Planning for growth management and environmental change: modelling options for the future of the City of Hobsons Bay, Melbourne

In an era where increasingly urban planning is required to envisage and model development and growth scenarios, there is a dearth of creative, flexible, timely and three-dimensional electronic tools that allow the planners to both model and visualize their scenarios without wading through extensive computer software. This paper reviews the capacity of contemporary visualization and simulation software and techniques to simulate real-time current and future directions in urban planning to highlight the advances in the applied ability to measure and predict sustainable land use outcomes internationally. The paper applies a municipal-level detailed visualization case study interrogation of the City of Hobson’s Bay, in south-western metropolitan Melbourne, in Australia. The discussion will include a series of projections and simulated forecasts from 2014 to 2050, using two scenarios, to assess if a process or methodology could better aid or guide better informed judgements as to the future growth of the City of Hobsons Bay as well as Australian coastal settlements generally. Two planning scenarios are developed for Hobsons Bay that are evaluated as to their respective environmental sustainability values and attributes using the international sustainability software package developed by the STAR Community Rating SystemTM program in North America. The results from these scenario evaluations, using Hobsons Bay as a case study, highlight the impacts of population expansion and urban development on the urban landscape and the need to provide an innovative digital barometer for the future land use planning for metropolitan areas not only in Australia but around the world.