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

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.