I'm trying to find some shapefiles (administrative boundaries) of New Zealand CITIES and SUBURBS/NEIGHBOURHOODS.
I've found some boundaries for the Country, Regions, Districts (not useful for me) .. but not cities and suburbs.
Can anyone lead me in the right direction, please?
If you're looking for administrative (legal) boundaries, then they are published by Statistics New Zealand and you can easily download them from Koordinates:
http://koordinates.com/#/maps/statsnz/layers/
There are regional council boundaries, territorial authority boundaries, ward boundaries and community boards, which are all legal boundaries of local government. There are general and Maori electorates for central government elections. There are also non-legal statistical area boundaries, like area units, urban areas, and meshblocks.
There's no official legal definition of a city's boundaries, or in most cases, of the suburbs within a city. The only councils with officially defined suburbs are
Wellington City: http://koordinates.com/layer/1431-wellington-city-suburbs/
Porirua City: http://koordinates.com/layer/6073-pcc-suburbs/
The former North Shore City also had official suburbs, but that council no longer exists and I couldn't find GIS data for them online.
The closest thing to a national suburb set is the "NZ Localities" dataset maintained by the NZ Fire Service http://www.fire.org.nz/ and while it is free (as in beer) you will need to agree to a licence agreement to use it: http://officialinfo.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/response-from-the-fire-service/
Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) has more information about how you can get the NZ Fire Service Localities data (suburbs) at http://www.linz.govt.nz/about-linz/our-location-strategy/geospatial-data-themes-and-datasets/administrative-boundaries-theme/nz-localities-suburbs-dataset. As synecdoche mentioned, it's free of charge but you'll have to request access to it via a signed licensed agreement. Contact DSI-Support@fire.org.nz to find out more, or try to make an Official Information Act request using this page: https://fyi.org.nz/new/new_zealand_fire_service_commission
If you just need a small sample, Wellington City Council provides freely downloadable suburb boundaries (in shapefile, geojson, etc) which you can access at http://beta.data.govt.nz/dataset/wcc-suburbs-boundaries.
*Note: In the future, you may find more data available at http://beta.data.govt.nz/dataset?q=suburb, the site is still in beta testing stage but it's looking really promising!
Koordinates is often a good place to look to try and find GI data, although I do not know if data at the scale you require exists.
There is quite a bit of data you can download off the the DIVA-GIS website as well:
There is a file here for NZ administrative areas. Just not sure of all that it contains though.
