Driving factors for attracting creative knowledge workers in the Amsterdam metropolitan area. The views of high-skilled employees, managers and transnational migrants

Abstract

This report is a synthesis of three previous studies which analysed the attractiveness of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area (AMA) for three groups: creative knowledge workers and graduates, managers in selected creative knowledge industries and transnational migrants in the creative knowledge industry who are working in the creative knowledge sectors. The studies were conducted between July 2007 and December 2008. One of the main aims of all three studies was to tease out of the proposed growing importance of the creative knowledge workers goes in hand with a change of the evaluation of the location factors in metropolitan regions. Florida proposed in his books a presentation that Amsterdam can be seen as a model for the future development. It is a compact city which oriented towards cycling. It has one of the highest shares of foreign population. Looking at the path development of Amsterdam, we also expected that the AMA would score high on soft factors like tolerance and diversity. The results, however, bring other points to the fore. Still, the labour market is reported to be the most important factor. This is followed by other hard factors such as the availability of educational institutions and the situation of the housing market. The latter, however, works as a push factor. Since not all creative knowledge workers can be conceived as affluent and especially starters, creative workers and also some groups of transnational migrants (PhDstudents) receive about average income, some groups of the creative knowledge workers are sensitive in this respect. The housing market in Amsterdam in particular is divided between a large, inexpensive social housing segment which is not accessible for most of the average earning creative knowledge workers and a small segment of expensive private sectors housing. The evaluation of the soft factors showed that soft factors alone hardly motivate creative knowledge workers to accommodate in Amsterdam. Also the named soft factors often vary between the groups. Unexpectedly, the importance of personal trajectories and personal networks was often reported as one of the most important reasons to live, work and stay in the AMA. Florida appears to construct our temporary society as fluent and he portrays the individuals as socially and spatially independent. The results of the studies however show that the embeddedness of persons in a local and regional life world with strong personal ties is a more accurate portrayal of the contemporary society in the AMA.