Culture, research and happiness index of residents of the city under the ROCK umbrella

For two days, Vilnius was the center of good practice of the ROCK project – on 25-26 February, project participants from 9 European cities gathered in the capital for the first time. During the meeting, the biggest achievements of all the participants and the Vilnius ROCK team, their integration into the strategic direction Vilnius 2IN were discussed, also having paid a visit to the best examples of cultural heritage management.

One of the most important gathering of ROCK project teams was held in the City of Vilnius for two days – representatives of all participants, universities and businesses came to the capital. The Vilnius ROCK team consisting of specialists and researchers of the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University and the City of Vilnius presented key achievements, also discussing what other cities have achieved, what Vilnius has achieved and what lessons can be learned from this experience.

“The reason for our gathering is important not only for us, project promoters, and the city of Vilnius, but also for all the cities that care about optimizing heritage, traditions and culture, creating an environment where residents feel happier, and where solutions of city planners respond to everyone’s needs” – said Dalia Bardauskienė, the Project Manager.

The experiment carried out in the course of the Vilnius ROCK project has evolved into individual projects and contributed to significant strategic directions of Vilnius – it became a part of Vilnius 2IN strategy, developing a new direction “Happy Vilnius”. The project measures the emotions of Vilnius residents in the Old Town, the central service center of the capital and in beaches of the city during the season, aiming to find out the extent the quality of urban services affects our emotions.

“This, where we ended up with the ROCK project today, is a great achievement for us, VGTU researchers. Over 350 million data were collected in a few years, and they will be used not only within this project but also elsewhere. The works will continue, the research will not end with the end of the project, as the interest in the obtained data has been growing. We are happy to see strategy developers to have appreciated and become involved in the city where it all started for the programmes being developed to serve the needs of people”, Prof. Artūras Kaklauskas, VGTU Project Manager, rejoiced over team’s contribution to the project.

According to project promoters, not only scientific achievements, but also their application is what matters most. Here a sufficiently flexible team’s approach, its relationship with other organizations, city planners and residents, who are an important part of the project, are of key importance.

The project has been financed from funds of Horizon 2020, the EU’s largest research and innovation programme.