Evaluating Changing Residential Segregation in Auckland, New Zealand, Using Spatial Statistics

Much work on residential segregation in urban areas has focused on aspatial indices of urban residential segregation, largely ignoring locational aspects of the degree of spatial separation of different ethnic groups. The adoption of measures of global and local spatial autocorrelation has recently been suggested as a way of introducing a more explicit spatial approach to studying segregation. This paper uses two of those measures – Moran’s I and Getis and Ord’s G* – to explore segregation of the four main ethnic groups in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest and most multi-ethnic city, at the four most recent censuses held there. They are used to identify the clusters of census reporting units (meshblocks) where each group is significantly over- and under-represented, and to chart the degree of segregation within such clusters.