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: