Jane Mah Hutton is a landscape architect, writer, and researcher focusing on the expanded social and ecological relationships of the act of building. She is interested in making connections between everyday construction materials (like wood, earth, gravel, and cultivated plants) and the ecosystems and human cultures that they come from and pass through. For example, what does a carefully designed architecture project have to do with the people that made it and the ecosystems whose materials were extracted? She studies gravel pits, plant nurseries, labor movements, landfills, and material cycles. Learning from political ecology, environmental history, and anti-colonial, feminist, and ecological science perspectives, Jane works between different research methods like situated fieldwork, photo and archival research, oral history, creative non-fiction, and material exploration. The research contextualizes contemporary construction within the legacies of colonial capitalist land development. Her projects aim to visualize and de-commodify an understanding of construction, strengthen connections between material practices and land relations in solidarity with people, landscapes, and other species elsewhere. She is interested in how design research and land-based practices can support social-ecological movements for policy change.
Recent book projects explore these themes: Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, Landscript 5: Material Culture – Assembling and Disassembling Landscapes, and the co-edited "Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial Current projects include: a study of the fragmentation of Southern Ontario by following the movements of beavers, white pine, clay, gravel, and demolition material; a short documentary film based on a family archive of a 1970s road trip across Asia; Jane is collaborating on efforts to promote deconstruction and material reuse in Toronto, and as well as to native plant supply for climate adaptation landscape projects also in the Greater Toronto Area.
View Associate Professor Jane Mah Hutton's faculty profile.