Informing future Australian settlement planning through a national-scale suitability analysis

ABSTRACT

Australia’s population is projected to triple by 2101, yet the nation lacks coordinated planning based on systematic regional analysis. This paper documents a novel national-scale suitability analysis of Australia which identifies the most appropriate regions for future urban development. The central research question is ‘Where should Australian federal and state governments encourage urban development to maximise climatic liveability, protect natural and cultural heritage, capitalise on previous infrastructure investments, and maximise economic productivity?’ The results indicate that the south-east and south-west of the country, and Tasmania, are preferred. The federal government is yet to prepare a national settlement strategy and contemplates large scale urban development in areas to which it is not suited. Regional planning decisions not based on comprehensive, evidence-based analysis are likely to incur significant social, economic and environmental costs.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian cities
• urban development
• population growth
• suitability analysis
• multi-criteria evaluation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The timeframes of this metropolitan planning varies from state to state. The most long range planning is for Sydney to 2056 (Greater Sydney Commission 2018) and the shortest for Hobart to 2029 (City of Hobart 2019).

2 In addition to ‘determinations’ there are currently 128 outstanding native title ‘claims.’ Many if not most will lead to ‘determinations’ so our analysis somewhat underestimates aboriginal claims to native title.

3 Nonetheless, the cities themselves are excluded from our suitability analysis.

4 The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Macbeth approaches are slightly different. AHP uses 9-point fundamental scales (ratio scale), whereas MACBETH uses seven semantic scales (ordinal scale). In addition, for calculating weight and scale, MACBETH uses linear programing method, whereas AHP uses the eigenvalue method (Rietkötter 2014).

5 Northern Australia is the region north of the Tropic of Capricorn (23.5’ S latitude).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DP190101093].