Research suggests that Amsterdam is currently the Netherlands's most attractive city to live in.

The source for this perfectly fascinating conclusion is the seventh edition of the annual Municipalities Atlas (Atlas voor Gemeenten). It compares the fifty largest Dutch municipalities (the so-called G-50), against 40 different criteria. Amsterdam proved to be the winner partly because of its wide cultural offering and improved physical accessibility over recent time, a factor that had in the past always been a negative one.

For the first time the Atlas introduced the idea of the so-called 'creative class'; scientists; ICT, engineering, legal, financial and organizational specialists; journalists and of course such people as artists, designers, authors, architects and TV producers. The creative class of a city is believed to be one of the factors important to the growth of the local economy.

But Amsterdam's creative class rather lags behind others due to shortage of owner-occupied properties the researchers found. Amsterdam proved to be the most attractive city to creative class 'subgroups' such as bohemians and homosexuals. Most of the Netherlands' ICT people live in the towns of Zoetermeer ('Nerdistan'), Gouda and Almere.