In late May, AURIN had the pleasure of presenting a joint training workshop with UNSW’s City Futures Research Centre at UNSW’s CBD Campus. The workshop was attended by academic researchers from across Sydney, as well as a majority cohort from the government sector. Our government participants visited from local and NSW state government departments, spanning economic development, liveability, sustainable development and transport. Workshop participants gained a hands-on deep dive into the AURIN Workbench, exploring some of the rich array of datasets and tools, and answering some real world questions about Sydney and New South Wales, such as:
- How equitable is access to Aged Care in New South Wales?
- What is the relationship between housing stress, income, and over-crowding across Greater Sydney?
- Do Construction Industry and Technical/Scientific Industry businesses cluster in different places in Greater Sydney?
- How walkable is Paramatta?
In addition to drawing on the thousands of datasets available for all AURIN users through the AURIN Workbench, participants also integrated datasets developed and produced by the UNSW City Futures’ CityLab.
This allowed participants to address research questions like:
- What is the relationship between AirBnB costings, and house prices?
- Is there a relationship between heat vulnerability and socio-economic disadvantage?
Step by step guides on how to answer these questions in the AURIN Portal are provided in our AURIN Portal Tutorials
In addition to undertaking training on the AURIN Workbench and the UNSW CityLab, the workshop provided an ideal opportunity for both AURIN and CityFutures to have in depth discussions with participants about their ongoing data needs, and how both organisations can work in partnership to find, curate, harmonise, and publish that data for the benefit of both the government and research sectors.
The AURIN-UNSW City Futures workshop represents one facet of the strong relationship between these organisations. Additionally, AURIN has been used as a teaching platform in the postgraduate Digital Cities course offered at UNSW. Moreover, a number of CityFutures research projects have been delivered and published, with AURIN as a central data or analytical component, including analysing housing affordability across Greater Sydney, or investigating equity of access to health resources in NSW, or the use of crowdsourced app data for cycling planning in Sydney.
In addition, AURIN is working closely with CityFutures to bring the datasets produced for CityLab into the AURIN Workbench for all users to gain insights from.
We look forward to building an even stronger relationship with CityFutures in the coming months, building a deep data and analytical environment for researchers and policy makers to undertake high value evidence-based decision making for all of New South Wales.