Place-based funding interventions such as city deals have the potential to address problems of spatially uneven housing and employment growth in urban and regional Australia. This report examines international evidence and emerging Australian practice in using place-based deals to catalyze economic opportunities and housing development through infrastructure investment and integrated governance and planning. In particular, the study seeks to understand the ways in which capital city and regional planning frameworks, supported by strategic funding interventions like city deals, might improve connections between affordable rental housing and employment opportunities, enhancing urban productivity.

There is growing concern about uneven economic growth in metropolitan and regional Australia, and relationships between housing, labour markets, and urban productivity (Australian Government 2019; DITCRD 2015). However, strategies to address the spatial mismatch between employment opportunities (clustering in central city locations) and lower-cost housing supply (gravitating to outer suburban and regional Australia) remain at an early stage of development.

Internationally, metropolitan economic strategies or funding ‘deals’ between central and local governments around infrastructure investment, urban planning or housing have sought to address such problems of spatially uneven housing and employment growth.