How location intelligence can accelerate local council planning

To meet a community’s needs and look ahead to the future, planners require a holistic and evidence-based understanding of how people move and behave within the built environment of their council area.

Without it, it’s challenging to plan in a timely way by identifying, prioritising and justifying investment decisions. Councils can, however, leverage numerous geospatial datasets and tools of analysis to uncover location intelligence and fill in knowledge gaps for open space, parks and recreation planning, placemaking, economic development, traffic and transport and beyond. So, what exactly are the questions that location intelligence can answer?

Who’s actually in your council area?

Demographic data can deliver essential insights into who lives, works or plays in a council area. Data points like population trends, age distribution and socioeconomic status succinctly paint this picture and, when combined with catchment analysis, can be used to identify the demographic makeup of the people living within a given radius to specific destinations.

This kind of analysis can be used for development assessment by helping find candidate sites based on the demographics of the surrounding area and the land use category of the proposed development.

Who’s using the assets you’re managing or planning for?

New datasets like People Movement Data give councils the ability to analyse visitation at a given asset or place (such as an open space asset). Using this kind of mobile phone mobility data makes it possible to clearly see where people are coming from to reach a specific place – highlighting visitation patterns which can then be turned into real insights.

Being able to perform visitation analysis on facilities and amenities such as community centres, libraries, sporting fields, council pools, parklands and more means that planners can get a nuanced perspective on who is using and benefiting from key assets within a council area. Are locals utilising your assets, or are people coming from other council areas instead?

Where do residents travel to outside of their local council?

Mobility data not only empowers council planners to see who is coming into their council area, but it also presents an opportunity to see where their residents are travelling to (and when they’re doing it).

This makes it possible to investigate where people travel to for work, for leisure and to access essential services and amenities outside of their own council area, which can be used to help identify strengths and bridge gaps in infrastructure, facilities and services.

How equitable is access to local facilities?

A crucial factor in catering to a community’s needs is ensuring that everyone has access to facilities and services to carry out their day-to-day life. Using catchment analysis, it’s possible to map accessibility to key destinations like health services, public transport, shopping centres, parks, recreation and open space areas and more by multiple modes of transport.

The knowledge of who can access key places within acceptable parameters – a 5-minute drive or a 10-minute walk, for example – can be used to highlight gaps in accessibility to a range of destinations within a council area. By answering this question, council can then investigate possible changes to land use or transport networks to help make access more equitable for council residents.

How can location intelligence make collaboration easier?

Local councils require collaboration to plan in an integrated, holistic way. Doing so ensures resources are properly allocated and the community is being adequately served now and into the future.

Location intelligence can uncover fundamental insights into places, how they’re used and who is using them in a granular and agnostic way. These insights are applicable to multiple planning disciplines, which allows different areas of council to draw from the same base of evidence. This helps avoid fractured thinking by driving stakeholder consensus, making the process of providing for the community more streamlined and purposeful.

Some tools or platforms like Planwisely, which allows planners to uncover location intelligence in their web browser without GIS experience, give councils the added ability to visualise complex geospatial data and then share it in a digestible way with stakeholders, too.

This combination of sophistication and user-friendliness means location intelligence platforms can empower local council planners and, ultimately, help shape thriving communities in an efficient and collaborative way.