ON SECOND THOUGHTS ...
Earlier this week, a colleague pointed out a grave miscarriage of justice – something was wrong on the internet. That something was Wikipedia, the wonderful online encyclopaedia anyone can edit, where errors are usually swiftly corrected.
This was an exception; its page for Christchurch incorrectly identified the city as the thirdmost populous in New Zealand.
To any unassuming, New Zealand-curious reader, the rational conclusion would be that Wellington was the more populated city. A visit to the Wellington page provided confirmation; it is, apparently, ‘‘the second-most populous urban area of New Zealand’’.
It may seem petty, or even quaint, to worry about this, particularly if you live in Auckland, a sprawling devourer of cities so large it gave itself its own classification, ‘‘super city’’.
But like sucker fish clinging to a mighty whale shark, those of us in smaller cities are in constant warfare, jostling for who gets supremacy on the slimy back of our host shark, Auckland.
There is, however, a clear answer to this question, and it is one that should be formally recognised once and for all. Not
only is there a compelling moral case for Christchurch to be the nation’s second city, even more compelling is the factual case.
Let us game this out – after all, the stakes are high.
The first step was figuring out how the respective Wikipedia pages came to reach said conclusions. The answer was simple but reflected an unfortunate oversight.
Up until the end of 2017, government agency Statistics NZ had been using a standard for geographical areas it devised in 1991 called NZSAC92.
A geographical standard allows the agency to organise people and households into specific places, data which aligns with the census and other population counts to allocate resources and plan for urban expansion. Using this standard,
Wellington is the second city, because it included the populations of Lower Hutt, Upper Hutt and Porirua (resulting in a combined population of 418,000, vs
404,000 in Christchurch). These were the figures cited on Wikipedia.
The problem is that standard is no longer in use. At the end of
2017, Statistics NZ quietly announced it had devised a new geographical standard that better accounted for the urban footprint of an area. It is called NZGA18 and expressly replaced NZSAC92.
This change has fundamentally altered the way we measure the populations of our cities and towns. What was once Wellington was split into four; two ‘‘major urban areas’’ (Wellington city and Lower Hutt city) and two ‘‘large urban areas’’ (Porirua and Upper Hutt).
Christchurch city lost about 40,000 people but because its urban population is more heavily concentrated, it remained largely intact as one ‘‘major urban area’’.
Overnight, at the click of a statistician’s cursor, Wellington nearly halved in size. And so it limped into third in the national population rankings, within reaching distance of an ascendant Hamilton in fourth. It makes intuitive sense. Given Lower Hutt, Upper Hutt and Porirua are large and distinct cities in their own right, it seems odd to include their residents as part of Wellington city’s population.
Armed with this data, I edited the Christchurch Wikipedia page to note it was the country’s second most populous urban area, which was quickly reversed.
A week later, the matter is still being debated among Wikipedia’s volunteer moderators; but for now, the pages of both Christchurch and Wellington continue to reflect a standard no longer in use.
It raises a broader philosophical question – who gets to decide where a city begins and ends? The Statistics NZ geographical standards are not the only method. Territorial boundaries are identified under the Local Government Act, which sets the jurisdiction of local authorities such as city and district councils. By this metric, Christchurch city is easily more populated than Wellington city
(385,500 vs 210,400).
The problem with these political boundaries is they include both urban and rural areas. A sheep farmer on the Banks Peninsula is thus a resident of Christchurch city.
Another metric is more vague; ‘‘greater Christchurch’’ and ‘‘greater Wellington’’ – terms which are commonly used and understood but neither of which is strictly defined. It is under this definition that Wellington comes the closest to being the second city; but even then it falls short. A request to Statistics NZ to provide population numbers for each showed ‘‘greater Christchurch’’ – in which it included Rangiora, Kaiapoi, Rolleston, and Lincoln, as well as several other small towns – had a population of
457,600, as of June 2019. ‘‘Greater Wellington’’ – in which it included Upper Hutt, Lower Hutt and Porirua – has a population of
418,000.
The case for Christchurch as our second city is persuasive. Whether you prefer the legal definition of a city, the statistical definition of an urban area, or the social construct of a ‘‘greater’’ city, Christchurch is the most populated in each.
It is time for this to be recognised, not just on Wikipedia but in our collective psyche.
Wellington is our capital city; Christchurch is our second city.