Impact of Cultural “Ambiance” on the Spatial Distribution of Creative Professions

Abstract

Creativity has in recent years received much attention from the research community, in relation to both technological innovation and knowledge spillovers. In the same vein, the concept of a creative class and of a creative city has gained a rising popularity. The present study aims to investigate the impacts of the urban “ambiance” on the spatial dispersion of heterogeneous types of creative people over different urban agglomerations. To that end, creative people are classified according to their profession or job class into Bohemians, creative core, and creative professionals. This article, then, seeks to relate the presence of each of these groups to the cultural ambiance of a given locality beside other moderator variables. Next, an econometric model is constructed and applied to explain the spatial distribution of creative professions in the Netherlands. Our study first maps out the spatial spread of these three creative classes in the Netherlands. Next, the shares of these creative classes are related to cultural, ecological, ethnic, and geographic characteristics of Dutch municipalities. Our results show that Bohemians and people belonging to the creative core exhibit a specific spatial pattern: they appear to be overrepresented in municipalities with a relative overconcentration of culture, nature, and ethnic diversity and with a short distance to job places.