Tom Hutton

Dr Tom Hutton is a contributor at the Centre for Human Settlements; a Faculty Associate in Green College, UBC; 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, was published in 2008 in hardcover by Routledge, with a softcover version published in 2010. 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 [Innovations Systems Research Network] directed by Professor David Wolfe and Professor Meric Gertler at the University of Toronto. 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, Professor Richard Shearmur of INRS-Montreal, and Professor Jim Simmons, Ryerson) of a project on employment and labour force change within the Canadian urban system, and work on multi-level governance in Canada, as part of a MCRI project directed by Professor Robert Young, University of Western Ontario. In 2011 Hutton, Bourne, Shearmur and Simmons co-edited Canadian Urban Regions: Trajectories of Growth and Change (Oxford University Press). 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. In 2011 Hutton, Daniels and Ho co-edited a follow-up volume with Routledge, New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities: from industrial restructuring to the cultural turn. Dr Hutton and Leonie Janssen-Jansen of the University of Amsterdam recently co-edited a special theme issue of International Planning Studies (Routledge) on “Rethinking the Metropolis: Reconfiguring the Governance Structures of the Twenty-First-Century City-Region”, with papers on Milan, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Portland and Vancouver. Michael Indergaard (St Johns University New York), Andy Pratt (King’s College London) and Tom Hutton are co-editing a special theme issue of Cities [Elsevier] on the subject of ‘The Creative Economy after the Fall of Finance’. Tom Hutton and Catherine Murray (Simon Fraser University) are conducting research on issues of governance and institutions in Vancouver’s cultural economy. Trevor Barnes and Tom Hutton co-manage a SSHRC project comparing the economies of Seattle and Vancouver, with Murray McKenzie as key researcher on field work for the Seattle project. Professional work includes adjudication of applicants for an ideas competition directed by the City of Vancouver Planning Department for re-imagining the “Eastern Core” in Vancouver’s metropolitan core; a partnership with colleagues from Laval University (Quebec City), Barcelona and University College Dublin on the “Megapolitan” graduate student mobility project funded by Human Resources Canada; an appraisal of urban and regional planning in the Amsterdam-North Holland Region, the BC Government Asia-Pacific Gateway Project, and continuing work on cultural policy and planning in Italian cities.