Geography of New Zealand an urban area. About percent of the population live in the 17 main urban areas (population of 30,000 or more) and percent live in the four largest cities of Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington, and Hamilton. New Zealand's peoples have been defined by their immigrant origin, the on going process of adaptation to a new land, being changed and changing those who came before. This process has lead to a distinct distribution of culture across New Zealand. Here language and religion are used as markers for the far richer concept of culture. These metrics unfortunately exclude the political rural-urban divide and also
Wellington Region the lowest percentage of machinery operators and drivers (4.1%) and the lowest percentage of labourers (7.1%). The region is second only to Auckland in many statistics related to breadth of ethnicity. In the 2006 census Wellington had the second-highest Asian population (8.4%, Auckland 18.9%) and the second-highest Pacific Islander population (8.0%, Auckland 14.4%). Around 25.3 percent of the Wellington region's population was born overseas, second only to Auckland (39.1 percent) and on par with the New Zealand average (25.2 percent). The British Isles is the largest region of origin, accounting for 36.5 percent of the overseas-born population in the region.