Centrality and Creativity: Does Richard Florida's Creative Class Offer New Insights into Urban Hierarchy?

Abstract

abstract To provide new insights into urban hierarchy, this article brings together one of economic geography's oldest and most well‐established notions with one of its newest and most disputed notions: Christäller's centrality and Florida's creative class. Using a novel original database, the article compares the distribution of the general population and the creative class across 444 city regions in 8 European countries. It finds that the two groups are both distributed according to the rank‐size rule, but exhibit different distinct phases with different slopes. The article argues that the two distributions are different because market thresholds for creative services and jobs are lower than thresholds for less specialized services and jobs. The article hence concludes that centrality exerts a strong influence upon urban hierarchies of creativity and that the study of creative urban city hierarchies yields new insights into the problem of centrality.