Abstract
In 2007 the world’s population became more urban than rural, and, according to the United Nations, this trend is to continue for the foreseeable future. With the increasing trend of people moving to urban localities—predominantly cities—additional pressures on services, infrastructure and housing is affecting the overall quality of life of city dwellers. City planners, policy makers and researchers more generally need access to tools and diverse and distributed data sets to help tackle these challenges.
In this paper we focus on the online analytical AURIN (Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network) workbench, which provides a data driven approach for informing such issues. The workbench provides machine to machine (programmatic) online access to large scale distributed and heterogeneous data resources from the definitive data providers across Australia. This includes a rich repository of data which can be used to understand housing affordability in Australia. For example there is more than 20 years of longitudinal housing data nationwide, with information on each housing sales transaction at the property level. For the first time researchers can now systematically access this ‘big’ housing data resource to run spatial-statistical analysis to understand the driving forces behind a myriad of issues facing cities, including housing affordability which is a significant issue across many of Australia’s cities.
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Acknowledgements
AURIN is a $24 million project developing national networked urban research infrastructure capability in Australia, funded by the Commonwealth Government under the Education Investment Fund and the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. The University of Melbourne is the lead agent for the project. The authors thank the AURIN Office and the Core Technical Team, along with the many contributors to the AURIN project in a number of institutions across Australia, including many government and other agencies providing access to data, through Data Access Agreements and Sub-contracted projects.
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Pettit, C., Tice, A., Randolph, B. (2017). Using an Online Spatial Analytics Workbench for Understanding Housing Affordability in Sydney. In: Thakuriah, P., Tilahun, N., Zellner, M. (eds) Seeing Cities Through Big Data. Springer Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40902-3_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40902-3_14
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