About Place Ecologies
Our Story
The Tourism CoLab began in 2018 on an unfashionable premise. The most powerful lever for changing tourism was not policy, technology or marketing. It was the willingness to sit with the mess, stay with the complexity, and build a better relationship with the living world. The planet is keeping the score.
For eight years, the CoLab brought practitioners, researchers and community members together to ask harder questions about what tourism is for. It was never anti-tourism but it asked honest questions about the extraction of place based assets and who makes decisions. It was uncomfortable but necessary work.
That work produced the Ten Pillars of Regenerative Tourism, a walking workshop exploring social enterprise and tourism in Vietnam, the Islander Way Regen Lab on Flinders Island, and a growing body of writing on systems change, belonging, stewardship and redesigning places for living futures.
Over time, the questions stopped being about tourism. They became questions about place itself. Who shapes it? Who governs it? Who profits, and who bears the cost when it fails? Tourism turned out to be a window onto something larger: the relationships between mobile people and rooted communities, between our economies and the waters, soils and seasons they depend on.
Living on an island made those relationships hard to ignore. On Flinders Island, you can see where the water comes from, what the land can carry, and how quickly a decision made elsewhere lands on the shoreline.
Place Ecologies picks up where the Tourism CoLab left off.
Image: Exploring the relationship between chaos and order in the forest | "Big Bamboo: Geometry of Innocence" by Doug and Mike Starn | Ordrupgaard Art Museum | Copenhagen Denmark | 2017
Image: The Tourism CoLab Social Enterprise Walking Workshop, Vietnam | 2020
.jpeg)
Image: FLOAT 3909 Arts-led creative environmental stewardship is a pathway for regenerating the local economies, communities and livlihoods | Lakes Entrance Victoria
Mission and Values
Mission
Working on the questions is the mission: What would it mean to belong to and care for a place, not just use it? Place Ecologies works alongside communities and listing to place to find out, and to act on the answers together.
Values
Living systems thinking:
Places are not static. They are complex, adaptive, more-than-human systems. Our work begins by recognising this work is messy, uncomfortable and often ambiguous and untamed.
Regenerative practice:
We are not interested in making the current system slightly less damaging by adopting criteria that lower the standard of what we can and should do. We're interested in what genuine systems change, innovation and 'different' looks like.
Thirty years of academic research backs Place Ecologies 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 knowledges:
The more-than-human world - the soils, waterways, species, seasons - is not background or a resource to be exploited. It is the stakeholder we must listen for health and well-being.
Ecological accountability:
How we work
Every place has its own shape: its landforms and waterways, its histories, and the many communities who hold it. My work follows that shape:
Listening to place. We start by mapping what anchors a place: its ecosystems, gathering spots, knowledge holders and the stories people return to. Numbers matter, but so does what people feel and remember. The warm data that lives between the cracks in silences and deep conversations matters.
Agreeing how we'll work together. Before projects come shared commitments: what we value, what we're each responsible for, and how decisions get made. When people own the story, they stay with it.
Acting together. From those foundations, communities co-design initiatives that fit their place. These might be small and practical, or long and strategic, and they are always grounded in what the place can sustain.
Keeping it alive. Momentum often fades when funding ends. We build for what comes after: local stewardship, involving young people, and ways of learning that let the work keep evolving.
We look for signs of vitality and growing a place's capacity to adapt and be resilient in a rapidly changing world.