Full Report

Infrastructure

Housing, energy, transport connectivity and public services

International comparison

Building homes to support economic growth

Downtown Austin's skyline above the Colorado River

Housing supply followed planning reform

Austin

Rapid growth in its tech economy pushed Austin's housing costs up sharply and the city responded by making it much easier to build.

Vertical Mixed Use zoning allowed housing within commercial areas and cut setback and parking requirements. Accessory dwelling units drove small-scale infill across residential neighbourhoods. In 2023 the city removed minimum parking requirements citywide, lowering construction costs and freeing up land.

Between 2015 and 2024 Austin added around 120,000 homes, increasing its housing stock by roughly 30%. Over the same period Cambridge added around 6,900 net new homes and Oxford around 2,600. Austin paired this with fast grid connections, keeping the cost of building and operating low.

Commutable catchment maps

How many people each cluster can reach in an hour, and how much of that catchment depends on the car rather than public transport. Change the place or the threshold to compare.

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60-minute catchment overlap

Teal: within 60 minutes of one city Mauve: within 60 minutes of two or more
OxCam

OxCam's 60-minute overlap is small and splits into two disconnected pockets.

OxCam 60-minute catchment overlap map
Amsterdam–Rotterdam

The Randstad's overlap covers almost the entire route between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, including Utrecht and The Hague.

Amsterdam-Rotterdam 60-minute catchment overlap map

Development pattern

OxCam's new development is dispersed across almost the whole region. Austin's and Guangzhou's extends and densifies what was already built, following the road network.

OxCam
New development is spread evenly across the whole region, with little correlation to existing towns or the road network.
OxCam new development vs built-up map
Austin
New development clusters tightly along the I-35 corridor between Georgetown and San Marcos, extending and densifying the existing built-up area rather than scattering across the wider county.
Austin new development vs built-up map
Guangzhou
The most concentrated pattern of the three, growth fills in and extends the built-up area almost continuously along the road network, out from the urban core.
Guangzhou new development vs built-up map
Built-up 2015 New development 2015–2025
Land covered by buildings in OxCam grew by 0.74% a year between 2015 and 2025, the fourth fastest of the 10 clusters measured, ahead of Paris, Boston, the Bay Area and New York. As the maps show, this growth was spread across the region while Austin, which grew 1.04% a year, concentrated its new development along its corridor.

International comparison

Making a polycentric cluster one labour market

Tulip fields, a canal and wind turbines in the Dutch Randstad

Four cities, one labour market

The Randstad

The Randstad links Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague through high-capacity intercity rail, one of the densest motorway networks in Europe and extensive cycling infrastructure, all planned alongside housing and commercial development.

This transport network gives Dutch cities greater reach compared to OxCam despite a dispersed geography such that extending a journey from 50 minutes to 60 brings more than a million extra residents within range of both Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The same ten minutes adds just 406,000 people in Oxford, Cambridge and Milton Keynes.