Combining spatial data and technology with community engagement in an innovative approach to envision different planning scenarios about the future of Victorian regional towns.
The Challenge
Strategic and urban planning is a very complex, and currently largely manual process that could greatly benefit from the use of spatial data and technology. The aim of this work was to combine data and technology to envision different planning scenarios about the future of housing development in regional towns, to help people engage with a range of possible futures. An adjacent University of Melbourne research and community engagement project focussed on the bottom up ‘What we build’ while providing criteria to meet the objectives of achieving sustainable, healthy, and equitable housing in regional Victorian towns, while this PoC project provided the top down ‘Where we build’ by leveraging technology to help improve the tools and data available to planners.
Partners
This Proof of Concept (PoC) project, led by FrontierSI, was a collaboration with UNSW City Futures Research Centre for the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning.
The Solution
The purpose of this project was to explore the usefulness of mapped planning scenarios, created using spatial planning support systems and visualised in a Digital Twin environment, in informing and supporting stakeholder engagement around government housing policy. This project was exploratory in nature, and not intended to create any information that will inform current planning controls or policy. It was also not intended to be used for any purpose other than exploring this research question.
This PoC project used the What If? Planning Support System (PSS) available as part of the Australian Housing Data Analytics Platform (AHDAP). What If? is a transparent, flexible and user-friendly PSS, for generating multiple urban development scenarios to efficiently assist decision making on land use policies and urban planning schemes. What If? uses spatial data to support some of the significant and challenging work of the land use and urban planning process including:
- Analysing the suitability of land for transformation to different types of land use.
- Projecting the future population trend and the corresponding land use demand.
- Allocating the projected demands to the most suitable locations (parcels) under various conditions.
The What If? scenarios aimed to maximise the use of existing infrastructure and services, mitigate climate risks, and gently densify the traditional regional housing typology of large block, low density housing to diversify available housing stock in line with community diversity. The scenario outputs were then visualised and contextualised with other data and 3D housing typology models in Digital Twin Victoria to provide new insights for the community and add value for planners.
Impact
The project collaboratively established a repeatable method using spatial data and analysis tools that enabled potential future scenarios to be generated and demonstrated the huge potential for PSS in housing development scenario generation. A set of recommendations were made for how Victoria can streamline the workflow into an easy-to-use tool that can be implemented by planners.
The project:
- Explored potential future planning scenarios with the community to support future housing needs.
- Demonstrated the capability of the Digital Twin Victoria platform to share and contextualise data.
- Proved the concept of using the AHDAP What If? tool in regional Victoria with real data.
Contact
To learn more, contact FrontierSI at contact@frontiersi.com.au or connect with Project Manager, Jessica Keysers, at jkeysers@frontiersi.com.au.