Skills and Cities

Creative industries have become fundamental in signalling the economic wellbeing of cities and urban regions. Workers who are attracted to the sector tend to have strong preferences when it comes to the neighbourhoods they want to live in, with factors such as job availability and urban amenities playing a large part in their decision.Skills and Cities analyses these factors and looks at the implications for urban and regional policy across a range of European cities. Drawing conclusions from the Netherlands and Scandinavian cities Copenhagen and Helsinki, this book sheds new light on the debate about the importance of jobs and urban amenities for attracting high-skilled employees. This edited collection brings together international literature and individual residential experiences from different cities, presenting policy simulations and highlighting the differences between urban and suburban groups. Subsequent chapters discuss the location preference and settlement process of international migrants and students in an attempt to understand what it is that attracts highly-skilled workers to a particular area. This book concludes by expertly drawing together the key issues surrounding the residential behaviour of highly educated workers and students.This collection will be of interest to researchers and policy makers in urban planning, as well as Postgraduate students researching housing preferences.

‘Starting from a revisited concept of the Florida ‘creative class’, the book analyses location preferences of creative industries workers and highly qualified human resources in Europe (or North Europe) for urban development and spatial planning in large European cities.’ — Francesco Capone, PhD, University of Florence, Italy.'This book presents a fascinating collection of empirical insights into the residential preferences of knowledge workers and the role of amenities for their locational choices. It thereby fosters an empirically grounded debate on agglomeration advantages in knowledge societies.' — Prof. Dr. Ilse Helbrecht, Humboldt University, Germany. 'Over the past decades, scholars have forcefully debated whether skilled workers are attracted to cities because of job opportunities or amenities. This landmark book marks the latest developments in research on skills and cities, with a special emphasis on stated and revealed locational preferences of highly-educated workers and their implications for urban development. This impressive volume contains a large amount of empirical chapters by prominent scholars in the field, and provides an excellent and balanced view on one of the hottest and highly-debated topics in urban and economic geography in the last decades.' — Ron Boschma, Utrecht University, the Netherlands; Lund University, Sweden.

Sako Musterd is Professor of Urban Geography at the Centre for Urban Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.Marco Bontje is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Urban Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.Jan Rouwendal is Professor at the Department of Spatial Economics of VU University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.