How Wollongong Is Tackling the Duplicate Image Problem — and How It Stacks Up Against Cities Doing the Same

Wollongong City Council is working through a systematic audit of duplicated imagery across its digital planning and asset management systems — a problem that has quietly ballooned across Australian local governments as drone surveys, satellite captures and legacy scanning programs have layered records on top of one another for years without a unified deduplication policy in place.

The issue matters now because councils across New South Wales are under pressure from the state government's planning acceleration agenda to digitise development application processes. Wollongong, which processed more than 2,800 development applications in the 2024–25 financial year according to its annual report, cannot afford to have planning officers and assessors working from contradictory or outdated imagery when the region is absorbing major industrial change around Port Kembla and a wave of new residential proposals stretching from Fairy Meadow to Dapto.

What the Problem Actually Looks Like on the Ground

In practical terms, duplicate imagery means a planning assessor checking a site near the Keira Street corridor or along the Princes Highway in Unanderra can pull up two or three versions of the same aerial photograph — taken months or even years apart — without a clear flag indicating which is current. For routine applications that might not matter. For a contaminated industrial site being considered for residential rezoning near the BlueScope precinct at Port Kembla, it can introduce real risk.

The University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility, which has worked on data integrity projects with local government bodies before, has been identified by council staff as a potential technical partner for the deduplication audit, though no formal contract has been publicly announced. The council's geographic information systems team, based at the Burelli Street civic administration building, is understood to be leading the internal review.

Wollongong's situation is not unique. Bochum, in Germany's Ruhr Valley — a post-industrial city of roughly 360,000 people that underwent a comparable steelworks-to-services transition over the past three decades — completed a citywide GIS image deduplication program in 2022 after its own planning systems became congested with overlapping aerial datasets. The Ruhr experience is now referenced in planning technology circles as a benchmark for mid-sized industrial cities managing digital transition alongside physical infrastructure change.

Comparisons With Pohang and Bochum

Pohang, in South Korea's North Gyeongsang province, is perhaps the closer analogy. Like Wollongong, Pohang is built around a major integrated steelworks — POSCO's main plant — and is now managing parallel pressures: a green energy transition, a housing supply crunch, and the need to modernise municipal data systems simultaneously. Pohang's city government committed roughly 4.2 billion Korean won (approximately AUD $4.7 million at mid-2025 exchange rates) to a three-year digital asset management overhaul beginning in 2023, with image deduplication forming a core component.

Wollongong has not publicly committed equivalent dedicated funding for the problem. The council's 2025–26 operational budget allocated spending on digital transformation broadly, but no line item specifically for imagery deduplication has been disclosed in publicly available budget papers. That gap is part of what separates Wollongong from the Pohang and Bochum models, where municipal governments treated the problem as infrastructure spending rather than an IT housekeeping item.

The pressure is building locally. The Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund, administered through the NSW government, has flagged digital planning capacity as a consideration for future investment rounds. Port Kembla's designation as a renewable energy zone under state planning frameworks means the volume of site assessments, environmental overlays and imagery captures in that precinct alone is set to grow substantially over the next three years.

For residents and developers with applications currently in the Wollongong system, the practical advice is straightforward: if an application involves a site that has changed physically in the past two to three years — a cleared lot, a demolished structure, new earthworks — it is worth attaching recent, date-stamped photographs directly to the application rather than relying on council systems to hold the most current view. The audit will eventually resolve the underlying data problem, but it will take time, and active applications will move through the system regardless.