Updates from the Beyond Sustainability Project

The Beyond Sustainability research project aims to develop new ways to communicate the temporal and multispecies layers of landscapes and to foster a regenerative relationship with the living world. The project is a collaboration between Aalto University’s Landscape Architecture Research department and the Saari Residence. The landscape of Saari Manor offers an ideal setting for exploring and presenting interactions between humans and other species across different time periods. The project spans from 2022 to 2026.

During the first two years, the project focused on familiarising itself with the Saari Manor landscape, collecting material, and identifying the various actors and layers that make up the environment. A work titled “Notations. Saari Residence Landscape Workbook” has been published as part of the project in autumn 2024. The workbook is a collection of illustrations, drawings, maps, and texts that serve as a local guide to the landscape for residents and visitors. Drawing on the work of writers representing posthumanism and multispecies thinking, the workbook approaches the landscape as a dynamic, changing, and renewing whole shaped by countless life forms and their agencies.

Following completion of the workbook, the project entered its second phase, which explores how residency participants perceive, experience, and understand the Saari Manor landscape and the changes and processes occurring within it. Discussions focusing on these landscape experiences have been conducted as walking interviews in the Saari Manor landscape since autumn 2024, with each residency group. The final interviews were completed in October 2025.

In the coming spring, the second phase will continue with the analysis of the collected interview material. The aim is to identify recurring themes in the interviews and consider what they reveal about the deeper relationship between humans and the landscape. Based on the analysis, the project will also reflect on how a regenerative relationship with the landscape and its multispecies actors can be supported through landscape walks and landscape communication (with the Notations workbook serving as one example).

In addition to the workbook, the project will produce three peer-reviewed research articles as one of its channels for sharing results. The project’s stages and interim findings have also been actively presented at architecture-focused and interdisciplinary conferences, and these discussions will continue throughout 2026. In recent years, the Saari Residence open-house days have also provided an excellent opportunity to share information about the project with local audiences and other interested visitors. The goal for the project’s final year, autumn 2026, is to synthesise the results and share them through various channels, making them accessible to both the research community and a broader public.