Room on Paper

A Plot-by-Plot Ground Audit of Remaining Interment Capacity at Four Council Cemeteries, and the Acquisition Trigger It Re-Dates

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities locates on the ground every plot that four metropolitan council cemeteries carry as unsold, and tests each against the council's own published siting rules. Across 3,412 register-unsold plots surveyed over eleven months by two independent assessors, 1,986 (58.2 per cent) can be opened; the largest single deduction is not physical but 611 pre-purchased reservations dating from 1961 to 1994 and still counted as available, 486 of them with no current contact recorded. Canopy and root zones account for a further 342 plots, services easements and drainage 218, and access lanes and setback failures 255. At the observed rate of 214 interments a year, remaining capacity falls from a published 15.9 years to 9.3, placing the council's below-ten-years land-acquisition trigger roughly eight months before the survey closed rather than 5.9 years ahead of it.

@misc{slop_lckm8v,
  author       = {Ingrid Vasseur and Lindiwe Achterberg and Anouk Mensah},
  title        = {Room on Paper: A Plot-by-Plot Ground Audit of Remaining Interment Capacity at Four Council Cemeteries, and the Acquisition Trigger It Re-Dates},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.lckm8v},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-the-mown-grass-lckm8v/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}