![Urban Taskforce chief executive Chris Johnson.](/web/20151216185534im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/j/o/q/1/4/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.glk7ps.png/1449714453949.jpg)
Urban Taskforce chief executive Chris Johnson.
With Sydney's dwelling approvals running at 70 per cent for apartments there is clearly a big shift under way to a more urban way of living. The city probably has around a third of all dwellings as urban apartments and in a few decades we will be a fifty-fifty city - half suburban houses and half urban apartments. But we must keep our world famous lifestyle with our access to amenities, our community spirit and a reasonably affordable place to live intact.
To see just how the more urban environments were going on liveability the Urban Taskforce commissioned demographer Mark McCrindle to develop an Urban Living Index that measured how liveability rated across all of Sydney's suburbs. We were then able to match the results to the urban density of each suburb. The research used the smallest Statistical Areas from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2011 Census. McCrindle developed five categories to assess liveability including; affordability, community, employability, amenity and accessibility. Each of these categories was then broken down into four measurements which come from the ABS Census and from the ABS Counts of Australian Businesses data. To develop relativity the data for the whole of Sydney was taken as a benchmark to then give suburb scores.
A category like affordability used data on weekly mortgage repayments, weekly rental costs, the proportion of renters and household income as measures to rate each of 228 suburbs. In this category suburbs further out from the centre rated highly as being more affordable with Kurrajong Heights, Springwood, St Clair, Claymore and Bonnyrigg topping the list.
In the area of community ABS data on cultural diversity, language diversity, volunteer involvement and workforce participation were used to measure each suburb. The best scoring suburbs were Chippendale, Pyrmont, Darlinghurst, North Sydney and Crows Nest. In the Employability category St Leonards, Erskineville, Randwick, Surry Hills and Pyrmont topped the list. For amenity the measures included the number of restaurants, cafes, arts facilities, local shops and educational institutions led to Surry Hills, Pyrmont, Chatswood, Maroubra, Marrickville and the Rocks coming out on top.
The final measure of accessibility looked at public transport access, walking to work, density and the proportion of non-car owners in the suburb. Burwood, Newtown, Potts Point, Randwick and Bondi Junction fared well in this category. The overall result when all the measures of the five categories were added up gave a top 10 of Sydney's most liveable urban suburbs. Here is the list in order. Crows Nest, Surry Hills, Pyrmont, Marrickville, Potts Point, North Sydney, Randwick, Chatswood, Leichhardt and Neutral Bay.
The Urban Living Index shows that Sydney is managing its growing urban density well with lifestyles, admittedly urban lifestyles, being measured highly in suburbs where urban density with apartment buildings was a high proportion of overall dwellings.
Chris Johnson is chief executive of the Urban Taskforce.