London's population is expected to fall by 300,000 this year, and Sydney's by up to 200,000. Stats NZ is forecasting a drop in Auckland's population also. The reason? Mobility and migration changes due to Covid-19.
Massey University migration expert Paul Spoonley told Kathryn Ryan it's a global trend.
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“I think what you’re seeing around the world, particularly in high-income countries is, with the collapse of migration because of covid, it’s reinforcing something that’s been going on for sometime.
“London’s population has not been growing particularly fast, nor has New York’s, but without migrants it goes into negative territory and you can see that with Auckland.”
He said there are two factors in play with Auckland, one is people moving out of the city to other parts of the country but the most significant factor is there’s no migrants and no growth.
Spoonley says it raises the question of whether big city growth has finally hit a plateau and will begin to end.
“Remember, these cities have been growing enormously fast and have become, in some cases, megacities. One of the conversations that’s happening in the UK is whether it’s the end of peak-London, is this is end of London’s growth.”
There’s also the fact that Covid-19 has put into stark relief the idea that we can work remotely and don’t even necessarily need to be in the same city as our job’s office, or even country.
“Are big cities pricing themselves out of the market. While we think that’s a New Zealand problem, if you go anywhere in the Western world you’ll find it’s a very common problem.”
He says that the same situation is playing out in other major and smaller New Zealand cities like Wellington and Christchurch where the cities themselves are experiencing a net loss while the regions around them are growing.
“Coming back to Auckland, this is one of the interesting questions about the future of the city – have we seen the end of the CBD as we’ve known it. If you look at the population of the CBD and inner suburbs of Auckland, they’re all losing population. However, if you go north and south, those are forecast to grow more than 3 percent this year.”
The fourth wave of Covid-19 through Europe, combined with the Omicron variant, has put paid to the ideas widely held that migration would open up in 2022 and the flow of migrants would resume.
“Even the poster child countries like Denmark have already moved quite rapidly to lockdown and, for those of us working in the international spaces and think about mobility internationally, we really do not think that 2022 will see a significant increase in the number of people migrating around the world. 2023 possibly or 2024 almost certainly, but it all depends on what happens with Covid and how individual countries react to Covid.
Spoonley says some of his European colleagues are already talking about the ‘Covid decade’ and how changes will roll out over the next ten years.
“We’re not sure what the combination of some of the big changes we’ve being seeing in terms of how we work, our demography, combined with Covid, what the immediate future is. It’s very difficult to foretell.”
