Our Regenerative Placemaking Model: The Place Pulse

In our last Regen Series post, we discussed the importance of creating a new regenerative narrative for our places. This week, we explore how we can make Regenerative Placemaking understandable, usable, and easily connect people to their places. Village Well has been working on the ground delivering successful places for years. So we asked, how do we integrate the complex ideas of regeneration into our processes to enhance the resilience of our places and communities?

Here’s our hook: we’ve developed a tool called the Place Pulse™ to measure place performance and guide place development. The Place Pulse™ assesses 90+ indicators that help us understand how your place is performing.

Our goal is to inspire people to embark on a regenerative journey and to ask whether each intervention can nourish life, unlock hidden potential, and strengthen the larger system it belongs to. This holistic approach is structured around five interconnected pillars because places are complex and adaptive systems. They work together as we know that in places, addressing one aspect in isolation affects other parts of the system.

Our five-pillar approach are set as aspirational goals, and are made up of outcomes we know need to be delivered in successful places. They are aims to deliver:

1. A Healthier Planet

2. Flourishing Cultures and Communities 

3. Joyful People

4. Loveable Places

5. Thriving Local Economies

The Place Pulse™ can be applied to current sites or future place plans and projects, regardless of scale, and can serve as a monitoring and evaluation tool. It is designed for councils, urban designers, architects, developers, and communities. 

Can one approach work for vastly different places? For instance, is the Model the same for a hospital as for a bushfire-prone rural town? Our answer is yes, but the emphasis and priorities will differ based on place context. This flexibility is one of the strengths of the Place Pulse™ — it allows for tailored measurements and focusses on a place-led approach to reveal unique strengths.

How did we create this tool? We leveraged our 35 years of experience working with over 2,500 communities to identify the patterns that make places great — not just for a select few, but for everyone. We drew inspiration from Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, consulted with leading academics and practitioners, and developed a user-friendly tool that offers value for both communities and built environment professionals. 

We aim for something that goes beyond mere sustainability. While sustainability is essential, it is not enough on its own. If current systems are extractive, inequitable, or ecologically harmful, merely sustaining them falls short. The challenge lies in transitioning from harm reduction to capacity restoration, from simply making things less bad to actively generating social, cultural, and ecological value.

In the coming weeks, we will break down each of the five pillars, explaining their significance and how they contribute to creating more regenerative places.

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