What does The State of the City report measure?
The report provides an analysis of Auckland’s performance relative to its international ‘peers’ of a similar size and location, across five key pillars — opportunity and prosperity, innovation and knowledge, culture and experience, place and connectivity, and resilience and sustainability.
Each pillar includes Auckland’s performance at glance, and includes strengths, challenges and risks, and where performance can be raised going forward.
The State of the City report was commissioned by the Committee for Auckland, in partnership with Deloitte and Tātaki Auckland Unlimited.
What is Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s place in the world?
What strengths, challenges and insights does The State of the City – 2023 report identify for Auckland? Discover and download the report.
How does Auckland compare to its global peer cities?
Auckland’s strengths, challenges and direction
Taking the benchmarks in aggregate, Auckland is ahead of the majority of its peer cities in six out of the 10 categories assessed here. This should be viewed as positive given that the peers are also cities renowned in their regions for their quality of living.
Experience and sustainability remain areas of comparative advantage that reflect Auckland’s setting, landscapes, atmosphere and lifestyle – and some of the planning and policy it has put in place.
Relative to the other cities, Auckland’s biggest gap is in innovation. This has knock-on effects to opportunity and knowledge. The report data also points to infrastructure deficits, workforce shortages and systems resilience as competitive challenges relative to other international cities. If these persist and Auckland underperforms, it has a direct effect on productivity, and in turn on prosperity and equity, at a time when talent is mobile and when other cities offer very appealing wages and opportunities.
Despite these challenges, benchmarking highlights plenty of reasons that Auckland should feel confident. Its inherited assets and appeal stack up. And while fresh from devastating floods, Auckland still surpasses others on the fundamentals of clean air, low pollution, uptake of renewables and recycling, and less carbon-intensive ways of living and doing business.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to The State of the City lead contributors Dr Tim Moonen, Jake Nunley, Borane Gille and Benjamin Lahai-Taylor at The Business of Cities — an urban intelligence firm providing data and advice to 100 global cities, companies and institutions.
This report also benefited from the guiding inputs of The State of the City Steering Group, as well as research input from Tātaki Auckland Unlimited.
The New Zealand Government’s Auckland Policy Office and Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures at Auckland University are also insight partners in The State of the City report.