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Abstract
The paper contributes to the on-going debate about the relative importance of economic and amenity-related location factors for attracting talent or members of the creative class. While Florida highlights the role of amenities, openness and tolerance, others instead emphasize the role of regional productions systems, local labour markets and externalities. The paper sheds light on this issue by analysing the changes in the spatial distribution of four groups of artists over time: visual artists, performing artists, musicians and writers. Little evidence is found for amenity-related factors influencing the growth rates of regional artist populations. Moreover, artists are shown to be a heterogeneous group inasmuch as the relative importance of regional factors significantly differs between artistic branches.
Acknowledgements
This work was prepared in the context of the research project “Creative Lower Saxony: regional distribution, spatial mobility, start-up potentials and economic relevance of creative people”. Our thanks go to the participants of the third research seminar “Creative Regions in Europe: Challenges and Opportunities” of the Regional Studies Association Research Network in Copenhagen for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Moreover, we would like to thank Jürgen Schneider from the Social Security Insurance for Artists and Writers providing regional data on artists and the anonymous referees for their useful suggestions.
Funding
The project was funded by the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony [grant number 76202-17-5/10] in the period from 2011 to 2015.
Notes
1. We distinguish between economic and amenity-related location factors. One can find the distinction between soft and hard location factors in the literature, too.
2. Following Brenner (Citation2004), we call the relative number of members of the creative class in relation to the overall population “relative agglomeration”.
3. A potential reason for this might be the lack of longitudinal data, which is a requirement for such analyses.
4. SD = standard deviation.
5. *, ** and *** indicate significance at the levels of .1, .05 and .001, respectively.
6. Starnberg is located between Munich and the Alps with the beautiful landscape of Lake Starnberg.
7. The variation coefficient is the ratio of a variable's standard deviation and mean.