Case Studies

Background

Council’s previous Industrial Land Strategy was adopted in 2002. Over the past 17 years there have been significant changes in technology, skills, training and occupations, energy, waste management and the Greater Bendigo economy. The City of Greater Bendigo needed to complete an updated review of industrial land that reflected current needs of industry. The review required economic and land use planning inputs to support and guide development of a new Industrial Land Strategy.

Project Goals

The final Greater Bendigo Industrial Land Development Strategy will guide industrial land use for the next 30 years. A key part of this was to understand future needs of industry. The goals of this initial project was to:

• prepare employment forecasts, with a focus on industrial employment
• preparation of land demand analysis, and review key trends in industrial land development.

REMPLAN’s Involvement

REMPLAN prepared key analysis for Bendigo and the broader region across two phases.

The first phase looked at industry within Bendigo and included:

• local economic trends relating to employment and productivity
• Preparation of population and employment forecasts
• Undertaking land demand analysis and land consumption by lot size.
• Qualitative analysis of trends in industrial land development including example case studies.

The second phase involved analysis of the broader region, incorporating several of the surrounding municipalities. This analysis:

• Delivered benchmarking of economic trends and contribution of each municipality to regional industry.
• Identified industry clustering
• Prepared a desktop lot-by-lot regional land audit to be used as inputs to demand analysis.
• Completed industrial land supply and demand analysis across the region.

Results

The City of Greater Bendigo was provided with critical insights into the role of Bendigo in the regional industrial land use and scale of economic activity. Key outcomes of the report included:

• Forecast of industrial land supply by lot size (as opposed to an aggregate assessment)
• Potential job losses resulting from possible land shortages
• Key trends and best practice occurring for industrial precincts.