Last month, a Vision for Wellington event asked ‘What makes a world-class city and how does Wellington become one?’. The panellists didn’t offer many answers, but it’s a good question that deserves a deeper look.

What makes a world-class city? 

The question is broad and inherently vague, but we all have an instinctive understanding of what it means – world-class cities are high-performing centres of economics, culture and politics with a high quality of life and a wide range of opportunities. A few different organisations have developed ways of measuring this.

The Economic Intelligence Unit Global Liveability Ranking grades urban quality of life based on political stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. Wellington is 20th on the 2024 rankings, while Auckland is tied for ninth. It’s a good metric, but probably not quite the definition of “world-class” that Vision for Wellington had in mind. The top cities are almost always in Australasia, Scandinavia and Canada because it favours wealthy areas with low rates of crime and civil disorder.

The Oxford Economics Global Cities Index is a more thorough ranking, based on five metrics: economics, human capital, quality of life, environment and governance. In the 2024 index, Wellington is ranked 69th (nice), Auckland is 59th, and Christchurch is 87th. Again, that number is a bit misleading. All three New Zealand cities rank extremely highly in two categories – they are tied for first in governance based on New Zealand’s “political stability and stellar business environment”, while Wellington is ranked fifth in the world in environment, and Christchurch and Auckland are ninth and 10th. Wellington does pretty well in quality of life, coming in 66th.

The final two metrics tell a different story. On economics, Wellington is 189th. The city has high average incomes, but is weak in total GDP, employment growth and economic diversity. For human capital, Wellington is 165th. It gets points for having good universities and high rates of education but is weak in population growth, foreign-born population and corporate headquarters.

My favourite ranking is the Globalisation and World Cities Research Network city classification, which grades top cities as Alpha, Beta and Gamma, with pluses and minuses. Lower-ranked cites are graded as Sufficient or Highly Sufficient. The metric is based on the global connectivity of four “advanced producer services”: finance, law, accountancy and advertising. That may seem like a limited measure, but it’s quite elegant – those services are highly correlated with economically and culturally powerful cities. 

New York and London are the only cities to receive an Alpha++ grade. Auckland is a Beta+, alongside the likes of Athens, Montreal and Dallas. Wellington is a Gamma-, the same grade as Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Turin. Christchurch is classified as Highly Sufficient. 

Wellington is tied for 173rd, which may not sound impressive. But it’s notable for one key point: of all the cities in the world that receive a grade of Gamma- or higher, Wellington is the smallest by metro population. All the cities that rank above Wellington are unique in their own way. They have different geography, cultures and economies. But the one thing they all have in common is that they are bigger than Wellington.  

How does Wellington become one? 

The obvious conclusion is that to be a world-class city, Wellington needs to be bigger. It already has globally high incomes, education, quality of life and strong institutions relative to its size. The main thing holding it back is that there aren’t enough people. Between the 2018 and 2023 censuses, the Wellington region had a 2.8% population growth, one of the slowest rates of any region. Wellington City was the only council area to record a population decline. That’s not just a problem – it’s a crisis.

If there were one million people in the Wellington region rather than half a million, it would attract more businesses,  visitors and international artists. It would mean more ratepayers to spread the cost of infrastructure across. And it would mean more wealth and productivity. Chris Bishop is fond of the statistic that doubling a city’s population could increase output by 3.5%. The idea of a million Wellingtonians is not some far-off dream. Auckland added an extra half a million people in the last 20 years. In that time, the Wellington region only managed 98,000. 

Wellington’s stagnating growth deserves serious interrogation from civic leaders. It’s a difficult, multi-faceted problem that raises many questions, including:

Where will they live?

Getting an additional half a million people into the Wellington region means building a lot more homes. Where will they go? There are a handful of potential greenfield areas in Upper Hutt, Wainuiomata and Kāpiti, but the greatest opportunity is in brownfield developments: tearing down old buildings and replacing them with taller ones. Wellington’s regional councils are taking the right steps to address this with new district plans that encourage more townhouses and apartments, and both the National and Labour-led governments have embraced reforms in this area.

Where will they come from?

Wellington, like New Zealand more broadly, is obsessed with so-called “high-quality migrants”. In 2023, WellingtonNZ spent half a million dollars on a campaign trying to recruit New Yorkers to move to Wellington to enjoy quieter streets and better work-life balance – which sounds more like the pitch for a sleepy seaside retirement town than an ambitious, world-class city.

The greatest source of population growth isn’t wealthy people moving for the lifestyle; it’s young people and immigrants moving for greater opportunities. Auckland’s population boom came through immigration from the Pacific islands and Asia. London absorbed peasant farmers during the industrial revolution. New York famously said, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

One of the reasons it is more politically convenient to talk about recruiting wealthy people is that it allows you to side-step the gnarly problem of housing affordability. Prices have come down recently, but housing is still too expensive, and there isn’t enough of it. People generally want to move somewhere they can afford to live.

How do you overcome political opposition to growth? 

Most ambitious cities want to get bigger and attract more people. That shouldn’t be a controversial point. And yet, in Wellington, it is. There will be some people reading this who baulk at the idea of their city being choked by an extra half a million residents. More people can mean traffic problems, noise and competition. Most of all, it means change – and some Wellingtonians are incredibly resistant to change. Wellington can’t keep its “small town” identity while also seeking to be a world-class city. 

Even Wellington’s new District Plan, which is a huge step towards housing growth, is based on embarrassingly unambitious assumptions. The council’s projections assume 30,000 new dwellings will be needed over the next 30 years. Multiple groups of submitters tried to challenge those statistics to suggest that the city wouldn’t grow as much the council thought. A group of Mt Victoria residents tried to argue that growth would be so slow that their neighbourhood only needed between 98 and 188 new homes over 30 years.

Local politicians have consistently treated population growth as a burden rather than an opportunity. We need leaders who see one million Wellingtonians as a goal rather than something to be feared.