Research Project
Shenzhen wants to become a creative city. Policies to reach that goal are mainly aimed at providing attractive work locations, city marketing and organizing events. But how about attractive living environments for people working in the creative industries? Creative workers have been interviewed about where they live, where they would like to live, and what the city of Shenzhen could do to improve their housing situation. The project is a collaboration with Urbanus and links to their on-going work on Chinese creative cities.

Contact Marco Bontje for more information on his project at: M.A.Bontje@uva.nl

Biography
Marco Bontje is assistant professor of urban geography at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is also the programme director of the Research Master Urban Studies at the same university. His main specialisation field is urban geography, but in both research and teaching he combines this with issues of economic geography and urban and regional planning. He has done research on the attractiveness of European city-regions for people and companies in the creative and knowledge-intensive industries, amongst others in the EU 6th Framework project ’Accommodating Creative Knowledge’ (ACRE) and the ’Inventive City-Regions’ project. Other research topics include or have included shrinking cities in Europe (see amongst others the recently published special issue ’Understanding shrinkage in European regions’ of the journal Built Environment), sustainable development of city-edge and suburban work locations (Marie Curie Host Fellowship in Leipzig, Germany, 2002-2004), and the the extent to which Dutch national spatial planning policy managed to reach its targets (PhD thesis, 2001). Marco was on a sabbatical leave (September-December 2012) hosted by the City University Hong Kong.