Economic and urban geographers have paid considerable attention to creative and cultural industries, both for their propensity to cluster in urban neighbourhoods and their potential to drive economic development. The thesis of the “creative class” has been a central topic of academic debate and urban planning since the dawn of the 21st century. It is widely believed that a city's economic prosperity is directly related to its ability to attract and retain “creative people”. Within this context, our study aims to examine the composition and the residential patterns of “creative class” in terms of distribution of employees by creative and knowledge intensive industries in Riga, Latvia. Indeed, we argue that the residential location and concentration of those working in the creative and knowledge sectors are linked to the existing low-intensity and fragmented forms of gentrification in inner-city urban neighbourhoods. However, they are simultaneously more complex than a simplistic desire to live in vibrant or artistic neighbourhoods. Thus, the study intends to clarify whether residential preferences of “creative class” in Riga formed in urban neighbourhoods recently experiencing the most profound urban social change. We apply an explicit geographic scale by considering the k-nearest neighbour approach. Thus, we explore the residential geographies of the “creative class” based on geo-referenced, anonymised individual-level data derived from the most recent population census of 2021 using Riga City as a case study.
Berzins et al. (Tue,) studied this question.