The role of different urban amenities in attracting knowledge workers : presenting the research design and first results

Human capital is a fundamental factor for every major urban agglomeration in modern-day society and economy. Urban amenities facilitate face to face contact both for pleasure and for productivity. Hence, the aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between these amenities and the presence of highly-educated knowledge workers on a neighbourhood level: do amenities such as shops respond, through time, to the presence of knowledge workers or lack thereof, and to what extent? Or do amenities such as theatres attract knowledge workers? Identifying relationships between amenities and knowledge workers can offer local policy makers better tools for planning strategies to attract more highly-educated people with high incomes to the urban area. We aim to present an analysis on a highly-detailed spatial scale-level (e.g. four-digit zip code or neighbourhood areas) by linking lifestyle-data on level of education, income, et cetera about inhabitants (with a special focus on highly-educated knowledge workers) to detailed data about different types of urban and cultural amenities in the vicinity. We plan to first do a cross-section analysis to explore the relationships. To address causality issues, we will subsequently expand our analysis by including a time-dimension in our model. Both data sets are available on a detailed spatial scale and for a series of years.