Learning How Neighbourhoods Regenerate...Together

The Regenerative Neighbourhood Compass is a civic learning system that helps communities, policymakers and researchers turn complex plans into real movement.

 

It blends a practical Playbook, a suite of AI tools, and a Learning Network that turns insight into flow, trust, and visible progress.

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Why We Built It

Neighbourhoods are living systems full of relationships and energy, but we keep planning them like machines.

Policies, strategies and poetic vision statements describe intent but rarely explain how change actually happens or where to start.

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The result?

• Projects that stall after good beginnings.

• Communities that lose confidence or feel left out.

• Institutions working hard, but in isolation.

 

The Compass responds to that reality by providing a way to see and shape change as it unfolds, creating coherence, momentum and trust through shared learning.

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What the Compass Does

The Compass combines three interlocking elements to help people understand, act, and learn together.

 

1. The Field Manual – The Compass Playbook

A practical guide for understanding how regeneration works in real systems. It introduces the Regenerative Neighbourhood Principles (RNPs) and shows how vitality, synchronicity and trust combine to create the conditions for renewal.

 

2. The AI Tools – Turning Insight into Action

Three custom GPTs bring the Playbook to life:

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• Community Compass – helps local groups interpret stories, data and priorities together.

• Strategy Compass – helps councils and policymakers align their plans around real system behaviour.

• Research Compass – gives academics and students a structured way to study regeneration in context.

 

These AI tools don’t replace human judgment, but they do help to amplify it and accelerate learning.

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3. The Learning Network – A Collective Experiment

Each Compass user contributes to a wider civic experiment. Together, the network builds evidence, refines the tools and helps communities learn how regenerative change actually happens in a way that puts the people most affected by problems, closest to the solutions.

 

The Civic Algorithms – The Engine Beneath the System

At its core, the Compass is powered by three Civic Algorithms: simple responses to human inputs that act like an operating system for renewal:

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1. Reflexivity — systems learn when they can see themselves.

2. Convexity — small actions amplify when networks are connected.

3. Recursion — feedback loops sustain adaptation and trust.

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These algorithms form a regenerative protocol — the transformation engine that connects shared reality with shared actions and shared learning into one continuous flow.

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From Plans to Momentum

The Compass doesn’t replace your strategy, should you have one, but it can bring it to life...

...It can take your existing plans, exiting reports, existing data sets and translates them into a grounded roadmap with clear steps that people can rally behind.

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• Finds where energy already exists and channels it into movement.

• Identifies quick wins that prove change is possible.

• Builds trust and confidence through early visible progress.

• Aligns partners around a shared sense of direction and flow.

 

The result is a living, learning strategy and not another plan that sits on a shelf or slows down through inertia.

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What Makes the Compass Different

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The Challenge                                                             The Compass Response

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- Frameworks are static and siloed                            - A living, adaptive learning system that grows through use

- Data feels abstract and detached                            - Interprets both data and story through shared meaning

- Change is slow and fragmented                              - Builds coherence and energy fast through collective action

- Trust is hard to measure                                           - Makes legitimacy visible and actionable

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