Saari Manor – Beyond Sustainability

In 2022, we started a collaboration project with the landscape architecture programme of Aalto University. The project Saari Manor – Beyond Sustainability aims to strengthen multi-species cooperation in the Saari Manor area and to create impulses towards a regenerative relationship with nature.

The purpose of the Saari Manor – Beyond Sustainability is to better understand the deep interconnection between humans and nature, which we plan to make visible by developing the Saari Manor area’s protected and culturally and historically valuable park area through various means. In the Beyond Sustainability cooperation project, the area of the residence will serve as a platform for researching and presenting the interactive relationships and non-human activities that take place in the landscape. The project challenges traditional landscape-related thinking in an attempt to steer it towards a new approach in which the landscape and people are one and nourish each other. It also examines how to reconcile the objectives of diversity and biodiversity with cultural and historical values. ıis part of the Saari Residence’s EcoCompass certificate. 

Led by professors of landscape architecture, Elisa Lähde and Ranja Hautamäki, the project includes two master’s theses. Eveliina Kunnaton’s master thesis Biological Cultural Heritage – Exploring the Interactions Between Biodiversity and Cultural Heritage in the Saari Manor Park (2024) looks at the way the measures for the development and maintenance of the Saari Residence’s park area are determined. Ella Prokkola’s Mapping Polyphonies. Examining Multispecies Asseblages in Mietoinen Bay (2023) examines the processes and non-human actors involved in the landscape management of the Saari Manor area through architectural graphics. This collaboration also includes a doctoral dissertation that was started in the spring of 2024 and that builds on the perspectives of the two above-mentioned theses on the surroundings and cultural heritage of the Saari Manor area. The aim of the research is to provide guidelines for the development and management plan of the park area and to produce related elements and research on their effectiveness.

As part of the collaboration, a network of routes that responds to the changes of the seasons was developed in the Saari Manor’s surrounding area, and residents and other guests are welcome to explore it if they wish with workbook named Notations. The purpose of these routes is to use observation, knowledge and experiences to generate new insights into the environment and the relationship between people and nature.  

In October 2024, we organised a seminar related to the project at Kone Foundation’s Lauttasaari Manor in Helsinki. The seminar was called Temporal Layers and Multi-species Assemblages at the Saari Manor – Landscape Architecture in a World Wider than Humans and it included discussions on eco-social learning and new directions in landscape architecture. The seminar was held in Finnish. In addition to Aalto University researchers, the speakers at the seminar were sustainability researcher Arto O. Salonen and Saari Residence’s alumni Camille Auer.