Background

Urban extents provide a snapshot of the size and shape of the portion of the Auckland region that is urbanised (focused primarily on the main urban/built up area). These snapshots are based either on historical information, or aerial ortho-imagery (aerial photographs) from which digital spatial datasets have been created. These datasets are stored as polygons in Auckland Council's corporate spatial data (GIS) repository (known as SDE). The measuring of the location of the extent of Auckland's urban area is currently undertaken by council's Land Use and Built Environment Research team, part of the Research Investigations and Monitoring Unit.

Auckland Council currently stores 15 urban extent snapshots, the earliest being 1842 and the latest dataset being 2014. ...

Auckland Council, August 2014