Rethinking human capital, creativity and urban growth

Do jobs follow people or do people follow jobs? A number of currently prominent approaches to urbanization respond to this question by privileging the role of individual locational choice in response to amenity values as the motor of contemporary urban growth. Amenities, it is often said, have an especially potent effect on the migration patterns of individuals endowed with high levels of human capital. However, these approaches raise many unanswered questions. Theories that describe urban growth as a response to movements of people in search of consumer or lifestyle preferences can be questioned on the grounds of their assumptions about human behavior, as well as their silence in regard to the geographical…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• JR
  John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation
• EA
  Economic and Social Research Council

  Award: ES/G005966/1