Dense and Denser

The Auckland Unitary plan was released and our little stem-cell of a community up in Riverhead is concerned that we will be swallowed by urban sprawl thanks to the redefining of the Rural Urban Boundary (RUB).

This post isn't really about that, but it's what sparked my investigation (as well as reading this article a while ago and deciding to delve into the figures myself). I hear people mention Auckland's spread out population and unnecessary urban sprawl all the time. "Auckland is the size of London with one tenth the population", they say. As well as, "Auckland is too spread out, that's why public transport doesn't work". Then there's the age old adage that I've heard since cows outnumbered Albany residents, "in terms of land area, Auckland is the second largest city, behind Los Angeles".

I'm not sure where the latter came from. In fact, it's actually very hard to find metropolitan area statistics, as these are defined differently in each country and mean different things. According to Wikipedia, "the parameters of metropolitan areas, in both official and unofficial usage, are not consistent"; so a comparison is flawed from the beginning. However, like a good scientist I'll proceed anyway. Using the numbers I could get hold of, I found that the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area encompasses LA and Orange county and covers 12,520 km², while the Greater Auckland Region (a similar geographical type of area) only covers 4,894 km². I guess that doesn't really say much, because it's only two metropolitan areas. So, I found a couple more metropolitan areas for comparison. The Tokyo Metropolitan Area is 13,400 km². That rules out LA as being the largest. The Sydney Metropolitan Area covers 12,145 km². Not as big as LA, but still bigger than Auckland. It's still hard to find any data on the whole 'volcanic pancake' theory, but it's not looking promising.

I'm here to write about things that matter to people though, like housing density and public transport. For that we have to concern ourselves with the urban area. This is the more populated part of a city. In Auckland, of the 1.5 million people that live in the greater metropolitan area, approximately 1.4 million live within the urban area. Demographia defines an urban area as, "the lighted area that can be observed from an airplane (or satellite) on a clear night". When you look at a city on Google Maps, it's reasonably obvious what would be called the urban area. It's the large grey mass nestled amongst green fields.  Here's a very rough diagram I made showing the Auckland urban area overlayed on London, Sydney and Los Angeles.

You can see that Auckland (the one that looks like a depressed seahorse) is considerably smaller than the other cities. It's one third the size of London, so there's another comparison that's inaccurate. Overall, the Auckland urban area ranks 229th in urban area size; equal with Kiev, Nanchang, Warsaw and Huntsville, Alabama.  "But the population is much smaller", you say. This is true, however next we look at population density within those urban areas; those statistics are much easier to come by and tell a different story.

Ignoring the developing world and their over-crowded cities (not altogether or course, just for the purpose of this post), here is a table of Auckland's population density compared with other major cities (hand selected by me for maximum dramatic effect).

According to this, Auckland is on par with Los Angeles, a little less dense than Amsterdam and denser than Sydney. Denser than Sydney? But their public transport is amazing?! That's right, so there goes another argument. Our public transport sucks just because it does, not through any fault of the city's layout. Since we're always trying to live up to our big brother, let's look a little closer at Australasia.

Auckland is actually the most densely populated city in Australasia. Even Hamilton and Christchurch are more densely populated than Sydney (although I'm sure these figures are pre-earthquake) and Wellington is equally dense. This is just the urban area, remember, not all the rural parts and satellite towns. But even in regards to this part of Auckland, people complain about public transport and the fact that we're building "out not up". I won't go into the fact that when the council dares to suggest people build up, there is opposition to that as well.

The fact is, Auckland isn't as sprawling as people seem to think. It's urban area is considerably smaller than most other major cities and it's population density is higher than many. Does that mean I want Auckland to keep expanding and Riverhead to be swallowed up? Of course not. But it will. I just hope that the low density excuse gets phased out and we can focus on improving infrastructure like public transport alongside the expansion. Most important of all, I hope people consider the actual population density of Auckland when complaining about urban sprawl instead of assuming we're more spread out than LA just because they can see a tree from their bedroom window.

PS: I spent a while putting together a full spreadsheet of all the urban land areas and populations in the world (taken from Demographia.com), so if you want it you can download it here.

All Summer in a Day

If you hadn't heard, Ray Bradbury passed away recently at the age of 92. Since his not wholly unexpected demise, I learned that he only ever acknowledged Fahrenheit 451 as being science fiction, since it was the only story that could come true. All others he considered fantasy, despite being quoted as saying, "The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance; the idea that anything is possible."

One of my favourite short stories I've ever read was written by Ray Bradbury and shared its title with this post, or rather the title of this post was posthumously plagiarised from his short story. If you haven't read it, do. You can download a PDF here. If that doesn't work, try Google, or whatever replacement exists in the dystopian future you currently live in where anarchy rules and Dropbox links no longer work. Don't come back to this post until you've read it; it won't make sense and I might ruin the ending.

So, for those who have read it, which should be anyone reading this far down the post, you will remember that it is a very sad story about a poor girl who, through an unintentional consequence of school bullying, misses a very, very rare event. That event is, of course, a break in the clouds and a brief glimpse of sunshine. Well, I wish to present to you evidence that Ray Bradbury was wrong about his stories being fantasy. For you see, we live in a city that over the past year has begun to resemble a certain Venusian settlement in more ways than a rising bully population.

In the past 12 months, Auckland has been subjected to 41.3 days of constant rain. Not 'constant' constant, but if you add up every rainy hour, that's what you get. That means it's been raining 11.3% of the past 12 months. So what, you say, that's 324.6 days of glorious sunshine. Au contraire, my arithmeticulous friend, the sun doth not shine at night. But you're right, 11.3% might not be that bad. Rain a bit at night, concentrate it over winter and voila; nice, long dry periods for all those outdoor activities. Unfortunately, the rain wasn't concentrated. It's been spread so thinly that we have actually had more rainy days than dry ones. A depressing 51.7% of the last 366 days have had at least 0.2 mm of rain (the minimum rainfall measurement at Auckland Airport). As you can see here, March and April have been the only months recently to buck this average, with January barely scraping above the bar.

In fact, as you can see from the graph to follow, the longest stretch of consecutive dry days we've had is 12 days. That's not even a fortnight without a bit of rain. And that stretch was in April, when all us working schmucks were safely tucked up in our office chairs. In the summer months preceding that the longest dry spell was a mere week.

I don't have time to go into long-term means, or rabble on about how this most likely has nothing to do with climate change. It'll probably all get better, we're due for a good run, blah, blah etc... There's nothing anyone can do about it, I just think of poor Margot every time I look up from my computer and see a break in the clouds and a glimpse of sunshine

I guess then, my point is this: the weather is miserable, you have every right to bitch and moan and if you have any school-aged children locked in your cupboard, there's no hurry to let them out just yet.