Scoping Sustainable Aesthetics – Rethinking Nature, Man-Made Environment

With this three-day conference celebrating the IIAA’s thirty years of facilitating thought formation on environmental aesthetics, the aim of the IIAA is to bring together people interested in the interface between philosophical/applied aesthetics and those approaches that seek to enhance ecological and social sustainability.

The IIAA was founded in Lahti in June 1993 by the University of Helsinki, the City of Lahti, the Finnish Society for Aesthetics, and the Päijät-Häme Region University Association. The first Summer Congress was held in 1995, after the World Congress in Aesthetics in Lahti, under the title “Nature, Man-Made Environment.” The City of Lahti has offered a base for the IIAA since the beginning. A lot has happened with environmental issues in the world since the 1990s. The city of Lahti has celebrated this change as its sustainability transformation (https://greenlahti.fi/en).

During the past thirty years, the idea of sustainability has become pervasive in all areas of human life, but we are still far from achieving, for example, the United Nations’ sustainability goals (UN SDGs). Nevertheless, with the rise of sustainability-related discussion and work, we have witnessed the return of moral interest that concerns care, respect, accountability, and ethical development, not only within and about the human community, but also beyond. Philosophical aesthetics has addressed these issues, especially in relation to environmental and everyday aesthetics.

The aim of the IIAA’s XV international conference is to scope the potentials and risks of sustainable aesthetics, to critically investigate its status in the contemporary world and influence on the future(s). “Scoping Sustainable Aesthetics” thus invites us to (re)think about the role of aesthetics in sustainable development and the contemporary transitions towards environmentally sustainable and socially just well-being of both humans and non-humans.