THOMAS HUTTON

Biographical Statement
From 1978 to 1991, Thomas Hutton was a senior economic policy specialist with the City of Vancouver, specialising in strategic urban development projects, land use policy, and international development programs. He received a doctorate (D. Phil) in Urban Geography from the University of Oxford in 1991. Since then, Dr Hutton has been Faculty Associate and Associate Professor in the Centre for Human Settlements, University of British Columbia. Dr Hutton's research priorities have included urban industrial restructuring in advanced and transitional societies, planning for the central city, the emergence of the 'New Economy' and creative industries, and problems of regional development in British Columbia. He is currently examining implications of the 'social economy' model of Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy for the metropolitan Vancouver region, in partnership with VanCity Capital.

Tom Hutton has published several books and many articles including The Transformation of Canada's Pacific Metropolis: a Study of Vancouver. Later this year, Routledge will publish a book co-edited by Dr Hutton, Peter Daniels (Birmingham, UK) and Kong Chong Ho (National University of Singapore) on Service Industries and Asia-Pacific Cities: New Development Trajectories.

Personal Connection
As a child I grew up in east Vancouver, but spent considerable time with my grandparents in Squamish. This was before the construction of the rail and road links, so Squamish always involved a 'voyage' of sorts. My grandfather (who emigrated from Scotland by himself in 1906, at the age of 16) was a locomotive engineer for the Pacific Great Eastern (PGE) railway. He and I were very close, and my brother and I loved to see him in the cabin of the locomotive as the train left Squamish for Pemberton, Lillooet, Seton Portage and other stops along the PGE route. In hindsight this experience has almost evolved as a kind of transcendent myth, so great does the distance between that period and present seem. (But I have the memories [and photos] to sustain this set of connections to people and place.)

My dominant impression of British Columbia in the 1950s and 1960s was that of a truly 'unbounded frontier' of resource abundance and wealth generated through the extraction, processing and export of staples. This 'abundance sensibility' (and personal contact with the 'proximate wilderness') was enhanced by frequent fishing trips with my father and brother, in which we always seemed to catch as much as we needed or wanted. Over the last decade or so I have been engaged in a series of research projects which have confirmed a trajectory of provincial staple depletion and pervasive environmental degradation, but I still find it astonishing that we in British Columbia could have 'progressed' from this era of unlimited resources wealth to one of limits and conflicts in less than a lifetime.