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Cultural and economic residential sorting of Auckland’s population, 1991–2013: an entropy approach

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Abstract

Auckland, the largest city of New Zealand, is one of the most diverse cities in the world, with more than 40% of its population born abroad, more than 200 ethnicities represented and 160 languages spoken. In this paper, we measure residential sorting of individuals in Auckland by their cultural (ethnicity) and economic (income, education and occupation) characteristics for the years 1991–2013. Using entropy-based measures of residential sorting and of neighbourhood diversity, we find that individuals exhibit greater residential sorting by ethnicity than by economic characteristics. Geographically, the semi-rural fringes of the city exhibit less diversity than the central urban area. Multi-group indexes of cultural and economic sorting showed a small decline over the 1991–2013 period. We also observe that ethnic sorting declined over that period for broad ethnic groups, but that sorting within the broad ethnic groups increased since 2001. A similar pattern of decreasing sorting at the aggregate level, with increasing sorting within groups in the more recent sub-period, is observed for occupations.

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Fig. 1

Source: Fathimath (2017). b Evenness index—Ethnicity. c Evenness index—Qualification. d Evenness index—Occupation. e Evenness index—Income

Fig. 2

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Notes

  1. Data from the 2018 Census of Population and Dwellings were not yet available at the time of writing of this paper.

  2. Pākehā are non-Māori, usually of European ethnic origin or background.

  3. Area units are non-administrative areas that are aggregations of meshblocks. In urban areas, an area unit is similar in size to a suburb or neighbourhood (Statistics New Zealand 2013a). We use 2013 area unit boundaries.

  4. Counts that are already a multiple of three are left unchanged, and all other counts are rounded randomly either up or down to be a multiple of three.

  5. Refer to Appendix Table 6 for the Level 1 and Level 2 classification of ethnicities in New Zealand.

  6. We ran the analysis also with ‘not further defined’ dropped, and again with ‘not further defined’ as a separate category. The differences in results with those reported in this paper are minimal, but available upon request to interested readers.

  7. Specifically, the ethnicity question in the 1996 Census had a different format from that used in 1991 and 2001. In 1996, there was an answer box for 'Other European' with additional drop down answer boxes for 'English', 'Dutch', 'Australian', 'Scottish', 'Irish', and 'other'. These were not used in 1991 or 2001. Furthermore, the first two answer boxes for the question were in a different order in 1996 from 1991 and 2001. 'NZ Māori' was listed first, and 'NZ European or Pākehā' was listed second in 1996. The 1991 and 2001 questions also only used the words 'New Zealand European' rather than 'NZ European or Pākehā' (Pākehā is the Māori word referring to a person of European descent). Also, the 2001 question used the word 'Māori' rather than 'NZ Māori' (Statistics New Zealand 2017a, b, c).

  8. Highest qualification is derived for people aged 15 years and over and combines highest secondary school qualification and post-school qualification to obtain a single highest qualification by category of attainment (Statistics New Zealand 2015).

  9. For highest qualification, 2013 and 2006 Census data have limited comparability with 2001 Census data due to the progressive introduction of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) from 2002. NCEA is now the main qualification for secondary school students (Statistics New Zealand 2013a).

  10. This is the highest secondary school qualification gained by category of attainment and was collected for people aged 15 years and over (Statistics New Zealand 2015).

  11. The Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO) was only introduced in 2006.

  12. In the Census, total personal income is collected for people aged 15 years and over, who usually live in New Zealand and are present on census night (including those who state not receiving any income). Total personal income is the before-tax income for the respondent and is collected as an income range rather than an actual dollar income (Statistics New Zealand 2015).

  13. The detailed year-wise income bands are shown in Appendix Table 9.

  14. We define 0*ln(0) = \( \mathop {\lim }\limits_{q \to 0} [q({ \ln }(q)] = 0 \) to allow calculation of \( D_{a} \) even in the case of there being groups who have zero members in any area at some point in time.

  15. The income categories are listed in Appendix Table 9.

  16. This number has declined from 2006 to 2013 because the number of people calling themselves New Zealander declined for New Zealand as a whole from 430,000 in 2006 to just under 66,000 in 2013 (Statistics New Zealand 2013a).

  17. See Appendix Tables 7, 8 and 9, respectively.

  18. See Appendix Tables 7 and 9.

  19. See Appendix Table 9.

  20. See Appendix Table 8.

  21. See Appendix Table 7.

  22. The data used for the Level 1 calculation have been constructed from the Level 2 data sheets (using a bottom-up approach), so that the total population count at both levels are the same.

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Acknowledgements

The first author acknowledges the support provided by the University of Waikato in the form of a University of Waikato Doctoral Scholarship. This study has also been supported by the 2014–2020 Capturing the Diversity Dividend of Aotearoa New Zealand (CaDDANZ) programme, funded by Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment grant UOWX1404. We thank Robert Didham, participants at the WEAI 94th Annual Conference, held in San Francisco in June 2019, and three anonymous referees for extensive comments and suggestions that have improved the quality and clarity of the paper. We also thank Geua Boe-Gibson and Dave Maré for their help with creating the maps.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Accounting, Finance and Economics, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, 3240, New Zealand

    Mohana Mondal & Michael P. Cameron

  2. National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis (NIDEA), University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Michael P. Cameron & Jacques Poot

  3. Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jacques Poot

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  1. Mohana Mondal
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Correspondence to Mohana Mondal.

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The results in this paper are not official statistics. They have been created for research purposes from Census unit record data in the Statistics New Zealand Datalab. The opinions, findings, recommendations and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors, not Statistics New Zealand. Access to the anonymised data used in this study was provided by Statistics New Zealand under the security and confidentiality provisions of the Statistics Act 1975. Only people authorised by the Statistics Act 1975 are allowed to see data about a particular person, household, business, or organisation, and the results in this paper have been confidentialized to protect these groups from identification and to keep their data safe. Careful consideration has been given to the privacy, security and confidentiality issues associated with using unit record census data.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Table 6 Ethnic group classification in New Zealand
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Table 7 Entropy Index of Sorting (EIS) by qualification: Auckland, 1991–2013
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Table 8 Entropy Index of Sorting (EIS) by occupation: Auckland, 1991–2013
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Table 9 Entropy Index of Sorting (EIS) by income: Auckland, 1991–2013
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Mondal, M., Cameron, M.P. & Poot, J. Cultural and economic residential sorting of Auckland’s population, 1991–2013: an entropy approach. J Geogr Syst 23, 291–330 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-020-00327-1

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