Introduction & Session Notes. Opening Address. Plenary 1, 2, 3, 4. Panel Discussion 1A, 1B, 1C. Review & Preview. Plenary 5. Panel Discussion 2A. Session Notes, Population Change & Social Services. Panel Discussion 2B, 2C, 2D. Plenary 6. Panel Discussion 3A, 3B, 3C. Closing Address.
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PANEL DISCUSSION 2B - POPULATION CHANGE & URBAN EXPANSION AND INFRASTRUCTURE
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Department of Geography, University of Waikato
A Preliminary Analysis of the 1996 Census Data
DENISE CHURCH,
SESSION NOTES,
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2.2 A global transformation
There is a very extensive literature on ethnic diversification of city-based populations in countries in Europe, North America and Australasia. Since the 1970s, the expansion of large, multi-ethnic urban population concentrations in many parts of the world has been fostered by significant economic and social changes associated with what has become know as "globalisation". The restructuring of New Zealand's government, economy, welfare system, labour market, and immigration policy since the early 1980s is part of this process of "globalisation".
This is not the place for a review of literature on these themes, but the New Zealand urban experience, especially that of Auckland, needs to be placed in a wider context in order to appreciate the fact that local trends are a reflection of larger global transformations. The reflections of more than 70 geographers on the impacts of these processes on New Zealand's rural and urban places have recently been drawn together by Le Heron and Pawson (1996).
The development of cities with sizeable multi-ethnic populations has become a focus for extensive international collaborative research and policy debate through UNESCO's Management of Social Transformation (MOST) Programme, the United Nations' Habitat II World Conference, the operationalisation of the Rio Summit's Agenda 21, and, most recently, through an innovative programme called Metropolis initiated by Citizenship Immigration Canada and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
New Zealand has been represented at the important international meetings sponsored by these programmes, and is currently an active participant in MOST's Asia-Pacific Migration Research Network, which is exploring social and political dimensions of growing ethno-cultural diversity in the Asia-Pacific region, and the Metropolis Steering Committee which is developing a co-operative, international research and policy platform to examine the effects of international migration on urban centres.
2.2.1 Immigrants and cities
As the co-ordinators of Metropolis recently pointed out in background papers for their second international conference for research and policy on migrants in cities held in Copenhagen in September 1997:
It is widely recognised that contemporary international migration is a powerful and inescapable agent of social change that affects virtually every domain of civic and private life. Overwhelmingly, the major impact of migration has been on cities. Large cities have always been the focal point of social, demographic and ethnic transformations, transformations that are invariably changing the broader society. Greater ethnic, cultural, religious and social diversity is leading to more complex interactions between migrants and host populations, as well as among migrant communities. Innovation and creativity are needed to understand the full effects of migration, to meet successfully its challenges, to capitalize on the opportunities it presents, and to moderate the tensions it produces (Metropolis, 1997).
These international comparative research and policy-related programmes on immigration and urban transformation have considerable relevance for New Zealand. The debate about immigration targets, for example, in reality is a debate about how many migrants our major cities can absorb while also coping with higher than average growth led by natural increase and internal migration.
At the first international conference for Metropolis in Milan in 1996, Mayors from some of Italy's largest cities challenged politicians to allow those responsible for administering the cities to have some say in immigration policy. Their very logical argument was that it is in the cities that most migrants congregate; they do not spread through the nation's settlement system in a way which reflects the total population distribution. It is the cities, especially the larger ones, which inherit the costs and benefits of high levels of immigration.
2.2.2 Managing social transformation
In a political economy where there is much greater devolution of responsibility for "managing" social and economic change at the level of the locality or region, inevitably local (or regional) authorities want a greater say over policies which will influence social and economic change in their areas. This message came through very clearly at a seminar on rural social transformation organised by MAF and the New Zealand National Commission for UNESCO on 22 October 1997. Mayors from several of New Zealand's smaller urban areas emphasised that local authorities must be empowered through greater involvement in the process of formulating national policy if they are to effectively "manage" social transformation at a local level.
In the context of migration and urban population change it is important to appreciate that the urban environment (in all its physical, cultural, social, economic and political dimensions) is not just a "space" in which immigrants "happen" to live, but is one with which immigrants are always in a dynamic relationship. As Demetrious Papademetriou (Director of the International Migration Policy Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Co-Chairperson of Metropolis) pointed out in the Milan conference:
... the experiences migrants encounter in urban settings shape their opportunities just as their presence produces social, cultural and economic changes -- not to mention political reactions [witness the immigration debate in the run up to the New Zealand elections in 1996] -- that in turn alter the urban fabric. The resulting dynamic becomes even more unpredictable when taking into account the fact that large cities are also where some of the more intractable fault-lines of late 20th century are most pronounced and are felt most anxiously -- from deepening fiscal crises and enduring economic uncertainties to the human effects of competition in the global economy. ...
Exploring the complex interaction between newcomers and a city's other residents is critical because successful cities now and in the future must understand better -- and exploit more systematically - - immigration's potential benefits (economic, social, demographic, or in terms of revitalizing the physical infrastructure) while at the same time controlling and attenuating -- or at least managing more effectively -- immigration's adverse effects (crowding, segregation, competition among marginalized groups for resources of all types, and the like) (Papademetriou, 1996, 2-3).
The issue of "management" of immigration at the level of the city is a contentious one. Clearly there must be a sound understanding of the role of migration in sub-national population change, and it is this theme which is developed in subsequent sections of this paper.
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- INTERNAL MIGRATION AND URBAN POPULATION CHANGE
- 3.1 Recent trends in internal migration
International migration is only one of the demographic processes impacting on urban populations. Indeed, of the four processes which account for numerical changes in populations of particular places (births, deaths, internal migration, international migration), international migration is the least important for all but a small number of urban areas in New Zealand. Internal migration and natural increase are the main drivers of population change for most of New Zealand's cities, towns and rural places.
Amongst the larger cities, only Auckland MUA had more overseas immigrants (104,000) than immigrants from other parts of New Zealand (87,400) (Table 3.1). In all of the other main urban areas internal immigrants exceeded the numbers of overseas immigrants during the intercensal period.
Table 3.1: Overseas and internal immigrants to Main Urban Areas, 1991-1996 Main Urban
AreaOverseas
immigrants1Internal
immigrants2%
internalWhangarei 1,854 9,336 83.4 Auckland 103,956 87,375 45.7 Hamilton 8,520 31,179 78.5 Tauranga 3,993 20,868 83.9 Rotorua 2,274 9,897 81.3 Gisborne 918 5,490 85.7 Napier-Hastings 3,771 15,906 80.8 New Plymouth 2,091 8,385 80.0 Wanganui 1,161 6,735 85.3 Palmerston North 4,383 17,793 80.2 Wellington 21,366 38,928 64.6 Nelson 2,421 10,095 80.7 Christchurch 20,475 42,486 67.5 Dunedin 5,823 19,932 77.4 Invercargill 1,284 7,128 84.7 Source: As for Table 2.1
Clearly Auckland is different from the rest of urban New Zealand when it comes to the respective contributions which internal and international migration make to population change. This issue is discussed further in the context of components of population growth in Section 4.
New Zealand's population is quite mobile by international standards. Approximately 20 percent of residents aged 5 years and over have been recorded as living in a different region from the one they were living in five years earlier since the migration question was first asked in censuses in 1971 (Heenan, 1985; Statistics New Zealand, 1991; Young and Bedford, 1996).
As noted earlier, the brief for this Panel Discussion includes the following questions: "Is there still a rural-urban drift?"; "Is there a significant reverse flow for some groups, e.g. Maori?" "How significant is the trend to inner-city apartments?" "Are our major cities continuing to expand at the edges -- i.e. rural encroachment?". It is not possible to address these questions at depth here, but some observations are made on each of them in this section.
A word of caution is needed at the outset about one key problem with the 1996 Census data on internal migration, and this relates to the much higher incidence of "not stated" cases for place of usual residence five years ago than in previous censuses. This inevitably has had an impact on the magnitude of the in-migration and out-migration flows recorded between specified places. However, the incidence of "not stated" cases does not cause a serious problem when overall net migration gains and losses to specific cities are being considered. It is the net migration figures, rather than the absolute flows in and out of particular places, which are referred to most frequently in this section.
3.1.1 "Rural-urban" or "urban-rural" drift?
The overall patterns of movement between the different components of New Zealand's settlement hierarchy show that all of the groups of urban places have experienced net migration losses to rural areas during the early 1990s (Table 3.2). The overall net migration loss from urban to rural New Zealand between 1991 and 1996 was 31,600 people. The biggest net losses from urban to rural areas were from the main urban areas (-14,000) and the minor urban areas (-13,700).
These patterns were becoming established a decade ago (Bedford, 1983; Heenan, 1985; Krishnan, 1987). In the early 1980s rural areas experienced a small net migration gain, mainly from minor urban areas. However, the movement out of cities into selected rural districts has become much more pronounced in recent years.
Table 3.2: Net migration gains and losses to the main components of the hierarchy through internal migration, 1991-1996 Component In-migrants1 Out-migrants Net migration New Zealand2 Main Urban Areas 107,562 121,617 -14,055 Secondary Urban Areas 39,135 43,080 -3,945 Minor Urban Areas 55,131 68,889 -13,758 Rural Centres/Areas 99,901 68,143 +31,758 Auckland MUA Main Urban Areas 32,487 25,515 +6,972 Secondary Urban Areas 4,689 4,386 +303 Minor Urban Areas 9,150 9,945 -795 Rural Centres/Areas 9,630 19,242 -9,612 Total 55,956 59,088 -3,132 Hamilton MUA Main Urban Areas 10,935 12,195 -1,260 Secondary Urban Areas 1,857 1,176 +681 Minor Urban Areas 4,536 3,132 +1,404 Rural Centres/Areas 4,515 5,088 -573 Total 21,843 21,591 +252 Wellington MUA Main Urban Areas 18,909 20,793 -1,884 Secondary Urban Areas 4,245 7,032 -2,787 Minor Urban Areas 3,051 3,603 -552 Rural Centres/Areas 2,445 4,719 -2,274 Total 28,650 36,147 -7,497 Christchurch MUA Main Urban Areas 14,718 12,750 +1,968 Secondary Urban Areas 4,936 2,907 +2,079 Minor Urban Areas 4,887 4,638 +249 Rural Centres/Areas 6,129 9,405 -3,276 Total 30,720 29,700 +1,020 Dunedin MUA Main Urban Areas 7,668 7,902 -234 Secondary Urban Areas 1,650 1,191 +459 Minor Urban Areas 2,085 1,782 +303 Rural Centres/Areas 3,273 3,357 -84 Total 14,676 14,232 +444 - 1
- The numbers of in-migrants and out-migrants shown in this table exclude two categories of people whose place of residence in 1991 was not adequately specified. First there are those who gave no place of residence for 1991 (these are the people excluded from Table 3.1). Second, there are the people whose place of residence in 1991 was inadequately defined to permit allocation to a specified area. These people are included in the total internal immigrant figures shown in Table 3.1 for the MUA. They cannot be included in calculations of net gains and losses.
Source: As for Table 2.1.
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