Peter Hall is a widely known urban geographer and town planner, author of “The World Cities” and “Cities of Tomorrow”. He was one of the more prominent speakers at a symposium that preceded Expo 86 in Vancouver, giving it a little academic heft.
The symposium, Tomorrow Begins Today, took place in 1984, and Hall’s topic was Have cities a future? – a title seemingly as fatuous as the name of the series. 
But remember, there was abundant evidence of the decline of city cores in the 1970s. Censuses were revealing actual contraction, including cities in Britain such as Liverpool and Manchester, even London.
“All this,” said Hall at the time, “makes it sound that the great cities do not have much future” – though he was not including Vancouver in that category. He wasn’t a pessimist, however, and wondered, in particular, “what if anything transportation technology has to do with all this” – the theme of Expo.
German cities, he noted, had been pumping very large sums of money into new rapid transit systems, starting with Munich prior to the 1972 Olympics. The federal government indulged virtually all major German cities, picking up most of the tab.
All this expense has been justified as part of an official policy … of providing good, cheap public transportation as an alternative to the use of the provate car in cities … Similar policies, of course, have been followed in some Canadian and American cities. Toronto, indeed, was a pioneer. What is not clear at present is whether such investments have had any real impact.
Nevertheless, Hall decided to “rush into prophecy” – and from the viewpoint of Vancouver in 1984, predicted what he thought would be the future of urban regions. And this is what he said:
The future urban pattern could well be a highlighted version of the present one. Major regional service centres, with good transportation and tourist infrastructure, will continue to grow but will also disperse.
Key workers may choose to live quite distant from their jobs, communicating electronically and commuting to their office on a part-time basis. Others will re-colonize the older inner city, rehabilitating and revitalizing it in the process; but the net result, perversely, is likely to be further outward displacement, since the new white-collar colonizers will live at lower densities than the older blue-collar population they displace.
Purely industrial cities both large and small are likely to be the real losers in this process, although a few may find new specialized roles as centres of craft industry or of industrial archaeology. So will small rural towns in less attractive locations, particularly in areas of industrialized agriculture (agribusiness), far from major regional cities.
He pretty much nailed it – just as H.G. Wells had done in 1901 in his prediction of the impact of the car, which Hall noted in his talk – and which we’ll add to an upcoming Annals of Motordom.
