About Place Ecologies
Our Story
The Tourism CoLab was founded in 2018 on an unfashionable premise: that the most powerful lever for changing tourism was not policy, not technology, and not marketing — it was learning together.
For seven years, the CoLab brought together practitioners, researchers and community members to ask harder questions about what tourism is really for. It's never been anti-tourism, but how can we host and dwell more authentically in place. It's a question that applies to both local community members and visitors.
That work produced the Ten Pillars of Regenerative Tourism, the Islander Way Regen Lab on Flinders Island, research partnerships, and a growing body of critical writing on systems change, regenerative practice, belonging and stewardship, and the redesign of places for a flourishing future.
Over time, those questions outgrew tourism. They became questions about place itself, about who designs it, who governs it, who profits from it, and who bears the cost when it fails. Tourism turned out to be a window into something much larger: the relationship between mobile people and rooted communities; between human systems and the living systems they depend on.
Place Ecologies is what those questions demanded. The name is not metaphor. We mean it literally: places are ecologies, with flows, nodes, thresholds and adaptive capacity. To work with a place well, you have to understand it as a living syste, not a product to be packaged, a destination to be managed, or a resource to be extracted.
The Tourism CoLab domain and content remain live and are actively redirected here, so nothing is lost. We are the same people, doing the same work, with a broader mandate.
Mission and Values
Mission
To regenerate the relationship between humans and the places they inhabit — through research that challenges, practice that transforms, and community that holds.
Values
Living systems thinking:
Places are not static. They are complex, adaptive, more-than-human systems. Our work begins with that recognition.
Regenerative practice:
We are not interested in making the current system slightly less damaging. We are interested in what genuine change, innovation and what 'different' looks like.
Thirty years of academic research backs this work. In the last 5 years its been a journey into weaving different sources of knowledge into practice. We believe in the power of place based knowledge as much as traditional social science.
Integrating different knowledge
The more-than-human world — soils, waterways, species, seasons — is not background. It is the stakeholder we must listen to.
Ecological accountability:
How we work
We do not separate research from practice. The approaches we develop are tested in real places with real communities. The case studies we document feed back and crystallise into the insights we share. The community we convene generates knowledge that neither academic nor consulting work can produce.
Our approach draws on thirty years of place-based practice, academic research, and ongoing engagement with practitioners, communities and place-governance bodies across Australia and internationally.
We are a social enterprise. That means our purpose is the work. Revenue from practice and learning programs funds research and community activity. We are accountable to the places and communities we work with.