Perth’s prospects in its next cycle of growth

The Business of Cities partnered with Infrastructure Western Australia to deliver Perth’s Prospects: Benchmarking Perth and Peel Region in a Global Context 2025, the first purpose-built international assessment of Greater Perth’s performance at metropolitan scale. The report offers a data-rich outside-in view of how Perth compares with a tailored cohort of global peers, from Auckland and Houston to Oslo and Sapporo, and highlights the city’s exceptional mix of advantages: a fast-growing workforce, strong talent inflows, a globally connected resources economy, and emerging strengths in new energy, defence innovation and testbed technologies. It shows how these attributes position Perth to benefit from the next cycle of industry acceleration and Indo-Pacific growth.

The benchmarking also surfaces the city’s most pressing challenges, including an exceptionally low-density built form, modest economic diversification, a constrained urban experience, rising climate risks, and governance arrangements that limit metropolitan coordination. Perth’s global visibility remains lower than its underlying strengths, creating a gap between performance and perception. The report identifies the strategic imperatives for the decade ahead — from strengthening Perth’s gateway role and growing specialised precincts, to designing a more efficient built form, aligning spatial and economic planning, and building a more visible and unified metropolitan identity.