Diversity is the degree to which a variety of activity types are located within an Activity Centre. Historically, planning policies have overemphasised the role of retail activity promoting the development of retail-centric Activity Centres to the exclusion of other activities such as health, education, entertainment and other commercial/office activity. To the WAPC’s credit, a key component of the new activity centre policy has been the diversity performance targets.
The policy sets targets in relation to the ‘mix of land uses’ floorspace as a proportion of total floorspace. The implications of the measure, as discussed yesterday by my colleague Jason, are that the outcomes achieved may not be that which is ultimately desired. A centre with 50% shop retail and 50% bulky goods retail while it would meet the requirements of this metric, can hardly be called diverse.
Pracsys has worked for a long time to develop metrics for measuring the performance of Activity Centres. The nature of our work makes us very conscience of the need to ensure that the metrics accurately reflect the desired outcomes. Pracsys has examined all activity centres in Perth and applied an ecological diversity technique to calculate an index of diversity (between 0 and 1) for each centre. The measure accounts for richness, which is the number of different types of uses in the activity centre and equitability, which is the evenness of the distribution floorspace amongst the different types. Figure 1 outlines the top five most diverse and top five least diverse activity centres in Perth, outside of the Perth Capital City.
Figure 1. Top five least and most diverse activity centres in Perth
Overall, more mature local economies such as Highgate, Victoria Park, Fremantle and Mount Hawthorn perform well against the diversity measure as they have benefited from age, diversity of land ownership, proximity to the CBD, infrastructure and intensity/diversity of users. In contrast, centres than perform poorly are typically either located in the outer sub-regions, experience a constrained boundary or single land ownership. Figure 2 shows the least and most diverse Activity Centres at each level in the hierarchy.
Figure 2. Least and most diverse activity centres in Perth according to hierarchy
| Level | Least Diverse Centre | Most Diverse Centre |
| Strategic Metropolitan | Armadale | Stirling |
| Secondary | Karrinyup | Victoria Park |
| District | Dog Swamp | Highgate |
A full list of all activity centres can be found here.
While, the revised policy represents a shift from the previous planning paradigm, it’s important to note that the requirements in the Activity Centre Policy are only a minimum for compliance. As such, Pracsys will be encouraging clients to apply a range of measures to ensure that centre plans accurately reflect the outcomes desired.
