Using an Online Spatial Analytics Workbench for Understanding Changing Housing Markets across Australian Cities

We live in an era of unprecedented global population growth where cities are expected to accommodate a significant proportion of this growth. In the context of Australia we have Sydney and Melbourne each approaching a population of 8 million people and Brisbane and Perth approaching 5 million people by 2050. This projected population will place significant pressures on existing services, infrastructure, housing and the quality of life of city dwellers. Hence, there is an increasing need to plan our cities smarter and such efforts can be supported by data analytics, information retrieval, data mining and visualization techniques.

In this context, this presentation will focus on the online analytical AURIN (Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network) workbench, which provides a data driven approach for informing smarter city planning. The workbench provides machine to machine (programmatic) online access to large scale distributed and heterogeneous data resources from the definitive data provides across Australia. This includes a collection and rich repository of data which can be used to understand the various dimensions of housing including supply, demand and affordability in cities across Australia. For example there is more than 20 years of longitudinal housing data nationwide, with information on each housing sales transaction at the property level. This presentation will cover two case studies. Firstly, a big data approach for understanding housing affordability in the context of Metropolitan Sydney and secondly the use of a What If? Scenario Planning tool for modelling likely patterns of residential growth across Metropolitan Perth.