The current Victorian Government Urban Planning Melbourne 2030 Plan supports a compact city model. The challenge facing local governments is the pressure on development of higher density housing near designated activity centres. Since the policy launch we have used the official VicMap cadastre data for the years 2001 and 2006 in conjunction with dwelling data from the ABS Census data in 2001 and 2006 for our analysis.

Within the Melbourne urban growth boundary the spatial variability and levels of densification was done using dwelling density mapping at a 1x1kilometere grid level. Further buffer analysis was done to evaluate differences between different distances from Melbourne CBD and from Activity Centres based on cadastre data and ABS dwelling datasets.

The ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) results indicate that urban densities across buffer zones around Melbourne CBD are statistically different. The densification proposed in the plan to encourage more multi-level/unit developments has been measured using a spatial autocorrelation measure. The results for this part reveal a decline in the Moran’s I computed for 2001 and 2006. This suggests that densification is just not restricted to the target areas (i.e. activity centres) as the evidence of higher density housing can be seen widely across the metropolis. Activity Centres are ranked from Highest to Lowest from dwelling counts and dwelling density over the time period 2001 and 2006 using cadastre and Census data. The ranking shows an interesting spatial pattern across Melbourne which highlights the need for a rethink of the current urban compactness policy.