Migration, Residential Preference, and Economic Development: A Knowledge-based Approach Regarding Locational Preferences of Two Disparate Subgroups of the Creative Class

The creative class literature centers on regional economic development, urban policy, and amenities. The creative class literature is considered at the metropolitan scale and is argued to be highly mobile. According to Asheim and Hansen (2009) , there are three knowledge bases of the creative class, analytic, synthetic, and symbolic. The three knowledge bases vary across two dimensions of ‘climate’. People climate refers to factors that positively effect the location of people, while business climate refers to factors that positively effect the location of businesses. The analytic knowledge base is comprised of economic activities that are based in scientific processes and have been codified and use formal models. The synthetic knowledge base includes economic activities that apply combinations of existing knowledge in innovative ways. Finally, the symbolic knowledge base involves the processes of creating cultural symbols, design, and images. Combining theories of migration and creative class, this work examines the migration tendencies of two knowledge bases, symbolic and synthetic, artists and engineers respectively, across three scales, metropolitan, submetropolitan, and individual, to determine if these two subgroups have the same residential preferences.

This is accomplished using three generalized linear models across three scales. The first model examines the difference between migrating artists and engineers for 52 U.S. metropolitan areas with populations greater than 1 million. The second model examines the difference between migrating artists and engineers for 1,177 Public Use Microdata Areas, across a submetropolitan scale, for the same 52 U.S. metropolitan areas used in Model 1. The third model is a logistic regression in order to determine if migrating artists and engineers select similar urban or suburban locations. This study suggests that migrating artists and engineers, as representatives of two disparate knowledge bases, symbolic and synthetic, select different metropolitan areas in which to reside. Additionally, migrating artists and engineers select different Public Use Microdata Areas. The logistic regression suggests that migrating artists and engineers select different locations within metropolitan areas. This analysis suggests that the creative class is not the same across the two different knowledge bases, thus raising questions about the homogenous nature presented in the creative class theory.