Understanding Key Workers in Superdiverse Cities: A Multi-Dimensional Quantitative Framework in support of Place-Based Public Policy

Contemporary debates on key-worker housing increasingly recognise that occupation alone provides an inadequate basis for understanding who key workers are, where they live and how housing pressures influence local economies and service provision. Yet much existing policy and research continues to rely on fairly fixed occupational classifications or broad sectoral definitions that can overlook the spatial, economic and social complexity of cities. This paper presents a quantitative, place-based framework for characterising key workers and their housing needs in Greater Dandenong, specifically in the suburb of Dandenong, one of Australia's most culturally diverse municipalities and a nationally significant employment centre. Greater Dandenong provides a revealing case study because it combines broad economic opportunity and education access with significant housing affordability challenges, high unemployment rates, disadvantage, complex commuting patterns, and one of Australia's most superdiverse populations. These characteristics raise important public policy questions about how local governments can better understand the relationship between labour markets, housing, accessibility, diversity and inclusion. We propose a four-stage quantitative analytical framework. The first stage characterises occupational importance within the local context by examining essential service provision, local economic significance, workforce-supporting functions, the requirement for physical presence and labour shortages. This approach recognises that occupational importance is place-dependent and shaped by local economic structure and policy objectives. The second stage examines housing and socioeconomic circumstances to better understand the diversity of housing need among locally important workers. Drawing on census, labour market and housing data, the analysis considers household income, housing affordability, tenure, employment characteristics and housing suitability. This recognises that workers within the same occupation may experience very different housing circumstances. The third stage investigates housing-employment accessibility by examining commuting distance, travel time, transport modes, journey complexity and the spatial relationship between housing and employment. This enables a more comprehensive understanding of how transport and housing systems interact to influence workforce accessibility, economic participation and inclusion. Recognising that the characteristics of key-worker populations and the policy priorities associated with them vary across places, the framework incorporates a fourth analytical stage that adopts a context-oriented approach. This stage is flexible, enabling the incorporation of additional socio-spatial dimensions that reflect the unique characteristics and priorities of the local context. In the case of Greater Dandenong, this context-oriented assessment focuses on superdiversity, reflecting the diversity of the local key-worker population itself. This stage examines characteristics including place of origin, language, religion, and other dimensions of population diversity alongside occupational and housing characteristics. Rather than proposing an entirely new conceptualisation of key workers, the paper synthesises and extends existing Australian and international scholarship into an integrated quantitative framework that can be operationalised using administrative, census and spatial datasets. It indicates that place-based policy that recognises local needs requires analytical frameworks capable of capturing the interconnected and locally-based relationships between labour markets, housing, transport and population diversity. It offers a transferable approach for supporting more inclusive, context-sensitive public policy in superdiverse cities. It illustrates the value of quantitative methods for understanding the complexity that underpins urban social inclusion.