By Stephen Burton | Featuring Nina Sharp, Regen Melbourne
For decades, the design logic of our cities has been governed by a single, dominant rule: “Car is King.”
We have engineered our streets for the rapid movement of vehicles, often at the expense of safety, biodiversity, and community connection. But when you look at a map of Greater Melbourne, you don’t just see a traffic grid. You see 300,000 individual public spaces waiting to be unlocked.
In this episode of The Placemakers, I spoke with Nina Sharp, the Lead Convener of the “300,000 Streets” initiative at Regen Melbourne.
Nina is leading an “Earthshot”—a mission-led project with the ambitious goal of transforming every street in Melbourne into a thriving, regenerative space. We discussed why we need to stop viewing streets as silos and start viewing them as an interconnected ecosystem.
Key Takeaways for Urban Designers:
🎧 Listen to the Episode
We discuss how to use Doughnut Economics to redesign the street and why “being a good neighbor” is a form of climate resilience.
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Prefer to read? Download the full word-for-word transcript of this interview.
Regen Melbourne is pursuing a “regenerative city,” and they are doing it through what they call Earthshots.
“Our Earthshots are a declaration of intent, designed to address complex social and ecological challenges,” Nina explains.
Drawing from the concept of a “moonshot,” an Earthshot acknowledges that no single entity can solve these problems. It requires a collision of stakeholders, research, and innovation. Regen Melbourne is currently running three:
“Streets are super interesting. Lots of our daily life is lived on the street. It’s where we emerge from our private settings into the public sphere,” Nina says.
However, the potential of this public space is compromised because it is dominated by cars.
Nina advocates for using the Doughnut Economics framework to reassess our streets. This means striving for a “safe and just space” for humanity that doesn’t overshoot our planetary boundaries.
When you apply this lens to a street, you realize that major planetary issues—biodiversity loss, air pollution, and water quality—can actually be solved at the street level.
How do we measure if a street is working? Traditionally, traffic engineers look at vehicle throughput or parking availability.
Nina suggests we need “cornerstone indicators.” Working with economist Catherine Trebeck, the initiative looks for participatory measures that tell a deeper story.
“If we see more girls riding bikes in our streets, what does that tell us about street transformation?” Nina asks.
It tells us that families can afford bikes. But more importantly, it tells us that parents deem the street safe enough for their children to be independent. The outcome isn’t just transport; it is healthy, active children and a perception of safety.
You don’t need to dig up the asphalt to start regenerating a street. The “verge” or nature strip offers an immediate opportunity.
“If people are enabled to plant out their street verge, not only are they creating habitat for bees, birds, and insects… they are gardening in their street,” Nina notes.
This acts as a gateway drug for community building. When a resident is out tending to a verge garden, they are in a public-facing environment. They talk to neighbors. They create “public surveillance” which increases safety.
A major barrier to local action is funding. Nina highlights the use of a distributed grant-making tool called Hum.
“It creates a high-trust funding environment where funders fund a community organization… and then enable a voting community to build out ideas,” she says.
Rather than a council deciding where the money goes, the community members themselves vote on how capital is spent on their own street. This builds agency. It ensures that when a tree is planted, the community feels ownership over it—meaning they are more likely to water it and ensure it survives.
“The simplest thing people can do is to be a really good neighbor,” Nina concludes. “In times of disaster and trouble, if we haven’t got community resilience, everything crumbles.”
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