This research develops a quantitative geographic methodology to assess and inform the forward planning of social and community infrastructure in rapidly growing areas of Australian cities. It focusses on greenfield areas of Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth greater metropolitan regions (GMR) to demonstrate data sources and methods that are able to be replicated in other contexts.

Social and community infrastructure is critical to the effective functioning of rapidly growing urban regions, but lag times between population growth and new infrastructure delivery are pervasive in new greenfield development areas.

This project tests and demonstrates the utility of new datasets— particularly high-capacity data such as Geoscape, median speed on individual road links, and Open Street Map — which are updated with greater frequency than traditional data sources, such as the census.