A digital, dynamic city plan for Adelaide’s future

Visualising data to help decision making

Our team reviewed over 400 datasets, collating all data into an overall accessibility scoring of the city. The accessibly score provides insights into the accessibility of open spaces, public transport, community amenities and local services within a 15-minute walking catchment. 

These insights provide an overall liveability score for the city with the ability to understand the performance of different precincts. As population growth follows amenities, this model provides a wealth of information for the City of Adelaide to apply and make informed decisions about infrastructure spending to reach aspirational growth targets in a sustainable way.

The Overall Accessibility indicator provides an assessment of the overall accessibility of different areas within the City of Adelaide. It considers multiple factors that contribute to the liveability and convenience of each location.

Visualising this data is an important aid to illustrate the diverse urban systems which underpin the city and drive a collective vision for its future. This process involved collaborating with government, industry and community through a series of workshops, one on one interviews, and exhibition forums.

The City Plan is a dynamic tool which reflects the continuous evolution of the city. It enables the City of Adelaide to measure city performance by population growth, climate resilience and equitable access. This analysis provides the opportunity to test social infrastructure investment and illustrate the projected positive effects. Through combining this analysis with the growth forecast models, the City Plan provides value in highlighted opportunities to deliver improved infrastructure for the City of Adelaide.

This tool offers greater certainty and transparency for the broader industry, allowing development to align with community needs, and increased community and industry engagement.

Shaping the growth of the city

Forecasting provides information to address a core need for this city: how can Adelaide achieve its growth aspirations and enhance its liveability offering while preserving its unique character and identity?

We developed a range of low and high growth forecasts. These forecasts considered economic feasibility and environmental parameters to gauge the development potential and likelihood for the redevelopment of individual sites. 

Our team identified sites based on their likelihood to be developed by cross referencing with the accessibility model. This process enables the City of Adelaide to make informed decisions about its future investment pipeline and the strategic planning controls available to it to best support the market in growing the city’s population. 

The baseline growth scenario modelled the current development pipeline and forecast this growth trajectory to 2036, shedding light on existing challenges and prevailing trends. Additionally, the high growth forecasts brought together the accessibility scoring and development potential analysis to model areas of the city apt for growth. 

Each forecast was tested to assess potential climate change impacts on the city. The results and insights of this analysis underscore the need to align growth with sufficient social infrastructure to promote resilience, liveability and wellbeing outcomes. 

This scenario modelling provides the basis for informed decisions to guide future investment, strategic planning policy and controls.

A city plan for Adelaide

The City Plan interactive tool can be explored here.