With burgeoning urban populations and the rapid expansion of city boundaries, “liveability” has become a hot topic among Australian urban researchers. Liveable neighbourhoods are those defined as ‘safe, attractive, socially cohesive and inclusive, and environmentally sustainable; with affordable and diverse housing linked by convenient public transport, walking and cycling infrastructure to employment, education, public open space, local shops, health and community services, and leisure and cultural opportunities’.
Based on this definition, our team at RMIT are modelling the components of liveability using open spatial data and GIS software to measure the built environment and the understand the social impact on communities. These results are released to the public as indicators relating to the build environment and liveability.
In its initial phase, our workflow was developed and tested only in Melbourne and was able to utilise a large amount of open data including addresses and a street network from the Victorian government open data portal. However, the expansion of the tool at a national level, introduced the need to identify national data sets such as an Australian road network and national address data. To enable the development of a national liveabilty research tool, data were obtained from spatial data from data wholesalers; Pitney Bowes and PSMA, a commercial spatial data branch of the Australian government. However, licensing agreements associated with the commercial data restrict public dissemination of the outputs and findings, highlighting the importance of identifying open data source alternatives.
After moving to open data sources, our workflow now utilises the OSM road network and OSM point destinations. Australian Census data and digital boundaries including suburb, SA1 and small area Mesh Blocks are freely available through Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and public transport location and frequency data is obtained from http://transitfeeds.com/. In 2016, PSMA also released their Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF) on the open data Australian government portal which enables liveability indicators for every address in Australian capital cities to be calculated. State specific data is sourced through open data government portals and/or web-scraped.
RMIT is using open source tools in their National Liveability model including PostGIS, QGIS, KNIME and Python. We are also currently developing an online Urban Observatory to enable to publication of indicators relating to the built environment. The Urban Observatory is also built using open source software and is intended for use by policy makers, planners and all interested general community members.