Economic and Cultural 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 percent 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 (age, income, education, occupation) characteristics for the years 1991-2013. We use entropy-based measures of residential sorting as our preferred measure, and find that individuals exhibit the greatest residential sorting by ethnicity, compared with sorting by economic characteristics. We also observe that ethnic sorting declined between 1991 and 2013, for broad ethnic groups, but that sorting within the broad ethnic groups has increased. At the broad occupational groups level, sorting has also declined between 1991 and 2013, but the contribution to sorting of within-broad-group occupations has increased. We also observe that the semi-rural fringes of the city are less diverse than the central urban area.