Carl-Johan Vesterlund (1976) is a Doctoral Candidate in Architecture at the Department of Architecture in the University of Leuven, Belgium. He currently holds a position as an Associate Professor at Umeå School of Architecture (UMA) at Umeå University, Sweden. Previous to that he held a position as Senior Lecturer, Chalmers school of Architecture, Gothenburg.
Since his graduation as an architect at KTH School of Architecture in Stockholm in 2005 he has parallel to working at several architecture offices in Sweden and Norway, been running and teaching in master design studios at KTH, Chalmers and UMA. In 2008 he co-founded the practice U+A/Agency together with Professor Ana Betancour. Together they have realized, published and exhibited several practice-based research projects focussing on socio-ecological perspectives in urban and rural transformation, emerging technologies, and alternative futures.
Carl-Johan’s PhD project takes its point of departure in his experiences from academic teaching, professional practice and artistic research on alternative socio-ecological approaches to the relationship to the notion of nature in urban-, landscape- and architecture design. The goal of the research project is to explore what new knowledge the thinking of alternative relationships between nature and culture from fields of knowledge such as Political Ecology, Ecocriticism and Ecosophy could provide to the practice of urban design and architecture in the design of future socio-ecological urban and rural landscapes. The project will use the coastal landscapes in the littoral zone of the west coast of Sweden as its cases of study, exploring the coastal territory as a transient landscape – the territorial product of historical and contemporary geo-political, socio-cultural, economic, climatic, environmental and human driven processes and conditions.