Tom Hutton

Dr Thomas Hutton is Professor in the Centre for Human Settlements and School of Community & Regional Planning, University of British Columbia; and an Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, UBC. Dr Hutton's research and teaching interests are directed toward theoretical and normative issues of urban and regional change among advanced and transitional societies. A major set of themes is concerned with the cultural economy of the city, with recent work including articles on creative industries and labour, the influence of space and built environment on the shaping of new industry formation, and the role of the inner city in cultural development. A research monograph, The New Economy of the Inner City: Restructuring, Regeneration and Dislocation in the 21st Century Metropolis, will be published in late 2007 by Routledge. Dr Hutton is conducting a four-year research program on 'creativity and innovation in the city-region' with Professor Trevor Barnes of the UBC Geography Department, as part of a national project. A second principal research theme concerns processes and implications of transformative change in Canadian city-regions, including co-direction (with Professor Larry Bourne of the University of Toronto) of a project on employment and labour force change within the Canadian urban system, and work on multi-level governance in Canada. The third domain of Dr Hutton's research addresses service industries, industrial restructuring, and urban transformation within the Asia-Pacific, including a series of articles and papers, and a co-edited book (with Peter Daniels of the University of Birmingham, UK, and Professor K C Ho, National University of Singapore), Service Industries and Asia-Pacific Cities: new development trajectories, published (2005) in the RoutledgeCurzon 'Growth Economies of Asia' series. Recent professional work includes an appraisal of urban and regional planning in the Amsterdam-North Holland Region, the BC Government Asia-Pacific Gateway Project, cultural policy and planning in Italian and Canadian cities, and an appointment to the Federal Mountain Pine Beetle Advisory Board.

Major Areas of Expertise in Sustainability Planning

1. The economy of the central city

History of the central city; processes of industrial restructuring; service industries and urban change; evolution of advanced production systems; changes in central city labour markets; clusters and socioeconomic agglomeration factors; intersections of the 'new economy' and the 'urban cultural economy'; occupational change and urban social class reformation; the built environment and economic change.

2. Planning for the metropolitan core

Evolution of planning models for the urban core; influence of postindustrialism, post-Fordism, and postmodernism; policies for urban structure and land use; evaluating the 'splintering' and 'regeneration' hypotheses in the 21st century inner city; expressions of normative interest in the core: narrative, polemical, analytical; cultural policy for the central city; planning for central city labour and housing markets; innovation in community planning for the metropolitan core; Vancouver as a policy laboratory; comparative policy studies

3. Service industries, industrial restructuring and urban transformation within the Asia-Pacific region

Restructuring and globalization; services, immigration, and the transnational
city; services and the changing space-economy of the Asia-Pacific city-region; services and state-directed development policies and programmes; urban
system impacts of accelerated tertiarisation; services and the changing
iconography of urban progress and development; case studies of services
and urban change among 'lead' cities in the Asia-Pacific; new industry
formations in inner city settings