies, and all these incredible humans, whether it's in the public, in institutions, in business, in technology, to bring them together and say, what are the partnerships that we need to actually collectively move to this vision? It's about collaboration. It's about collective impact. It's about creating the space. So I we tend to say, like, my role is to work, in the middle or in the cracks of these silos and actually say, hey. Come together as an opportunity here. And to actually translate that this work, all these different strategic objectives, policies, and plans, everybody is actually saying the same thing, but in different words. So language becomes a really powerful thing here to say, you're all saying you want this collective vision. And so yes.
Can you give me, like, an example, like, something that you've done to make this real for people, like or something that has happened,
is To make it real? What make what real?
This role and this work of the swimmer. Like, is there an event? Is there a moment in time when you felt this is this is what we're here for?
I think there's been several things, but I I would say that one of the things I'll I'll tell you that there's two. I'll try to be short. Like, I think one of the things is actually creating a space for people to have an immersive experience. Right? Like so we talk about a small bureaus saying in the city reaches. The city reaches of the river is very critical because it's the end of the line, and you can't do anything in the end of the line without doing everything upstream and across the catchment. And I remember last year during, the Birrarung Festival, which is the biggest festival community driven across the catchment, we actually had a swimming event in the river near where you're currently staying. And there were, like, over thirty, forty people from different parts of Greater Melbourne, and they did not know they could swim in this location. They did not know that the river was actually swimmable. And so all of a sudden, you're having these people have a really real, experience of immersing themselves in the water. And then they're asking, why can't I do this right there by Flinders Street Station? And and I I think the more we start having these really immersive, tangible experiences where people it's not no longer about just the imagination. It's a tangible experience. People then can start asking the question and getting behind the vision. But another one is we held something we held an event called Tomorrow's River where we curated a group of policy makers, water, technical experts, and academia, like and brought 40 people together by the river and said, imagine a future, where this river is thriving, it's healthy, and it's swimmable. What does that look like? You had technocrats talking about beautiful visions of, like, the river in the heart of the city being a joyful place where, like, nonhuman and human, I'm coexistent swimming. And it was it was real for those people because they had that immersive experience. And so I think playing a role where we invite people into these spaces to see what's possible and to be part of the journey to get into what's the swimming pool. Birang is really important. So that's that's part of the role in the many juggling acts that, we're doing. That's one of the things.
I'm gonna pause us there and, because I'm gonna come back to you, Charity, and your background and how you, embody this because I think, you know, in a way, you're you're a very interesting kind of, expression of what region Melbourne is all about personally, I think. But but, I mean, just to answer you briefly, Kai, and and and this because swimmable bearing is one of the three earthshots. And this way of working, you were saying, like, this emerged early as an expression of how you wanted, what you wanted what you all wanted Regen Melbourne to be. Can you just reflect a bit more widely on that role of the Earthshot and how Swinburne Bowring expresses that?
Yeah. I think the when we released the vision, and it was this relatively not relatively. It was incredibly ambitious. Like, it was stating something that came from a deep love of place, and it was, on the one hand, just a whole bunch of nice words on the page, and on the other hand, carried a lot of weight for people. There was a lot of energy, time, love put into this process. And I think we all felt, those of us who are involved in facilitating, curating that process, quite a heavyweight of responsibility around the fact that this had been created in the first place. And I guess that partly comes from you know, I've spent fifteen years prior to that working in various aspects of the social environmental impact sector, And I've seen lots of processes like this where energy is poured in, visions are created, and then not a lot happens. And so and that's not the fault of anybody in particular. It's just a very different set of expertise to create agency behind ambitious collective visions. And what has sadly happened in many places is that there's been a loss of energy, a loss of trust, a loss of agency when the intent was precisely the opposite. But I do think that's contributed to a kind of, when you come to that question of our future democracy, what's our role in strengthening and reforming and evolving democracy, I think some of these efforts actually have taken us backwards. And so I think we felt a heavyweight responsibility around backing up this vision. So when we were doing this sort of experimental convening that I talked about earlier, it was with a deep sense of intent. We were doing that to surface the themes that we could then organize behind. Mhmm. And so water and the was such a incredible enabler of us to test organizing methodology that could back up the vision. And about the same time, we started talking about the food system as another one of those layers, and we talked about the role of the street and this particular question on agency and participation as another cluster. And over time, those sort of thematic, areas sharpened up to become earthshots. And so the Tumor Birang, 300,000 streets, and nourished neighborhoods, over time, become a really sharp expression of a goal that in turn would take us tangibly towards the vision that we've created. And so in a way, you know, this is a recovering engineer in me. I see the earth shots as the scaffold, as the tangible pathways that people can follow to back up this visioning process that we did, which was why why we're why we're all here to create transformational change. And so all of the work the charity is describing, the kind of below ground soil work, the organizing, the you know our friend, Indi Joa, talks about it as the dark matter. You know, all that stuff that we don't see that we need to do in order to achieve this transformational change, it's all nested within this idea that we're not mucking around with the vision. The vision is like an ambitious expression of what we need here, but we're not just settling the vision. Like, we're here to enact change towards the vision, and so there's something about that kind of there's a beautiful collective relational aesthetic to what we do, but we're not here to muck around. This is a deeply serious, quite quite ambitious, but very serious attempt to shift systems in a place. And so that's I'm saying that kind of fluently in a way, but it's also really important because I think a lot of the work that we see and that we get inspired by around the world, it's often perceived as nice. Yep. And nice is great, but necessary is better. Mhmm. And what we're trying to do here is to shift systems in a way that frames our work as necessary for the messy transition that we're all in to scaffold our existing systems so they can become what they need to become in service of all of us. And
just to bring back that contrast with the the way that a very similar earthshot has been described in London, you're very much saying, this needs everyone. Yeah.
Yes. And the the interesting example of that, I think, is that we have always had a sense that our legitimacy, our civic mandate comes from the place. You know, we're a nonprofit. We're, independent. Literally, our constitution says, Regen Melbourne is in service of the regeneration of this place. Mhmm. That's that's our mission. That's very clear. It's why we're all here. And what that means is that we get our mandate from the place. And so all of our work, whether it's making the river swimmable or creating a a a network of local food economies, We have an open posture to everyone, including the current state forces of today, the political forces, the capital forces, big business. We have an open posture. We want everybody to be part of this, but we're not waiting for permission. And that balance of, like, openness and momentum is what I think has carried us to this point and also is the enticing bit. It's like the it's like the the bit that people can find inspiration and joy around while doing deeply serious work.
And feels like it's quite a good summary of the personality of a certain human being. That's opposite. All of us. But but trust me, I don't mean to make you feel like you're carrying the weight of this, but I am not. It's collective effort, John. There we go, my dear. But but you do have a a pretty powerful combination of, the rational and the intuitive or the rational and the spiritual in your in the way you're doing this work. Right? Yeah. So just tell me a bit more about your your personal connection to the issue of water, perhaps. Yeah. And and you're professional. And and and and how you how that means you can show up in some of these rooms. Yeah.
So I grew up in Botswana, and it's a semi arid country. It's a lovely country, lovely country, but we don't have water. And so I think I grew up at the very cold front of, how crucial water is to our very existence as a Botswana. And, and and I, my grandfather was actually a farmer, so he was really reliant on those rains and and rivers flowing. And and I share stories about how I remember playing in in rivers as a as a little five year old, you know, feet in puddles and stuff like that. But all of this to say, I grew up really, really valuing water because I knew what could happen. I could I could see the impact on livestock or on the orchard, on the farm, in my family's life, in in in in in communities, lives. And and Botswana, like, you know, is the name of our currency, the Botswana if you've ever been there. But also means rain, and and it's about abundance. It's about the harvest. It's about, you know, the earth being nourished and drinking and and all of that. But I think all of that led me to Australia to to study. I I have a civil and environmental engineering background, but focusing on water. So I've spent, like, the last twenty years, like, working in the water sector, whether it was the planning, designing, managing, constructing, various, water infrastructure, stormwater pipelines. Part of the reason why you're opening your tap is because somebody like me back in the day had designed a pipeline with valves and pump stations and dams, you know, to make sure that you never have to think about it, but just open the tap and drink and flush your toilet and have a shower. But that was a very technical side of it. I I almost feel like it was a very rational side. You know? You know the equations. You know the formula. You know the standards. You know the policies, the regulations. And I think in the last three years, that body of work has led me to a place where I'm now realizing that infrastructure has always been, in relation whether I knew it or not, has always been in relation to the environment. So those stormwater pipelines that I designed will always lead water to a water body. So stormwater is the biggest pollutant of the Yarra River for instance. I've designed them and I I don't even think I thought about how what I was designing would end up being a pollutant into a river. And so I think Australia is very, I think it's unique in that in in in how indigenous culture and wisdom values country and how they've been such incredible stewards of of country. And country is place. It's the water, the sky, the land. And and and I feel like not I feel like country has always been seen as one with with us. It's it's our ancestors. We care for it. We we nurture it. Right? We live in reciprocity with it. We never take more than we need because we understand if it's healthy and thriving, we're healthy and thriving. And I think the last three years, I have been on that journey without even realizing I'm on that journey, right? Like, of of learning, getting to know the river, getting to understand her. And I I still don't understand her because there's so much it's so expansive. Right? And I think I've been on this journey of what does reciprocity mean? What does being in relation to a river, a living river, mean? How do I treat you different? Do I just run next to you and not acknowledge that you exist? Do I open the tap and drink water and not acknowledge that a river has sacrificed that water for me? It's given that water so I am alive. Like, do I am I actually consciously aware of how the river is, like, running, flowing through every single aspect of my life? Let's not forget all great cities, all great cities, this is like post colonial settler type stuff, have been created because of rivers. Right? Because they were you could navigate through them. Like, you could, you know, like, I say great cities around the coast. You could get on a boat. You had access to fresh water. You had food and stuff like that. Melbourne is not any different. We exist because,
you know. So you you are, an embodiment in a way of this of this beautiful, like, combination of the prose and the passion, the the the the technical understanding. Yeah. And you begin talking of the Birrarung as her and Yes. Speaking to her. Yes. And that, for me, has felt like it's it's a it's a big part of what Regen Melbourne is. It's it's it's the bringing together of these understandings in a way that feels like it's of this moment in time. And I wonder if you, turning to Kai again, you can just, like, looking at where we are right now, and and this moment for Regen Melbourne, and for Australia and for broader, like, this idea that we are we need to think of these challenges differently. Is that I I'm reading. I meet charity, and I and I meet this human who makes me go, oh god, we've got all of this. Like, this is all here. Is that am I picking up the right things?
Yeah. I think so. I think there's something about, we were talking about this earlier around this. There's a kind of integration question, I think, that that is at the heart of regenerative work and systems work and and holistic practice, which is around kind of, reintegrating a compartmentalized way of being. And I mean that at a kind of individual level in the way that you describe Charity's background. I think about it in the way that, you know, I I've always struggled with the fact that I'm a civil engineer by training, but I really love history and what does that do to the two sides of the brain. Even in our team at Region Melbourne, we have systems engineers, and we have anthropologists, and we have dieticians, and there's many backgrounds that kind of make up our our little crew. And then in the work that we do, it's trying to integrate the strengths of, legal traditions and engineers and activists and arts organizations and government. So it's worked kinda integrate across Mhmm. Many disciplines. And I do think it's a response to the fact that, you know, western education, traditions has taken a really problem solving approach to the world. And the best way to solve problems as recovering engineers is to, reduce them, simplify them, and externalize as much as you possibly can. And what's left is solvable. But, of course, what you've done in that process is you've created a whole bunch of externalities, which I think for a while there, we were able to maintain, at a kind of civilizational level. But I think now when we talk about words like metacrisis or polycrisis or, or, collapse or, you know, all these terms, they relate to this idea that the externalities that we've all created are now amplifying to such an extent that they can't be managed. And so the response to that, I think, has to be a revisiting of some of these fundamentals of how we think about the world, primary primarily of which is this idea of reductionist problem solving. And so, yes, I think what you're describing in a in a human is actually a a manifestation of some of the major problems that we're trying to, or challenges that we're trying to explore together.
And and this is sort of why something like a Regen Melbourne is needed. Right? Because that's difficult for our existing institutions and systems
Yeah. To do. And I think that's where, you know, one of the early responses to our work and what we're trying to do in those early days, someone said to me, it feels like what you're doing is creating, a space where we have permission to talk about what we actually wanna be doing in the world to fulfill our greatest ambitions as organizations. And so I think to some extent, what we've done is created sort of the conditions in a relatively artificial way. Like, let's get together and talk about how we make a river swimmable, which sounds sounded absurd three years ago. It sounded like an absolute pipe dream. And yet by creating the conditions to ask bigger questions and and to sometimes create the very practical conditions, so what funding might be required, what access to networks might be required, what type of convening do we need. By creating those conditions over time, you move the needle from impossible to plausible and then perhaps to inevitable where, you know, last year, the city of Melbourne came out in active support of a swimmer war. And three years ago, that was completely would have been completely unheard of. And I think that is an example of creating permission spaces that over time allow legacy institutions to move to where they need to be in response to the times that we're in. And that's a that's a sort of both a deeply deliberate process, and I think we have lots of ways of organizing that, you know, deeply considered and strategic. But it is ultimately also creating the conditions for a type of emergence that we have which is very foreign to the way of thinking about change. And we are actively considering how we shift the conditions so that the place can express itself in a way that's in alignment with the vision that we have.
Mhmm. So that the place can express itself and the people of the place. Right? This is coming back to the concept of democracy, and this is essentially and the question of how to save democracy. Coming back to the concept of democracy, you are saying this this is a democratic institution in a sense.
Yeah. I think what we're saying and and and and I love this framing of putting democracy at the center because it encourages a conversation around what is democracy. I think there is a a when I say, you know, we're trying to create the conditions for the place to express itself, I think it's saying place in the most holistic sense. So people are place, place are people. But in the same way, we have to listen to the beyond human voices of a place. And and we try and do that in many ways. Structurally, we have nature on our board, which provides a governance mechanism where we can go beyond human voices. As Charity was talking about, the Birrarung expressing itself as a living entity in what we do, but also the way it's formally governed in this state. You know, it's declared as a living entity. So we try and do it structurally, but then we also do it culturally in the way that we talk about our work, not just being about people, but also being at that place. So your question around what does that mean for democracy, I think speaks to, you know, who's democracy. And there is a need, I think, in this conversation to also scaffold it around the current state of what is democracy, the long term vision for what it could be, but most importantly, what are the stepping stones from here to there. And so I think maybe the way that we're thinking about that, and this is where we go from the kind of vision for democracy and the role that we play as a we talk about it as transitionary infrastructure. You know, if our systems are doing everything they need to do, if they were fit for purpose, then we wouldn't exist. But they're not for lots of reasons that we could spend three hours diagnosing, but they're patently not serving their purpose in the way that they need to. Therefore, we need transitionary institutions like Regen Melbourne until our systems become fit for context. And that might be ten years. It might be thirty years. It might be fifty years if we take a macroeconomic view. And then we biodegrade, then we don't have to exist anymore as an organization. And maybe one more thing I'd say, which is perhaps a little bit more challenging, is that I think by taking a long term view of how democracy evolves and how our work evolves, we also have to acknowledge that there are stepping stones between our current state and the future vision that we have for Regenerative Melbourne. And those stepping stones include conversations around security. You know, what how are we managing risk and security? How are we thinking about adaptation? How are we thinking about resilience in the face of volatility? As well as what the ultimate vision for regeneration might look like. And I think too often I see movements for change take a very significant leap of faith from where we are today to the idea of regeneration or the the total expression of a vision, and don't also take responsibility for some of those other domains. And my great fear is that we then leave vacant these domains for other forces who can capitalize on a lack of security or a lack of resilience or a lack of adaptability. And I think all of us who are working towards the sort of vision that we are at Region Melbourne need to be actively in a conversation around what does a secure place look like, what does a resilient place look like, as well as what does a regenerative place look like.
Lovely. I'm gonna come to you, Charity, because you said something wonderful when we were speaking earlier. You said and the end you talked about the end game. Yep. Tell me about the end game.
I think the endgame sounds like a Marvel movie. In the con I guess the work that we're doing, like the Earth Shore, like the Sunwolf Biarang, for me is this is so ability is a very powerful lever, that opens up a whole array of opportunities to bring a lot of people on the journey to achieve this collective vision. But one of the central, opportunities is to bring people back to nature. Right? Is to bring people back to being conscious of place, that they are in coexistence with with human and nonhuman. You know, the beautiful platypus, you know, like, our health is the platypus's health. The platypus's health is our health. Like so there's a really strong interconnection between these two. But, ultimately, it's about care. Right? It's about care and reciprocity. If we are caring for the river, the river is caring for us. If we are not being extractive, if we're actually saying if the river is benefiting, like like, ecologically thriving, like, culturally, we're recognizing, like, indigenous stories, we're we're we're respecting and getting to know those valuable cultural locations along the river and honoring that. Right? Because as part of our story as well, knowing that from a social community perspective, society, community is thriving because now they can come together. They there's places to commune. There's places to talk, to have these conversations Kai was talking about. There's joy. We are our feet are there dangling over a little big stone, a big stone, a living stone, a stone in the cool refreshing waters. We're hearing the sounds of children laughing and giggling and splashing. We are bringing joy back to places where joy has not been around for a very long time, or we've been unconscious of it. I think then we can start seeing this thriving Greater Melbourne when we are caring for the river, so caring for ourself and place, and we are in a very reciprocal relationship with place, with people and non humans. That's the end game.
I love it. That is not the average conversation that people will have with two civil engineers. Karloff Grinn, Charity, mosey nyah, money. Thank you very much.
This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know we've got serious work to do to save it.
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