How do I find a list of small towns in my region?

Glenn explains how small towns are classified and demonstrates how to find demographic data for these areas using the 'Locality snapshots' in our community profiles.

Q:

(This question was sent to us by someone In the Murray Bridge region in South Australia)

I’m trying to find the population sizes of towns within our region. I’m looking at a project that is targeting smaller towns based on population size (for a start) and want to get a list of those towns.

A:

There are a few ways to define the population of towns and localities. One is area-based – the official gazetted locality classification, which covers all of Australia in a set of approximately 15,000 “suburbs” or localities. These are sometimes very small and don’t correspond to what you’d think of as a town. But they are great for Local Government level, and we have these online in our LGA level community profiles (not the RDA level ones, these are restricted to our LGA client sites).

For instance here is the list for Murray Bridge.

https://profile.id.com.au/murray-bridge/locality-snapshots

Another one is “Significant Urban Areas” – these look at cities and larger regional centres as broad urban conglomerates and have a hard boundary which enables comparison over time. You can get these ones on an annual basis – but in your region only one place is large enough to have a SUA, and that’s Murray Bridge.

The one that will probably work better for your query is the “Urban Centre/Locality” classification. This is for Census years only, and defines a boundary around the built up area of every built up place of at least 200 people (counted on Census night). The boundaries may change each Census, but you can get a snapshot for 2016 of just the town areas.

I’ve attached below a list of the defined UCLs in the RDA Murraylands-Riverland region for 2016 – smaller towns and rural areas are in the “Rest of State/Territory” item. Number of persons is usual residents from Census 2016.