The Quest for Creative Industries: A Multilevel National Study of the Impacts of Urban Form on the Geography of Creative Industries

Abstract

Creative industries have gained increasing attention in light of the cultural economy as viable magnets for local and regional economic development. Policy makers thus would benefit from attracting creative industries as potential economic boosters. However, it is hard to target such catalyst industries without better knowledge of the urban form conditions that may influence the location preference of these industries; do creative industries favor compact, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with transit accessibility to employment? This paper, as one of the first national studies, answers this question using a multilevel modeling approach to control for the socioeconomic and built environment characteristics at both local and regional levels. Factor analysis is used to define a Creative Score, which captures the geography of creative industries using the number of creative firms, employment, the percentage of creative firms, and a creative employment location quotient. The compactness/sprawl index is used at both census tract and metropolitan levels as a proxy for urban form. Accounting for the socioeconomic factors, the findings suggest that, at the neighborhood level, the compactness index is significantly and positively associated with the Creative Score. Every 10% increase in compactness score results in a 0.3% increase in Creative Score at the census tract level. This is partly because compact neighborhoods provide creative industries with a stronger consumer base as a reliable source of development. Compact urban form also serves agglomeration economies by facilitating knowledge exchange, reducing travel time and costs, and giving greater accessibility to destinations by transit.

Major and recent trends in creativity research: An overview of the field with the aid of computational methods

“…Creative industries have a preference for urban areas, but there are differences in how they cluster together within these areas depending on whether they belong to traditional cultural creative industries like publishing or technology‐related creative industries like advertising (Lazzeretti et al, 2008). Also, creative clusters, different from traditional industries, are observed in a compact neighbourhood within the cities priming accessibility and networking opportunities (Coll‐Martínez et al, 2019; Granpayehvaghei et al, 2019). Research in this subtopic explores such differences in a variety of cities and industry types. 3‐e Creative tourism .…”

High-tech business location, transportation accessibility, and implications for sustainability: Evaluating the differences between high-tech specializations using empirical evidence from U.S. booming regions

“…Secondly, while this study offers an innovative approach in identifying the location of high-tech zones, it is not within the scope of this paper to investigate which factors actually determine high-tech firm location decisions. More evidence is needed to link the locational preference of high tech firms, inside and outside the high-tech zones, to other factors widely supported by the literature such as access to talent, diversity and inclusion (Granpayehvaghei et al, 2019;Hamidi and Zandiatashbar, 2018b, 2017a, 2017bZandiatashbar et al, 2019;Zandiatashbar and Hamidi, 2018). Furthermore, while our sectorial classifications come from one of the most widely cited studies done by Harvard's economist Michael Porter, it is possible that the changes in the classification leads to the changes in the ANOVA findings.…”

“…These place-based characteristics align well with sustainability strategies such as smart growth (Wlodarczak, 2012). However, these studies often do not address the specific needs of particular types of high-tech firms (Bakhshi et al, 2008;Granpayehvaghei et al, 2019;Hamidi et al, 2018;Hamidi and Zandiatashbar, 2018a, 2017b, 2017aZandiatashbar and Hamidi, 2018).…”

Transportation Amenities and High-Tech Firm Location: An Empirical Study of High-Tech Clusters

“…While quality-of-life factors and place-based amenities are known to affect location decisions of knowledge-based firms ( 9 , 28 , 29 ), another line of research should look at differences between categories of high-tech sectors in workforce recruitment, as the value of place-based benefits may vary by tech sector. For instance, sectors such as IT depend on footloose economic activities and flexible production systems and therefore prefer part-time and flexible employees.…”