Dane Carlson

Dane Carlson is a landscape designer and researcher. His practice (REALMS) is formed by a series of ongoing collaborations between human and other-than-human peoples in the hinterlands of Nepal. These collaborations use design as advocacy for adaptive, just landscape systems and building broader networks of landscape relations. He has been visiting design critic in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University and is currently an environmental design strategist at UNOPS (United Nations Office for Project Services).

Scholarly Interests

Dane's interests revolve primarily around building a model for world-embedded, plural, and just landscape practice. In the context of this practice, the purpose of research and theory is to shape action on the ground.

Contributions to Your Field

Dane's contribution to his field is still emerging, in part through the collaborative work of REALMS. This has begun to take shape through developing adaptive landscape networks in highland Nepal, open-ended flood adaptation processes in the southern Terai plains, and illuminating the critical landscape agencies of marginalized peoples in Mustang district. Dane has also been active in challenging the norms of development practice in Nepal.

Awards

Fulbright Scholar, Nepal 2017-2018

Publications and Presentations

• “Tied Across Time: The Future of Making Landscape in the High Himalaya” presentation at Dumbarton Oaks Landscapes in the Making symposium, May 2022.
• “A Landscape that has Never Existed: Temporalities of Control and Disaster-Making in the Terai” (with Tshewang Tamang) in Thresholds Journal, issue 50, 2022.
• “Trajectories of Practice Across Time: Moving Beyond the Histories of Landscape Architecture” (with Mariel Collard) in Landscape Research Journal, 2021.
• “Agencies of the Present: Landscape-Making and the Herders of Lower Mustang, Nepal” in Landscape Research Journal, 2021.
• "The Hinterlands: Designing at the Intersections of Continuity and Change" in LA+ Journal, issue 09 DESIGN.
• "Hybrid Landscapes of Nepal's Himalayan Frontier" in SPACES magazine, July 2018 issue.
• "Emerging Hybridity and the New Vernacular" in Landscape Architecture Frontiers, volume 6, issue 3.
• "At the Meeting of Earth and Sky: A Sacred and Profane Landscape in Upper Mustang, Nepal" in Journal of Landscape Architecture, vol. 12 2017, issue 02.

What led you to teaching?

The world today needs doers engaging with working methods that are plural, dynamic, relational, and caring. By beginning creative practice on these foundations, I think we can prepare students to build presents and futures that are truly just.

How do you like to spend your free time?

Mostly working--but I'm hoping to spend more time in the forge and woodshop at Voney.