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Study offers new insight to Perth's future
August 2001
As part of the Future Perth Project, researchers at the Western Australian Ministry for Planning have been investigating just how much land will be available over the next 20 years to accommodate the city's growth. The research has taken the application of computerised planning systems to the cutting edge and created new management tools to shape Perth's future.
In fact the urban capacity study has revealed in theory Perth has enough serviced land zoned Residential to accommodate up to 100,000 more houses.
It has shown that by consolidating existing brownfield sites (land occupied by existing dwellings) it would be possible reduce the roll out of greenfield sites on the urban fringe. Currently those greenfield sites are earmarked for a short to medium term capacity of 300,000 more dwellings.
According to John Chortis, who manages the Ministry's Industry and Infrastructure Coordination Branch, the purpose of the study was to identify how many new dwellings could be built within the 7,050 square kilometre Perth Metropolitan Region.
"This is a complex GIS process and has been using the full capacity of the Branch's computing systems," he said.
"It also needed a good measure of patience and concentration to sift through every building lot, contained within dozens of GIS areas of coverage.
"Each one contains up to 250,000 records and they needed to be analysed together with the hundreds of GIS overlays located under both the Metropolitan Region Scheme and within the 30 local government town planning schemes."
According to Alex Saunders, a specialist in GIS analysis at the Ministry, the procedure tested the computer hardware to its limits with the computer taking many hours to complete individual tasks.
Andrew Montgomery, who is managing the project said the first phase of the study was to examine the housing capacity of the Perth Metropolitan Region from the view point of existing policies, strategies, programs and scheme provisions.
"Preliminary findings show that 56% (almost 400,000ha) of the metropolitan region comprises parks, State forests, recreation, and rural-related purposes," said Dr Montgomery.
"There is 24% (170,000ha) of rivers, lakes and marine reserves. The balance of 20% (about 135,000ha) is set aside for urban purposes, industrial, water-related, Commonwealth and other related purposes.
"Land zoned for residential use is being closely examined. There are large variations in the proportional location of residential zoned land and housing within the region.
"For example, the Inner-Middle sector contains 27% of all residential zoned land but 54% of the existing housing.
"The North-Western sector contains 26% of the residential land and only 19% of the existing housing.
"In the South-Eastern sector, it is 17% land and 11% houses, while in the Eastern and South-Western sectors each have 15% of the land but only 8% of the houses."
Preliminary findings from the study have identified a substantial surplus dwelling potential within land already developed with houses (brownfields - approximately 100,000 potential new dwellings) and on vacant, residential land (greenfields - 300,000 potential new dwellings).
The level of residential development within the region also offers some surprises - for example only an average 51% of metropolitan land has been developed.
"Residential housing densities are also surprisingly low with the net residential density of existing metropolitan housing averaging at 12 dwellings per hectare, although some Inner-Middle sector suburbs exceed 20 dwelling per net hectare," said Dr Montgomery.
"However, gross densities are particularly low - averaging at six dwellings per gross hectare in the Inner-Middle sector and less than one dwelling per gross hectare for the rest. This is due to the high proportion of land used for non-residential uses compared to residential zoned land.
"Predictably, average areas per dwelling are smaller within the Inner-Middle sector and increase as the distance from the city centre increases.
"We are now working on the second phase of the study with the aim of building computer models of various development scenarios for the city," said Dr Montgomery.
"These include changes in the location, density and the timing of development and will provide valuable guidance in determining future growth management of the city."
