The geography of the creative class and its impact on regional development has been debated for some years. While the ideas of Richard Florida have permeated local and regional planning strategies in most parts of the Western world, critiques have been numerous. Florida's 3T's (technology, talent, and tolerance) have been adopted without considering whether the theory fits into the settings of a specific urban and regional context. This article aims to contextualize and unpack the creative class approach by applying the knowledge-base approach and break down the rigid assumption that all people in the creative class share common locational preferences. We argue that the creative class draws on three different knowledge bases: synthetic, analytical, and symbolic, which have different implications for people's residential locational preferences with respect to a people climate and a business climate. Furthermore, the dominating knowledge base in a region has an influence on the importance of a people climate and a business climate for attracting and retaining talent. In this article, we present an empirical analysis in support of these arguments using original Swedish data. Copyright (c) 2009 Clark University.

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Highly skilled workers are increasingly recognised as a key competitive asset for regional development, and claims have been made that emphasise the importance of certain amenities for the prospects of attracting this particular group of workers. We use a recent large-scale survey to investigate the relative importance of jobs versus amenities for the decision to migrate, as perceived by the migrants themselves. The paper thereby adds important insights to the existing literature that has hitherto mainly focused on analysing the extent to which aggregate migration flows correlate with employment-related or amenity-related factors. The results show that jobs are considerably more important for the decision to move among highly educated migrants compared with migrants with lower education.

The Nordic countries have a quite different urban structure and social systems than the USA. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden may then constitute a critical test of the empirical reach of Richard Florida's much cited creative class thesis beyond its empirical basis in the USA. This paper employs comparative statistics to examine the importance of the quality of place in attracting members of the creative class to Nordic city regions, and it analyses the role of the creative class for regional economic development. Florida's original study focused only on city regions with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Our statistical analyses mainly support Florida's results with regard to these larger Nordic city regions. The paper, however, also analyses smaller city regions, which are important in the Nordic urban structure. The findings are clearly less supportive for these smaller regions, which mean that the original creative class approach has to be considerably refined when used in the Nordic context.Regional growth, creative class, Nordic countries,

Since the late 1990s, the concentration of economic growth has increased in the urban areas of Denmark while peripheral regions of the country struggle with stagnating or decreasing population and increasing unemployment rates. This paper analyses the migration patterns and motives of highly educated people who relocate from urban areas to settle in Denmark's peripheral regions. The study makes a novel empirical contribution to the counter urbanisation literature by using socioeconomic microdata along with interviews to identify trends and motives of counter‐urban migration among highly educated people. The article demonstrates that counter‐urban migration decreases in times of financial crisis, and that the motives for highly educated people to relocate to peripheral areas relate to their preferences for housing conditions, local natural, and social amenities, together with job opportunities. Additionally, age and household composition play important roles in the motives for relocating. While families with children perceive the new location as permanent, the young and newly graduated perceive it as a stepping stone for a future career.