Investing in Place: From Service System to Ecosystem
December 2025
Penny Hagen (The Auckland Co-Design Lab) & Ingrid Burkett (The Good Shift)
This article is the first of a three-part series exploring what it means to genuinely work in and with place when addressing complex social challenges.
This series will examine how we might move beyond place as simply a geographic location for service delivery, towards understanding it as a dynamic living system – complete with its own histories, relationships, knowledge, and capacity for collective action.
In this article we detail what we mean by place, and introduce four patterns of working. We dive deeper into an emerging approach, Place as Ecosystem, highlighting key principles, potentials, and the shifts we will need to be deliberate about in our policy and system capabilities.
While this is still in-progress thinking, early signs are promising, suggesting an ecosystem view of place could offer valuable complements and alternatives to other more programme-based, service-system, or collective impact approaches.
Parts Two and Three will be available in 2026.
