June 2025
To celebrate and honour RAIC volunteers, we are pleased to introduce you to听Jennifer Cutbill, Architect AIBC, FRAIC.
Thank you, Jennifer!
1. Why did you decide to become an architect?听
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As a child I loved making art, solving puzzles, exploring nature, and building make-shift structures with friends in the woods around our home. In undergrad, I took a survey course in Art History that used architecture as a window into the complex interplays of social life, economic and political power, eco-social philosophy, science, and the technological innovation, art and craft that brought them into being鈥nd I was hooked. Actively engaging these issues to help make the world around us better was the next logical step.听 听
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2. How long have you been an RAIC member听and what do you see as the value of your membership?
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After graduating, I was quickly frustrated with what I saw as glaring disconnects between the 鈥渞eal world鈥� (status quo) and core practice priorities: climate, equity, and values cases embedding both as baselines. A mentor told me: 鈥渋f you don鈥檛 like it, do something about it鈥�, and recommended the RAIC. I signed up the next day and started volunteering with my local chapter. That was 15 years ago.
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For me, the value of being an RAIC member is helping advance and strengthen needed discourse, learning, and action on important issues shaping practice, and by extension, the communities we serve - current and future, human and more than human.听 Echoing Climate Action Engagement and Enablement Plan Steering Committee colleagues Olivia Keung and Mona Lemoine: this is both 鈥渁n opportunity and a responsibility.鈥�
3. Why do you volunteer for the RAIC?
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We have myriad opportunities to affect change as individuals - at the scale of our projects, teams, and firms. But the deeper 鈥渟ystemic transformations鈥� needed require broader collective action.听 As the national advocacy body for our profession, the RAIC provides a valuable platform for collective action across regions, regulatory regimes, and communities of place and practice.
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As Olivia also noted, 鈥渃ollective action [a]s both challenging and rewarding.鈥� I鈥檓 grateful for the learnings from both 鈥� and especially getting to work with and learn from insightful, inspiring, and dedicated colleagues across the country. Reflecting further, these experiences have also been formative in my professional development and the decision to launch my own practice (supporting institutional clients with upstream transformation). Some specific examples below.
- Volunteering with my local Chapter right out of school helped me better understand and engage local issues, the diversity of perspectives/drivers shaping them, as well as a platform for testing potential interventions.
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- Being elected to the Board right after getting registered (my first Board position, started three weeks before giving birth to my daughter) exposed me to more diverse contexts and considerations - including: valuable insights into organizational governance, strategic planning, and deliberative decision-making. It also provided the opportunity to help establish a standing Committee on Regenerative Environments (as well as the chance to help normalize babies and breast-feeding in meetings and conferences).
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- Working and (un)learning alongside inspiring and insightful colleagues across the country to co-develop the RAIC鈥檚 Climate Action, Enablement and Implementation Plans has, and continues to be revitalizing.
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- And attending the International Indigenous Design Summit in 2017 - organized by the Indigenous Task Force (including a tour of the Wabano Centre by Douglas Cardinal himself) - was nothing short of transformative. Architecture forever changed how I see the built environment, and this event forever changed how I see and understand the constructs I inhabit; opening the door to deeper (ongoing) un/learnings into true histories, ongoing injustices and harms, and my roles and accountabilities in relation for restorative paths forward.
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4. What do you find most challenging about working as an architect?听
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Growing shared understandings and collaborative capacities needed for required transformations. And doing so in ways that meet everyone where they are, while being honest (with ourselves and each other) about where we are, root causes of how we got here, and what needs to change; so that we can align values and visions to co-create futures where all can 鈥渕utually flourish鈥� (Potawatami botanist, educator and poet Robin Wall ).
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As architects, we鈥檙e deft at engaging systemic challenges, but the compounding crises we now face 鈥� unprecedented scales of climate breakdown (spatial and temporal), biodiversity loss, intersectional injustices 鈥� require different things of us. Not just new functional skills and new technological innovations (though we鈥榣l need these too), but shifting our ways of thinking, being, doing, valuing, and cultivating deeper capacities in relation. Capacities to see, name and engage root causes (e.g. extractive capitalism, anthropocentricism, colonialism, racism, ableism, heteropatriarchy). Capacities to challenge assumptions, norms and power dynamics holding status quo patterns in place. And capacities to do so in ways that are inclusive, equitable, just, caring, and that uphold the Knowledge Systems, rights, laws, and leadership of Host Nations 鈥� understandings and ethical approaches that have successfully stewarded the mutual flourishing of Lands, Waters, human and more-than-human relations across听 Turtle Island since time immemorial.
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5. Why is this area of advocacy important to you?听
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International science-policy consensus asserts the unprecedented scale, urgency and complexity of compounding planetary health crises - climate, biodiversity, intersectional injustices - underscoring imperatives for transformative (vs merely incremental) shifts and integrative (vs siloed) approaches (e.g. , ; ; ). We can see and feel the impacts around us everyday. As leaders of complex interdisciplinary teams and professionals with seats at tables of influence, we have tremendous potential to help enable these shifts.
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At the same time, the complexity, pace and scale can feel overwhelming alongside 鈥渞egular鈥� pressures of practice 鈥� especially as disasters grow more frequent, budgets tighter, fee undercutting deeper, and discourses more polarized. All of this makes the focus on 鈥渆nablement鈥漦ey. Understanding and addressing barriers and levers for effective action (internal and external) helps unlock greater impact with less effort, while helping all involved feel more energized and supported doing it.
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6. What do you think will most change/shape practice over the next five years?
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Google鈥檚 embedded (un-disableable) AI tells me that the most significant changes will come from two main drivers: integration of advancing technology (digital fabrication, IoT, quantum computing and machine-learning driven optimization, automation) and growing concern for climate action (and specifically sustainable technologies in response). Nested at the bottom of its 鈥渕ore detailed look鈥� bullets are mention of 鈥減ower dynamics鈥� (between companies / industries), 鈥渆thical considerations (re privacy) and their 鈥渟ocietal implications鈥� (superficially).
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While these seem self-evident and pose as comprehensive, perhaps less obvious and more important are what it doesn鈥檛 mention. Things like: the clear bias AI and its creators have towards techno-solutionism; that power imbalances are not just between corporate entities but between the (super) rich and everyone else 鈥� creating not just inequities but compounding social and ecological injustices (鈥渟acrifice zones鈥�, 鈥済reen colonialism鈥�, the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands and violation of Indigenous Sacred/Natural laws); the rise of misinformation and social fragmentation fueling fascist political regimes 鈥� and the roles AI plays in relation all of these. From eco-social impacts that outstrip purported efficiency gains (via unjust and unsustainable extraction of energy, water, critical minerals; land conversion; e-waste, etc.) to the systemic biases embedded in largely blackbox algorithms designed by a small handful of people (mainly super rich, white, cisgender, able-bodied men) and trained on data from predominantly unjust systems (reductive, anthropocentric, colonial, capitalist, racist, heteropatriarchial, ableist 鈥�).听听
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From a more holistic perspective, I think the aspects that will most shape practice (and society) in the coming years are not merely climate, AI, and in/equity, but paradigm shifts in how we understand the relationships between these issues, and our individual and collective agency and accountabilities in relation. Such as:
- shifts from whack-a-mole approaches to siloed challenges, to viewing as interdependent crises of planetary health, with our relationships with natural systems and each other at the root[1]
- shifts away from degenerative logics of mitigating risks/harms/(first) costs and cumulative losses; to regenerative logics of nurturing health/healing/care for compounding reciprocal co-benefits
- shifts away from myths of terra nullius and the supremacy of fragmenting, reductive, exclusionary economic- centric ways of knowing being, doing and valuing; to holistic, integrative, inclusive, ethics of care-centric alternatives 鈥� enshrined in distinct Indigenous Knowledge Systems, laws and leadership across Mother Earth.
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One of my favorite quotes about Architecture comes from critical anthropologist David Graeber: 鈥淭he ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently". While he doesn鈥檛 reference architecture specifically, for me, it captures the crux of our role鈥r at least, our potential. Many call the current 鈥減olycrisis鈥� a crisis of imagination 鈥� an inability to imagine that we could design the world differently, and a lack of collective capacity to bring reimagined futures into being together. I see this as one of our core value-adding roles as architects 鈥� not by imposing our own visions, but by surfacing shared visions of regenerative futures with the communities we serve, and growing collective capacities to nurture them long after we鈥檙e gone. A responsibility that comes with this role is challenging the degenerative narratives, logics, and practices that hold currently dominant imaginaries and patterns in place, while co-creating conditions to nurture new ones through our everyday actions.
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The RAIC has the potential to support these capacities and needed shifts 鈥� in regulation, education, policy and public understanding 鈥� across sectors and scales, by working with allied organizations regionally, nationally and internationally. Three efforts I see as especially key in relation are: first, more effectively communicating the call to action, compelling value case, and pragmatic pathways (and inspiring precedents) for near and long-term actions. Second, nurturing the various levels of (un)learning and capacity-building required to implement them. And third, helping enable greater collaboration, synergies and co-benefits across efforts and organizations. There is great work being done by so many groups, but much is lost when we work in isolation or compete at cross purposes.
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8. What advice would you have for those looking to get more involved in advocacy causes related to architecture?听
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As Poet June Jordan said at a speech at the UN decades ago: 鈥淲e are the ones we鈥檝e been waiting for鈥�. It鈥檚 never too early or too late to take more action on issues you care about. Wicked problems need emerging perspectives, deep expertise, and the recognition that wisdom comes in diverse forms, and all are needed. Every scale of contribution helps, and many hands make lighter work and bigger impact.
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9. How do you incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion in your work environment, the built environment and your volunteer work?
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Designing environments that are inclusive and just for everyone requires systems and processes that reflect these values 鈥� as, in the more poetic words of Adrienne Maree Brown: 鈥渨hat we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole鈥� (: 53). In my practice, this means embedding regeneration, 鈥渆thical space鈥� () and 鈥渘othing about us without us鈥� as core principles 鈥� in everything from: what projects we pursue; who we work with; how we build project teams, respond to RPFs, and design our processes (contracts, work plans, collaboration protocols); what we count as 鈥渄eliverables鈥� (i.e. including not just plans but relationships); where we bank; how we show up; and how we evaluate outcomes and impacts (metrics, methods and methodologies). And throughout, reflexively re-examining what is required of us (in our roles across spheres of action and influence) to compost discriminatory / degenerative systems, structures and practices; and to support the decolonizing core to needed transformations (using UNDRIP, TRC, MMIWG and legal pluralism as minimum frameworks).听
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In my volunteer work with the RAIC this has included: embedding principles of equity, reconciliation, climate action and justice into how we draft terms of reference for committees, working groups, etc.; how we design engagement and co-development processes; how underrepresented voices are supported and empowered; and collaboratively exploring how the organization can step further into its commitments to truth, reconciliation, climate action, and equity and justice more broadly.
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10. What do you like to do outside of architecture?听
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I spent my formative years in a hamlet of ~800 people. 鈥淒owntown鈥� was three churches, a post office, and a gas station; so my world was the woods (Maple forests off a Southern tributary of the Kitchi Zibi / Ottawa River, unceded territories of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaune and Huron Wendat Nations). Those years instilled in me a love of nature 鈥� especially trees, climbing, and snow. While I鈥檝e spent the last 20 years amidst the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest (unceded x史m蓹胃k史蓹y虛蓹m/Musqueam, S岣祑x瘫w煤7mesh/Squamish听and听s蓹lilw蓹ta涩/Tsleil-Waututh territories) 鈥� and 鈥渃old鈥� is now minus 5掳C; snow, woods, and climbing are still my happy place. Hiking/ snowshoe running in the Northshore mountains in the winter; biking them in the summer. Otherwise, spending quality time with my better two thirds 鈥� cooking, gardening, reading, drawing, puzzling, really whatever together, the more outside the better. (And, when schedules and savings permit, the occasional hot-cold plunge with the girls).
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[1]听 Views now unequivocally asserted by leading science-policy organizations (e.g. ; ) and by Indigenous Peoples across the globe since Time Immemorial (e.g. ; )