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Remote urban sensing of urban sprawl in Melbourne

Remote sensing of the urban sprawl’s pace of the Greater Melbourne

BLog link
Urban sensing project in Python
tools: Jupyter Notebook, R, Python, Pandas + Wikipedia + Pysal + Geopandas + Numpy + Folium + BeautifulSoup + OSMNX + Matplotlib + Plotly + Networkx + Scikit-learn, QGIS, Grasshopper, Urbano.

What I learned:

  • Data mining and aggregaion from Australian national, state and local resources
  • Modelling of dynamic maps in QGIS and Grasshopper
  • Data manipulation, cleaning and preparation for analysis
  • ETL establishment
  • Data visualization
  • Map generation and processing with Python, R, QGIS
  • Prediction of urban sprawl, lack of social infrastructure

Statement and questions

Australian cities including Melbourne are car dependent and this means that housing for a growing population is accommodated largely through a suburban growth model that contributes towards urban sprawl. New suburbs on the fringe of the Victoria’s capital are expensive to build and are heavily subsidized. Average new suburb costs 3 times more than a densified urban neighborhood with the same amount of new residents. While new land-owner pays only for a plot and expansion of utilities, authorities cover expenses for highways, public transport, critical and social infrastructure, environment conservation.

According to Sergio Famiano, author of New Australian Dream: rethinking our homes and cities to solve the housing crisis, population growth and car dependency are the primary drivers of unbridled urban expansion but political will and innovation could still minimize the scale and impact of sprawl in the future.

If larger urban populations can be accommodated in existing urban areas through infill development, this will limit the establishment of new suburbs and sprawl while at the same time accommodating a greater population.

But there needs to be a policy shift by all levels of government in favour of urban infill development over new suburban development and this needs to be supported by the necessary infrastructure to encourage infill development, such as public transport.There is a strong nexus between mid-tier public transport such as light rail and trackless tram technology and the development of housing diversity such as apartment development.Summing up the main question is: how can we track the pace of urban sprawl of the Melbourne metropolitan area in order to understand what localities could become the first target for infill densified development and improvement of public transportation?

  1. Although accurate definition of urban sprawl is debated, a general consensus is that urban sprawl is characterized by unplanned and uneven pattern of growth, driven by multitude of processes and leading to inefficient resource utilization.
  2. Considering the last studies of Melbourne’s urban sprawl revealing the out-breaking population dynamic growth in the fringe zones we are going to prove that the infill densified development should be addressed the first of all to the inner ring of metropolitan zones in order to balance back the urbanization loads.
  3. Additionally, comprehending the dynamics of public transport development, we are going to highlight that the inner ring zones need more public transport connectivity (trackless tram) as a supplement of the strategy of the infill densified development.

Piece of code

Data visualization and analysis

Dynamic map of urban sprawl pace in the Greater Melbourne

ETL scheme

Dynamic map of population density by SA2 of Melbourne metropolitan area in 2001-2022

SA2 - is a statistic area level 2 in Australia that combines a neighborhood or city district level

Dynamic map of Mean price of homes by LGA of Melbourne metropolitan area in 1992-2022

LGA - is a statistical term defining the Local Government Area, equal to a territory of municipality or a shire in Australia.

Dynamic map of Mean price of plots by LGA of Melbourne metropolitan area in 1992-2022

Dynamic map of Mean price of apartments by LGA of Melbourne metropolitan area in 1992-2022

Dynamic map of Amount of sold homes by LGA of Melbourne metropolitan area in 1992-2022

Dynamic map of Amount of sold residential plots by LGA of Melbourne metropolitan area in 1992-2022

Dynamic map of Population by SA2 of Melbourne metropolitan area in 2001-2022

Dynamic map of Amount of sold apartments by LGA of Melbourne metropolitan area in 1992-2022

Map of urban growth reveals anomal 100X growth last 20 years in the cheapest rural areas of the metro area

Map of planned urban growth within the metro area envisions addition of 65% to previously urbanized terrains

Map of areas for urban densification to reconsile and mitigate the urban sprawl.

Key takeaways

  • Urban Density correlates with the flats (apartments) market while homes construction booms on the remote perimeter of the metropolitan area.
  • The most actively population grows in North,West and South East remote localities fueled by low-rise development.
  • 400-m catchment area of public transport has gaps in the localities with fast growing population.
  • Infill development would be reasonable within the inner perimeter of metropolitan area on the edge of well developed area of public transport.

References