There are many things that contribute to making cities great places in which to live, work and learn. The quality of the physical environment, access to green spaces, safety in the streets, cultural amenities, ease of mobility, responsible management, and social and economic stability are but a few factors cited as determinants of great places.

Perhaps the single most important consideration stems from the fact that great cities don’t just happen. They are the consequence of deliberate and decisive actions at critical times. Increasingly, planners and designers are recognising that evidence-based practice is crucial in creating places benefit residents, but also draw more people who want to live, work, and visit there.

This article explores three recent projects that used big data to support better urban planning and – ultimately – improved community health and wellbeing.

Activating schools and golf courses transforms access to open space

Open space has played a crucial role in cities during the COVID19 pandemic. Park visitation rates increased as most gyms and other recreation facilities were closed. During the height of the COVID19 pandemic lockdown in Melbourne the community were restricted to locations within five kilometres of their homes, and open spaces became critical community assets.

To understand how easily Melbourne residents could access open space Mosaic Insights carried out a research project to identify areas where people have to walk more than 400 m to reach any open space. The study used advanced spatial analytic approaches, and found that access to open space is not equitable across Melbourne.

There are pockets of residential areas throughout Melbourne where more than one third of the population is outside easy walking distance of open spaces. Suburbs with particularly poor access to open space are found throughout Moonee Valley and Moreland City Council areas. There are also several councils in the east and southeast with poor access to open space, including Glen Eira, Boroondara, Monash and Bayside.

We analysed walkable networks and spatial distribution of open space across Melbourne and analysed these data sets in combination with detailed population density data to estimate – at a fine scale – the actual number of people not serviced by open space.

The results of our analysis are presented in the map below. An interactive web map that allows you to scroll and zoom around the map to see what access to open space is like in different areas of the city is available on the Mosaic Insights website https://mosaicinsights.com.au/allowing-public-access-to-schools-and-golf-courses-could-deliver-30-million-of-health-and-community-benefits/

With the trend towards working from home likely to continue after the pandemic has subsided, making access to open space close to home even more important.
Creating new open spaces can be difficult and expensive and can take significant time to deliver. For example, the City of Melbourne are creating a new 2.5 ha park at Dodds Street at a cost of $35 million.

However, a significant opportunity to increase access to open space would be to make school grounds accessible to the public on weeknights and weekends. A few schools are already collaborating with their local councils to do just this. Melbourne’s many golf courses provide an additional opportunity.

We looked at the distribution of schools and golf courses across the city, and what that would mean for access if they were opened to the public. We found that opening up schools across Melbourne would give an additional 185,000 people easy access to open spaces and opening up golf courses would provide access to an additional 29,000 people.

We used the findings from our spatial analysis and published economic research to estimate the economic benefits of opening up schools and golf courses to the public through improved health and community outcomes. We found that opening up schools would be worth between $21 and $26 million per year. Opening golf courses to the public as open space will bring benefits between $3 and $4 million per year.

There are clearly barriers to opening schools and golf courses to a wider group of people (for example, concerns around security, vandalism, and loss of access to existing users). But these are not insurmountable, as has been shown by the community starting to use Northcote Golf Course in Melbourne as parkland and the Shared Schoolyard Project in San Francisco.

Regardless of what happens as the pandemic restrictions ease, open spaces will remain critical to Melbourne’s liveability. Our analysis of open spaces, accessibility to such spaces, and insights into potential solutions provides new insights into the provision of open space across the city. This level of understanding will be important as State and Local Governments implement Plan Melbourne, 20-minute neighbourhoods, open space strategies and public health and wellbeing plans.