Shape of the Suburbs

Last week­end a friend asked on Twit­ter wheth­er any­one had made a New Zea­l­and equi­val­ent of this poster of Lon­don bor­oughs, which took the out­lines of the bor­oughs out of con­text by arran­ging them alpha­bet­ic­ally while keep­ing them to the same scale. This revealed both the weird­ness of some of the shapes, and the strik­ing con­trast in scale between the largest and smal­lest ones.

It turns out you can­’t do this for New Zea­l­and in gen­er­al, since in most cit­ies sub­urbs don’t have offi­cial bound­ar­ies. But Wel­ling­ton is dif­fer­ent! So I down­loaded the sub­urb bound­ar­ies from Koordin­ates, and with a little help from R, ggplot2 and sf, cre­ated the fol­low­ing:

It’s a bit hard to read at that scale, but click­ing it will bring up a much lar­ger ver­sion. For space and lay­out reas­ons, I omit­ted the purely rur­al Makara and Ōhāriu, but I kept in a few oth­er offi­cial sub­urb shapes that are much big­ger than the actu­al sub­urbs due to the inclu­sion of large rur­al areas (Owhiro Bay, I’m look­ing at you).

As well as the vast scale dif­fer­ences (such as between dinky Vogeltown and sprawl­ing Tawa), this pro­voked much dis­cus­sion about the oddity of the shapes. Coast­lines played a big part, of course, plus old bor­ough bound­ar­ies, Mein Smith’s urb­an grid, rur­al prop­erty edges, and the pub­lic con­sulta­tion pro­cess that led to these “offi­cial” defin­i­tions (no doubt includ­ing argu­ments often fueled by snob­bery and prop­erty-value pan­ic).

Of the res­ult­ing shapes, people on Twit­ter had no short­age of snarky com­ments. John­son­ville came in for par­tic­u­lar ridicule, vari­ously described as a vir­us, a tumble­weed and “a dropped bird shit” (harsh, but accur­ate, accord­ing to the John­son­vil­lian who pro­posed that one). Here’s a lar­ger ver­sion:

Pip­itea reminded someone of a sax­o­phone (“the Kenny G of Wel­ling­ton sub­urbs”). When zoomed in, it becomes a par­tic­u­larly hairy sax­o­phone, due to all those wharves:

Seatoun, per­haps appro­pri­ately, looks like a Kraken’s tentacle:

Houghton Bay “looks like it’s leg­ging it”, while Southg­ate resembles a toe­less foot­print, and Crofton Downs was described as a Tur­key. I also think that Tawa looks a bit like a leaf, though dis­ap­point­ingly not a tawa leaf:

And just for fun, here’s a little glitch I ran into when first attempt­ing the lay­out. The ‘burbs all ended up centred but super­im­posed, which I thought looked rather pretty in an abstract way giv­en a bit of trans­par­ency: