14 comments

    1. Ironically, NZ reached this “urban majority” point a lot earlier than most of the world. Settled late, so settlement concentrated much more in towns and cities than in many other countries where there’s still a lot of villages and rural-dispersed settlement. But since our cultural conciousness claims that NZ is a rural country, we never really got that fact.

      1. In 2001, 86% of NZ was urban (admittedly, that bar is not that high, counting everything above 1000 people towns). Do we know what the bar is in the two graphs / diagrams above?

        1. Ah, there’s an interesting comparison – UK also uses communities “above 1,000” as the rural / urban treshold. Their urbanisation in 2002 was 90%, ours 85%. So in some respects we are almost as urban as the UK (though probably decidedly more sub-urban).

      2. Yes I’ve seen that, and you’re right to question the definition; we have long been a nation of townies, then in the post-war era townies and suburbanites, now we are really urbanising along with the rest of the world. Auckland Central grew 46.5% in the last census period 2006-13, a greater growth than anywhere else.

        We were arguably more urban in the first half of the 20thC than the second! All streetcar dense walkable little cities…..

      1. Glacier retreat in the Himalayas will drastically reduce the dry season flow of the Indus (after a couple of decades of increase due to the melt). Could be as low as 10% of current flows. That will lighten up the colour on the map around there, and darken it further afield. Oh wait- there’s national borders in the way. War anyone?

    1. Why strange – it’s typical behaviour to settle along coasts and rivers. Not so much on offer in most places of either.

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