Most of today’s debates about the so-called creative class tend to focus on downtown areas or center cities. (For instance read this critical account.) This morning I came across this column by Patrick Holmes about the creative class in the Rocky Mountains area. It is a commentary based on a kind of state of the art report measuring the creative class in eight ‘Rocky Mountain’ US States. The report finds that most concentrations of the creative class are actually located in suburban areas or smaller towns. Only three central cities (Boise, Salt Lake City and Tucson) are the top creative places in their respective metropolitan area.

Somehow, I don’t think Richard Florida is worried by the findings.

In his column Holmes cites Florida’s thesis that “the most successful regions welcome all kinds of people. And they offer a range of living choices, from nice suburbs with single-family housing to hip urban districts for the ‘unattached’”.

With the broad definition of the creative class that Florida uses it is not surprising that housing preferences among ‘the’ creative class are highly differentiated. Housing preferences are influenced by a lot of different variables (including income, and household and demographic characteristics). Still, professional background seems to predict preferences at least to some extent. A couple of years ago I was involved in a research project to map the housing patterns of people with creative class professions in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. The patterns revealed that people with more artistic creative class professions (like artists, architects, media) are over-represented in the center city (Amsterdam), while people with more technical creative class professions (like ICT-workers and University Professors in natural science) are over-represented in the suburban areas. Interestingly the same patterns could be observed in the residential locations of university students.

When discussing the creative class, it is time to bring in the ideas of the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.