Ethnic enclaves in New Zealand?

Most studies of ethnic segregation use relative measures of the residential separation of various groups within cities. The models that they are implicitly testing call for absolute rather than relative measures, however, and these are employed here in a comparative study of Maori, Pacific Island and Asian ethnic minorities in New Zealand's 36 largest urban areas. We find relatively little evidence of ghetto/enclave-like concentration of individual groups, except in some smaller cities where the Maori comprise a substantial proportion of the total population. There is more evidence of clustering of the Polynesian populations as a whole, however, and certainly so relative to the more recent Asian immigrants, which suggests the importance of economic disadvantage in the production of those differences. Levels of segregation across New Zealand's urban system are closely linked to the ethnic group's share of each urban area's population. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.