Is Auckland the largest city in the world?

Have you heard this before, the idea that Auckland is the biggest city in the world in terms of area covered?

?It seems that Auckland being the most extensive city in the world is an accepted fact for quite a lot of people. It’s a pervasive myth, oft repeated at barbeques and gatherings and in letters to the editor. It’s the sort of thing that taxi drivers and tour guides like to say to visitors arriving in the city. I remember hearing this at least as far back in the 1990s, yet I’ve just seen it repeated again on social media.

The usual implication of Auckland being so huge is the “common sense” conclusion that driving cars is the only viable kind of transport.? It’s obvious that public transport will never work in such a spread-out city, so there is no point trying to improve other modes.

Needless to say it’s not true… except that it kinda is. Well sort of.

There is a kernel of truth to the claim, but not one that has much bearing on what kind of transport works in Auckland.

What is true is that Auckland Council has one of the largest administrative areas of any local government in the world. It covers almost five thousand square kilometres of land, stretching from Pukekohe in the south to Wellsford in the north, and from the Waitakere ranges in the west to Great Barrier Island in the east. This is something it inherited from the former Auckland Regional Council, and the Auckland Regional Authority before it. But there’s a hint in those former names: this is the area of the Auckland region. It’s an administrative boundary rather than one that represents the actual metropolis of the city. You can see the extent of the Auckland Council area in this map here:

According to Statistics New Zealand, the Auckland region has a population of 1.72 million people. If we divide that by the 4,863 square kilometres covered by the regional area we get a population density of 354 people per square kilometre, which is almost an acre of land per person. To illustrate what that means, if every person in Auckland stood alone spaced out across the region the nearest person would be about a hundred metres away in any direction.

At a regional level you can say that Auckland is indeed very large, very spread out and, on average, has density that is far too low for public transport to be effective and affordable. But then again this is also far too low for roads and motorways to be effective and affordable too, or power lines, sewers or internet cables for that matter. The problem with looking at statistics at a regional level is that you dilute everything evenly across the whole region, which includes a whole lot of rural land with very few people in it. When it comes to whether public transport is viable or cars a necessity, it’s the urban area where people mostly live that really matters, not the extent of the local government boundary or the amount farms and mountain ranges within it.

I crunched some numbers on land use zoning in the Auckland region, and currently the urban parts of Auckland and its suburbs cover 670km2 of area (this includes the likes of Pukekohe, Helensville and Wellsford which are arguably separate towns rather than suburbs). While that’s not exactly small, the area of the city at its broadest definition covers just 14% of the Auckland region. More than four-fifths of the supposed largest city in the world is not city by any means, but farmland, regional parks and wilderness.

However, by far most of the Auckland regional population lives within the urban area. Overall 94% of Aucklanders live in the city, suburbs and satellite towns that make up just 14% of the land area.

In total Auckland’s urban population is 1.61m people, so if you divide that by the 670km2 of urban area, you get an average population density of 2,400 people per square kilometre. This actually makes Auckland a fairly dense city, compared to the rest of Australasia and North America at least.

The population density that Aucklanders live at is around seven times higher than the population density of the region, because almost everyone lives in the 1/7th of the region that is actually covered by the city. In that context, Auckland is neither too large nor too spread out for public transport to work, and it’s clearly dense to the point where traffic and parking congestion is a problem, rather than an ideal outcome.

There’s some really good data on the extent of cities from the European Commission data office, they have a dataset that shows the urbanised areas of the whole world. This is taken from satellite scanning of the surface to identify built-up surface features like buildings, roads and streets, versus crops, trees and wilderness. This doesn’t show population, only areas that are built on. I like this data because it’s completely unaffected by administrative boundaries or the way population is measured and sorted in censuses, which can be a confounding factor when you look at population density.

I generated a few images of cities around the world to the same scale, you can clearly see here that Auckland is sure the biggest city in New Zealand, but it’s not particularly large compared to Australian cities and it’s much smaller that some of the truly largest cities on the planet.

...so no, Auckland is no way near being the largest city in the world by any meaningful measure.