Karima Kourtit

Impact of Cultural “Ambiance” on the Spatial Distribution of Creative Professions A Modeling Study on the Netherlands

Creativity has in recent years received much attention from the research community, in relation to both technological innovation and knowledge spillovers. In the same vein, the concept of a creative class and of a creative city has gained a rising popularity. The present study aims to investigate the impacts of the urban “ambiance” on the spatial dispersion of heterogeneous types of creative people over different urban agglomerations. To that end, creative people are classified according to their profession or job class into Bohemians, creative core, and creative professionals. This article, then, seeks to relate the presence of each of these groups to the cultural ambiance of a given locality beside other moderator variables. Next, an econometric model is constructed and applied to explain the spatial distribution of creative professions in the Netherlands. Our study first maps out the spatial spread of these three creative classes in the Netherlands. Next, the shares of these creative classes are related to cultural, ecological, ethnic, and geographic characteristics of Dutch municipalities. Our results show that Bohemians and people belonging to the creative core exhibit a specific spatial pattern: they appear to be overrepresented in municipalities with a relative overconcentration of culture, nature, and ethnic diversity and with a short distance to job places.

Tourism and Voyeurism in Heterotopia’s: The Role of Perception and Information in the Behaviour of Visitors to Amsterdam

Tourists are not only regular visitors of important distinct places of interest. In making their decisions what or where to visit, they are also influenced by the (expected or realized) observed behaviour of others. A particularly interesting case of such social externalities is formed by so-called ‘voyeurism’, the phenomenon that visitors are visibly interested in—and attracted by—the preservice and spatial motives and behaviours of other visitors. Essentially, voyeurists derive their visitor utility from the observable behaviour of others, e.g. by watching them or speculating on their motives when they pass by. The present paper offers a novel empirical approach to these issues; it focuses on tourist voyeurism in the Red Light District of Amsterdam, with an emphasis on two well-known characteristic phenomena in this area, viz. prostitution and soft drugs. On the basis of existing literature that has demonstrated the importance of tours as an educative tool for tourists, we analyse if and how the perceptions of visitors have changed, through a panel study of 29 foreign students, and identify changes in their perceptions, after they have been exposed to real-world and site-specific factual information on this area, inter alia through a professionally guided field tour. Tools used in the present paper to analyse the voyeurism phenomenon—based on a before and after experiment—are multivariate analysis and regression techniques, while as a start a content cloud analysis is employed as an introductory exploratory tool. It turns out that information provision by a tour may change the site perceptions of voyeurists, but less so their value systems on the objects or people observed.

A BIG DATA DASHBOARD ARCHITECTURE FOR A COMPUTABLE INTELLIGENT CITY

This paper aims to sketch the principles and design of advanced smart city research from the perspective of digital big data, against the background of the emerging “New Urban World”. This study takes its starting point in the need for up-to-date and knowledge-based decision support systems for modern cities and sketches the cornerstones of an “Urban Dashboard” for modern urban policy analysis. Keywords: trading zone, integrated conservation, sustainable development

New Urban Economic Agents: A Comparative Analysis of High-Performance New Entrepreneurs

Abstract Migrants are often the carriers of new skills and original abilities. This study focuses on the importance of ‘new urban entrepreneurship’ - in particular, ethnic or migrant business firms - as a major driver of creative and urban dynamics and economic vitality in urban agglomerations. The paper offers a general account of both backgrounds and socio-economic implications of migrant entrepreneurship in large agglomerations and highlights the socio-economic heterogeneity in motivation and performance among different groups of migrant entrepreneurs. This demographic- cultural diversity prompts intriguing questions about differences in business performance among distinct groups of migrant entrepreneurs, even in the same ethnic group. In the paper, a recently developed and amended version of data envelopment analysis (DEA), viz. super-efficiency, is presented and applied to a group of Moroccan entrepreneurs in four large cities in the Netherlands. The main research aim is (i) to identify the best-performing firms (so-called ‘entrepreneurial heroes’) from a broad management and business perspective, while (ii) the background of our findings are more thoroughly analysed. The paper ends with some general concluding remarks on urban business strategies.