Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2015

Publication Title

Applied Geography

Volume

63

First Page

166

Last Page

183

Abstract

Richard Florida's creative class theory posits that highly skilled workers with creative- or knowledge-intensive occupations are particularly sensitive to ‘quality of place’, a key component of which is an open and tolerant attitude toward different peoples, cultures, and lifestyles. While diversity, as a proxy for tolerance, has proven to be a relatively weak pull-factor at the inter-metropolitan level, the potential role of neighborhood-level diversity in the residential location of creative class workers has yet to be explored empirically. In this study we use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and geographically weighted regression (GWR) to test the hypothesis that there exists significant associations between particular types of neighborhood diversity (i.e., sexual orientation, language, race, and income) and the proportion of workers with specific creative class occupations. The results of our Chicago case study suggest a significant positive relationship between the creative class and the proportion of gay households and income diversity, but not racial or linguistic diversity. Overall, diversity appears to play a limited role in predicting where creative class workers reside, though the GWR analysis indicated substantial spatial variation in the strength of association between neighborhood diversity and creative class share across the study area.

Comments

© 2015 Bereitschaft and Cammack. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Download

Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Included in

Psychology Commons

Share

COinS
 

Funded by the University of Nebraska at Omaha Open Access Fund