Shifting Village: Research and Co-Design for Autonomy in Himalayan Climate Adaptation

Lubra’s Ongoing Retreat

In Nepal’s trans-Himalayan Mustang region, the village of Lubra is retreating uphill. The nearby river, swollen by increasingly extreme and unpredictable rains, brings vast deposits of fine clay sediment from the high mountains during monsoon floods. Families are building new homes upslope as the buildings and fields of the ancestral village are slowly buried.

Retreat is layered with many other dynamics of change. Construction, traditionally undertaken through communal labor, is shifting to paid contract labor as outmigration transforms regional demographics. Apple orchards have become an almost ubiquitous sight across the village and Mustang region as road networks allow for widespread export. Different forms of infrastructure emerge alongside development; flushing toilets cause new complexities in a high mountain desert where water is scarce and soil saturation can cause slope failure.

Yet the complexities of such change can obscure the fundamental nature of Lubra’s ongoing retreat: it is not a passive community waiting for intervention. It is actively undertaking the ongoing design of itself amidst deep uncertainty and unprecedented change. Our prior research examined how residents are already undertaking the work of adaptation on their own. Members of the community design futures and do the labor or enacting them every day. They layer short-term decisions, like where to repair a wall or redirect runoff, with longer-term shifts in settlement patterns and the proliferation of orchards.

Design action in the community is both decentralized and collective. Yet, like any community, even this small village is not monolithic. The capacity to undertake design is unevenly distributed. For instance, members of marginalized caste groups and immigrants have less social capital in processes of retreat, and the growing shift toward contracted construction labor means that those with less access to financial capital may be unable to move.

At the same time, the answers offered by the climate adaptation practices of the development apparatus are dangerous. They follow the patterns of development: the imposition of outside expertise, alignment with elite visions rather than grounded experience, and a singular focus on visible interventions.

This work was developed in response. Our first goal was to provide resources and facilitation for undertaking a collective design process across the community. Our second goal, rather than positioning design as the development of replacements for ongoing practices, was to position design as a means of working within and making space for the community’s ongoing making of itself.

Process and Method

Our work followed the logic of critical co-design, positioning each community member as an expert in their own right and working with an embedded critique of existing adaptation practice. It unfolded through collective design sessions layered across social strata because it needed to ensure that all community members could play a role in the process anonymously if desired and without fear of recrimination.

The first series of sessions were held in late 2024. We used scenario design to collectively imagine the possible futures of the village. The outlines of scenario design work clarified outstanding priorities. For example, responses were needed to address increasingly extreme and unpredictable monsoon rainstorms. These include unprecedented large influxes of surface stormwater runoff that driven erosion and destabilize potential rockfalls uphill.

Another important concern that arose was the need for a more organized process of retreat. In general, because families have been building homes one-by-one, the process has been relatively haphazard and no collective infrastructure has been established or laid out. This also includes the need to balance the cut and fill soil that comes with new home construction, particularly important because most new building is happening on a 25 degree slope.

The second series of sessions, held in late 2025, considered these design questions in more detail. We further examined the need for a more organized process of retreat that would simultaneously address stormwater, wastewater, the long-term viability of the village’s trail network, the balancing of construction cut and fill, and other issues. These outcomes were not works of dramatic redesign. Rather, what we developed through this process were modest technical practices embedded within the existing, ongoing dynamics of retreat. We then translated this into a series of design drawings that illustrate how this process could unfold over time alongside other ongoing dynamics of retreat.

While detailed proposals were developed through this process, we consider these to ultimately be the property of the community and cannot be shared without consent. Since we do not, at the time of writing, have this consent, not sharing the design outcomes here is part of maintaining our commitment to centering the community as the decision-making center of this work.

Landscape Architecture and Climate Adaptation Practice

We also think this work can make an important contribution toward the emergence of alternative forms of climate-responsive design practice. While more attention has been paid to this subject by landscape architecture and the design disciplines, actual climate-responsive practice beyond academia largely remains constrained by the client-practitioner model. A defined client commissions a project, design “experts” develop solutions, and implementation follows. This is an obvious parallel to the adaptation practices of the development apparatus.

We hope that this work begins to demonstrate the possibilities of a different kind of design practice: landscape architecture as claiming space for communities to continue making their own landscapes on their own terms. Co-design, the centering of community desire, or climate-responsive design as uplifting what already exists are certainly not novel ideas. This project, for instance, turned to Arturo Escobar’s autonomous design and Sasha Costanza-Chock’s design justice as critical references. But, by and large, they remain more or less constrained to theory and speculative proposals in the design disciplines. This work provides an example of its possible processes and outcomes in practice.

Team

Dane Carlson (left) is a landscape designer and researcher holding an MLA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His practice investigates and works within landscapes of climate crisis in Nepal. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Art and Sustainability at Principia College and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. His work is published in the Journal of Landscape Architecture, Landscape Research Journal, Thresholds Journal, and other publications.

Assistant Professor of Visual Art and Sustainability at Principia College

Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis

Sonam Lama (middle) is an architect and planner engaged in community-centered heritage and landscape projects in the Himalayan region. His practice bridges architecture, conservation, and community dialogue, contributing to long-term strategies that respect both the natural terrain and the living heritage of Himalayan communities. Lama’s work focuses on integrating traditional knowledge, cultural heritage, and sustainable planning in fragile mountain environments. In Nepal’s Mustang region, he is collaborating with residents to plan the relocation of a village threatened by geological instability.

Yungdrung Tsewang Gurung (right) has an academic degree of BSc. in Zoology. He worked as an assistant conservationist with NTNC-ACAP, Jomsom for over five years. He is from Lubrak Village in Mustang, a village known as the only Bon (Pre-Buddhist religion) settlement in Mustang. Yungdrung’s key interests are: conservation, sustainable development, eco-tourism, and climate change.