Investigating the use of dasymetric techniques for assessing employment containment in Melbourne, Australia

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

This project studies employment containment in Melbourne, Australia. Employment containment is a measure of the proportion of people that work in a location close to their home. Recent urban planning policies in Melbourne have aimed to improve employment containment in the city’s suburbs. While there has been analysis of the rates at which people both live and work within broadly defined ‘local areas’, little work has been done to investigate employment containment using smaller and more uniform catchment areas as the unit of analysis. This research attempts such a finer scale analysis using dasymetric downscaling techniques. A regression modelling approach supported by land use data, alongside a binary dasymetric method, is used to develop fine scale estimates of employment distribution, while binary and populationdensity weighted methods are used to develop a fine scale estimate of working population distribution. For the employment distribution estimate, the Poisson model that distributed employment to employment-related land use classes produced the smallest error. However, the error produced by this model is still high. For the working population distribution estimate, the population-density weighted estimate is the more accurate of the approaches, and overall produced low error. For the employment containment analysis, a number of employment centres were randomly selected and an employment containment catchment has been derived from a 5 km2 commuting distance catchment. Commuting flows from an origin-destination matrix were areaweighted to estimate flows into the employment centre from the 5 km2 catchment. The method is found to be potentially useful; however inspecting the results of this employment containment calculation highlighted flaws in the current estimates that should be addressed before the measures can be used to further analyse employment containment in Melbourne. Improvements to this method would support urban strategic and transport planning analyses at a metropolitan-wide scale.