The Polycentric Dynamics of Melbourne and Sydney: Suburb attractiveness divides a city at the home ownership level

TL;DR

This study models urban dynamics in Sydney and Melbourne, revealing how housing and population distributions evolve into polycentric patterns influenced by social, economic, and transport factors, with diverging tendencies between renters and mortgage holders.

Contribution

It develops a calibrated model of urban dynamics that captures the evolution of housing markets and population distributions, highlighting the divergence between renters and mortgagors in a polycentric context.

Findings

Renters cluster near commercial centers

Mortgage holders occupy suburban outskirts

Cities are on a long-term polycentric trajectory

Abstract

Urban dynamics in large metropolitan areas result from complex interactions across social, economic, and political factors, including population distribution, flows of wealth, and infrastructure requirements. We develop a Census-calibrated model of urban dynamics for the Greater Sydney and Melbourne areas for 2011 and 2016, highlighting the evolution of population distributions and the housing market structure in these two cities in terms of their mortgage and rent distributions. We show that there is a tendency to homophily between renters and mortgage holders: renters tend to cluster nearer commercial centres, whereas mortgagors tend to populate the outskirts of these centres. We also identify a critical threshold at which the long-term evolution of these two cities will bifurcate between a `sprawling' and a `polycentric' configuration, showing that both cities lie on the polycentric side of the critical point in the long-run. Importantly, there is a divergence of these centric tendencies between the renters and mortgage holders. The polycentric patterns characterising the mortgagors are focused around commercial centres, and we show that the emergent housing patterns follow the major transport routes through the cities.