WHAT'S NEW
CULTURAL HERITAGE' INFLUENCE ON POSITIVE EMOTIONS
ROCK sensors results
Old Town cultural heritage – influence on positive emotions
During ROCK project time Vilnius’ activities were focused on cultural heritage and Old Town public spaces. All the city actions served as an engine for the citizens emotions raising. Results were based on smart, open city ideas innovative Biometric Method, which was used by Vilnius technical university (received mega data from 10 sensors located in open spaces).
ROCK findings inspired Vilnius city administration and Old Town Renewal Agency (OTRA) to focus on citizens emotions in the process of creating and updating public spaces, using them for cultural events.
Cultural heritage projects online
During Covid both city administration and OTRA had been working online therefore all projects were discussed virtually. It became obvious that online discussions for cultural heritage site are more constructive compare to traditional meetings, better results were achieved (e.g. the square of St. Anne’s church, Vokieciu street square, etc.)
Cultural events
Vilnius is approaching 700 th anniversary therefore the number of cultural events is increasing significantly. Besides the most popular annual fairs, various actions and events take place almost every other week. According to the results of the sensors - St. Kazimieras days in the first weekend of March ( Kaziukas fair) is always the most popular emotional event in the city. Beside Christmas time, which has traditionally the highest emotions Vilnius birthday on January 25 is getting more and more polular, people started to celebrate it from 2019.
Tourism as economical factor
The Old Town is traditionally the most popular place. Visitors are attracted by Old town World Heritage, cozy environment of public spaces, by number of innovative cultural events. Tourism is an important factor in building a city's economy and statistics is rather positive - after drop in 2020 Covid time we are catching up the level of 2019:
2019 ~ 1 356 767 visitors.
2020 - 390 728 visitors; decrease by 57 % (COVID impact).
2021 - 575 019 visitors; increase by 47,2 %
2022 m. I – II quarter - 479 799 visitors; increase by 50 %
Conclusions
ROCK project results confirm that positive emotions could be a tool for measuring effectiveness of investments in city public spaces.
Even the ROCK project is finished, we still believe that positive emotions are an integrated assessment of the results that city leaders and urbanists seek when investing in and designing city public spaces.
