Design for Circular Cities MSc @ Deakin University

Design for Circular Cities with the City of Greater Geelong

At Deakin University, the MSc Programme and Postgraduate Course Suite on Design for Circular Cities has been experimenting with new ways to connect teaching, research, and practice. Directed by A/Prof - Senior Lecturer Burak Pak, the course suite brings together students, researchers, and city stakeholders to reimagine Geelong’s future through the lens of Doughnut Economics.

The starting point for the SRD 744 Interactions and Enablers of Circular Cities Unit is the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) framework, with its four-lens City Portrait. Instead of treating sustainability as a checklist, students work with local–social, local–ecological, global–ecological, and global–social dimensions side by side. This shift helps them see how a single intervention in the built environment, whether a new housing typology, a reuse strategy for vacant spaces, or a food system innovation, ripples across multiple boundaries. DEAL’s indicators give them a way to measure these ripples: to ask whether a proposal contributes to social foundations, remains within ecological ceilings, and strengthens Geelong’s position in a globally connected world. This unit is chaired by Burak Pak and taught with Beau Beza and Ilana Russell (design sprints).

These tools move out of the classroom and into practice through design sprints with the placemaking leaders from the City of Greater Geelong. In these intensive workshops, city officers, community organisations, and students come together around local challenges such as the activation of vacant spaces or the design of resilient neighbourhood systems. The DEAL City Portrait is used as a collective map: participants diagnose “value leaks” where ecological or social resources are being lost, and then prototype circular strategies to close those loops.

In three design sprints connected to the City of Greater Geelong initiative, DEAL methods framed adaptive reuse of underutilised buildings not only as an architectural problem but as a civic opportunity. 

By situating vacant space activation in the local–social lens, participants linked it to community agency and affordability. By drawing on ecological indicators, they were able to test whether design concepts avoided locking the city into new material and energy burdens.

Through this approach, the unit demonstrates how academic learning can directly intersect with city-making. DEAL indicators are no longer abstract—they become practical tools for evaluation, dialogue, and innovation. And for Geelong, the collaboration offers a glimpse of what it means to plan within planetary boundaries while expanding the social foundations of urban life.

Walking the City with Ecological Eyes 

During the Circular Cities design sprint on Little Malop Street – Market Square, one of the most powerful moments began with a walk. Guided by Ilana Russell students were invited to slow down and read the city not through abstract plans but through their own senses.

Ilana Russels led this walk as an exploration of the rhythms, textures, and microclimates that shape daily life but often go unnoticed. Equipped with DEAL Local–Ecological indicators, the students tuned into air quality, temperature shifts, soil hardness, insect sounds, and the feel of surfaces underfoot. What might normally be overlooked—a stagnant pocket of hot air, a dry planting bed, the silence where birdsong should be—became evidence of ecological value loss.

By encouraging participants to “walk as sensors,” Ilana shifted the sprint into a mode where circularity was no longer just a design principle but a felt reality. The walking exercise laid the foundation for mapping ecological leakages and imagining interventions that restore not only systems but also the lived experience of space. It underscored how walking, when guided with ecological intent, can transform the city into a site of learning, diagnosis, and regenerative imagination

Thanks to Ilana Russell for leading the walk, her guidance and Beau Beza's lead with contributions from City of Greater Geelong Helen O'Beirne Ragen Haythorpe MBA