South Melbourne Market is a prized community asset

South Melbourne Market (The Market) has a treasured role in the civic life of Melbourne. The Market has evolved over 150 years from its early role as a traditional produce market to provide a distinct retail offer including a range of fresh fruit, vegetable, meat, seafood and other grocery produce, as well as arts, crafts and fashion, accessories and home décor.

Over more recent years, The Market has expanded to host seasonal celebrations, festivals and events, including night events with live music and a range of street food and other community services such as pop up bike repairs. This curated mix of uses makes an important contribution to the local economy by drawing visitors from across the city and beyond.

The Market anchors a vibrant and mixed use precinct

The Market’s inner-urban precinct also hosts many retail, restaurants, cafes, bars and community activities. A light rail station nearby and a network of dedicated bike lanes connect the site to the inner city and inner eastern suburbs. However, there is still strong demand for car parking from private vehicles continues to dominate the local streets. As a high visitation destination, one of the challenges facing The Market is managing pedestrian crowding both in and around the market.

The Market has a unique role in supporting the community and economy as part of the recovery from the effects of COVID-19

The Market offering and potential market catchment were significantly affected by the COVID-19 lockdowns in Melbourne between August and October 2020. Restrictions on trading meant that while food and produce stalls remained open, the merchandise stalls were closed, and hospitality outlets provided takeaway services only. Melbourne residents were only permitted to travel up to five kilometres from home, which limited many regular customers access to The Market.

It is important for future planning and management to consider the effects these restrictions had on market activities and how The Market is recovering post lockdown. It is also important to understand how The Market’s visitation changed during and since lockdown – including understanding who visits, where they come from, how long they spend there and how they get there.

Attempting to answer these questions using traditional precinct analysis is limited. Using anonymised mobility insights data (developed by DSpark), it is now possible to have these answered in a timely way.

New data sources can help understand how COVID-19 affected The Market and what this could mean for recovery

Planning and managing local precincts and places often involve traditional data capture methods such as traffic counters, surveys, and relevant statistical data such as the ABS five yearly census of population and housing. While these methods can effectively capture a narrow range of localised insights, they each come with drawbacks: they can be expensive, cumbersome, time lagged, or insufficient. The lack of up to date, local data means that analysis is often delayed and involves many assumptions.

SGS and D-Spark have collaborated to analyse anonymised mobility insights data to uncover insights and identify policy implications of changes to activity levels at the South Melbourne Market.

DSpark are leaders in processing large geo-spatial temporal mobility data to deliver intelligence on people and places.

DSpark takes anonymised mobile cellular tower and GPS data, public transport data, road network data, immigration data and census data and transforms it into longitudinal insights with population movement patterns. The data represents the Australian adult population and includes key demographic characteristics as well as mode of transport. Understanding how people move, where they go and what they do enables organisations such as Transport For NSW, City of Gold Coast and City of Melbourne map their strategies around where people live work, and play.

The data for The Market captures visitation over one week during each of these five points in time that reflect before, during, and post COVID-19 periods:

• August 2019 (pre-COVID-19)
• August 2020 (during lockdown)
• November 2020 (post lockdown)
• January 2021 (recovery)
• Mid-February 2021 (5-day snap lockdown)

The data sets can be manipulated to address specific questions and issues. In this case, as well as overall visitor numbers, we applied the following filters:

• Visitors are defined as anyone who lives outside the Precinct and has entered the Precinct SA1 (which contains The Market) for longer than 15 minutes, during Market opening hours
• It excludes visitors who have ventured into the Woolworths building located close to The Market.