Large-scale administrative data collected by municipal government are increasingly being used by researchers to better understand a host of urban phenomena and the way they are patterned over space and time. In this paper, council data are used to explore the incidence of complaints about neighbours across urban neighbourhoods using a GIS-based spatial approach. Through an exploratory and a confirmatory factor analysis of the spatially extracted neighbour complaints data, we identify four types of neighbour complaints – animal related; building construction; property management issues; and health and visual amenity issues – that categorise neighbour problems. GIS technologies are applied to map the spatial distribution of each complaint type across the 218 suburbs, resulting in distinct patterns of neighbour complaints in Brisbane suburbs. Our research demonstrates the utility of naturally occurring administrative data as a means of learning more about the social life of urban areas.
This project has produced publications as below:
Cheshire, L., Fitzgerald, R., & Liu, Y. (2019). Neighbourhood change and neighbour complaints: How gentrification and densification influence the prevalence of problems between neighbours. Urban Studies, 56(6), 1093-1112.
Liu, Y., Cheshire, L., Wang, S., & Fu, X. (2019). A socio-spatial analysis of neighbour complaints using large-scale administrative data: The case in Brisbane, Australia. Cities, 90, 168-180.