Community infrastructure benchmarks

Strategic social infrastructure benchmarks for Greater Melbourne: useful, but not gospel.

Benchmarks can be a handy starting point for councils looking to define meaningful provision targets. They’re useful for comparison across municipalities and regions — but they should always be used with caution.

We’re often asked to apply ‘industry standards’. Our response?
“There are no industry standards… just commonly used — and often misused — ones.”

We continue to see established urban councils applying provision ratios intended for use in growth areas, where there’s little to no existing infrastructure to account for. There’s a lingering belief across the sector that all municipalities should aim for the same rates of provision. But we ask… why?

Communities aren’t all the same. Every council is working with a unique mix of people, demographics, infrastructure legacies, and local priorities. At SocioLogic, we build provision targets from the ground up — informed by robust evidence of community need and service priorities, and tailored to each municipality.

Sometimes we start with strategic social infrastructure benchmarks. But we never stop there.

Provision ratios, data tables and charts

The pages below provide some of the strategic datasets compiled by SocioLogic for use in the CASIMO ‘Quantity Assessment’ module and other community infrastructure needs analysis. The data has been extracted from public data sources or acquired by SocioLogic from service providers. SocioLogic does not make any warranties for the accuracy of any content in these datasets. We recommend that users exercise caution and ratify the data themselves before use.