Abstract:  Economic and urban geographers have paid considerable attention to creative and cultural industries, both for their propensity to cluster in urban neighbourhoods and their potential to drive economic development. The thesis of the “creative class” has been a central topic of academic debate and urban planning since the dawn of the 21st century. It is widely believed that a city’s economic prosperity is directly related to its ability to attract and retain “creative people.” Within this context, our study aims to examine the residential patterns of the “creative class” in Riga, Latvia, using geo‐referenced individual‐level census data from 2021 and a multi‐scalar k‐nearest neighbour approach. We identify a pronounced spatial concentration of creative class workers in the historic inner city and adjacent pre‐war neighbourhoods, with substantial variation across subgroups: Cultural workers show the strongest inner‐city clustering, knowledge and creative industry workers display moderately dispersed but still core‐oriented patterns, and leisure industry workers are the most spatially integrated across the city. Creative class workers are markedly underrepresented in Soviet‐era housing estates, reflecting established socio‐spatial divides, rather than active displacement processes. These findings demonstrate that “creative class” residential patterns in Riga align with fragmented forms of urban transformation characteristic of post‐socialist cities, while revealing significant internal heterogeneity that challenges the notion of a unified “creative class.”

Keywords:  creative class; knowledge workers; residential patterns; Riga

Published:   18 February 2026

Issue:   Vol 14 (2026): Digital Transition and New Forms of Spatial Inequality (In Progress)