The linkage between the lifestyle of knowledge workers and their intra-metropolitan residential choice

As knowledge-based economy is recognized as a powerful engine of economic growth and regional competitiveness, policy makers increasingly invest in branding their cities as knowledge-cities and focus on retaining and attracting knowledge-workers. Consequently, most studies related to the residential choice of knowledge workers focus on the inter-regional level, and empirical evidence regarding the residential choice of knowledge-workers at the intra-metropolitan level remains scarce. This study investigates the linkage between the residential choice of knowledge-workers and their lifestyle encompassing life-cycle stage, work-role and leisure activities, subject to economic and spatial constraints. The importance of this issue derives from the role of housing as key enabler for attracting and retaining knowledge-workers, and from evidence regarding the role of knowledge workers in promoting the contradictory trends of urban sprawl and inner city revitalization. The analysis consists of two stages. First, distinguishable clusters of knowledge-workers according to their lifestyle are identified by means of self-organizing maps (SOM) for pattern recognition and classification of multi-dimensional data. The applied method is a two-stage clustering process that comprises SOM followed by neural gas, Bayesian classification and distance matrix edge analysis. Following, the residential choice of these clusters is analyzed in terms of home ownership, location, building type, location and dwelling size. The analyzed data are retrieved from a custom designed revealed-preferences survey among workers in the high-technology and finance sector, who work and reside in the Tel-Aviv metropolitan area in Israel. Results identify five groups of knowledge workers that significantly differ in terms of lifestyle and residential choice: nest-builders, bon-vivants, careerists, entrepreneurs and laid-back. Bon-vivants and entrepreneurs largely prefer to reside in the metropolitan core, although they differ in terms of home ownership, dwelling size and building type. While bon-vivants rent small apartments, entrepreneurs tend towards owning large dwelling units and single detached houses. Careerists strongly prefer to own large single-detached houses in the middle and outer ring of the metropolitan area. Nest-builders exhibit strong preference for home ownership and large apartments or houses, and their main reason for suburban locating is the ability to reside in larger dwellings and single-detached houses. Laid-back trade-off between location and dwelling characteristics, although they exhibit weaker preferences towards home ownership, large dwellings and single detached houses than nest