The creative and knowledge-intensive sectors have become more and more important in both national and regional economies, and increasingly urban economies have become internationalized. International migration of well-skilled, often well-paid, people serves different purposes in the economy. It can fill shortterm labour gaps or be used to address long-term skills shortages and help with the gradual development of the labour force. This has spurred policy and scientific interest in transnational migrants and their preferences and wishes. It is said that cities have to strengthen their links to global pools of creative-knowledge talent in order to remain competitive and that cities must pay attention to the conditions that attract and retain top layers of international migrants. One policy response has been that immigration policies in many European countries and at the EU level have shifted from restrictive policies to policies that actively aim at attracting higher strata of foreign workers. This development was spurred by labour shortages in the information technology sector and in parts of the service industries such as banking and the health sector. In 1999, EU countries formulated a common framework to manage migration and an important role was ascribed to legal migration for the enhancement of the knowledge-based economy in Europe in ‘The Hague Programme’ of 2004. Also a ‘blue card’ was introduced in 2009 which enabled employees with a sufficiently high income to smoothly enter EU countries. Consequently, many urban economies, and particularly those with a strong international orientation, have acknowledged a growing inflow of international ‘knowledge’ workers. This includes the two regional case studies in this research project. The Amsterdam Metropolitan Area and the Eindhoven Metropolitan Region have a growing international population, in which ‘better-off’ migrants account for a large proportion of population growth. In the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, already 13 per cent of residents are of ‘Western migrant’ origin; in the municipality of Amsterdam the proportion is 16 per cent (Regiomonitor 2014). The Eindhoven region offers more high-tech employment than regional technical graduates can fill in, which makes the region heavily dependent on talent from elsewhere, at least in the short term

(Van der Zee 2013). The (specific) number of international knowledge workers in the region quadrupled between 2007 and 2012 and is expected to further double before 2020. Around 80 per cent of the population growth is expected to consist of single-person households. It is a great challenge for both the city and the region to accommodate these workers and to offer housing that matches their demands (Municipality of Eindhoven 2014). Therefore, it is important to know more about their preferences and residential behaviour.