VDU

The "innocult" Teaming Phase 1 project specifically aims to create a Centre of Excellence (CoE) of Creative and Cultural Innovations in Lithuania, The new CoE is targeted to perform research and innovation actions in line with the challenges faced in our country and aimed at promoting participatory culture and socio-cultural engagement of diverse societies by supporting cultural and creative processes of integration and disruption. Investigation and measurement of cultural and creative capital value on the basis of developed methodological approach and means will disclose the wide social and economic role the cultural and creative industries play and, therefore, foster networking, entrepreneurship and innovation potential of cultural and creative sector creating conditions for estimating forthcoming model of participatory culture. The main goal of the Centre of Excellence is to provoke innovative changes in participatory culture and provide a guidance of smart and sustainable changes for cultural and creative organizations and audiences within creative sector to operate in competitive environment for leading excellence based on investigated and measured cultural and creative processes. Therefore, the CoE seeks to promote development of CCI institutions, formation of new institutional strategies leading towards inclusive and participatory culture taking into account the importance and shifts of the economical, communicative, technological and social factors, in order for the cultural institutions and network to start functioning as activating centres of social innovations, as hubs for involvement of new audiences (minorities, youth, seniors etc.) increasing competences of culture consumption in respect to the development of CCI.

The Lithuanian Energy Institute (LEI) and Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) plan to establish an association to foster the uptake of Waste-to-Energy (WtE) research and innovation in Lithuania and engage the country in pan-European collaborative efforts on this topic. To ensure its success, both institutions need to increase their research excellence in the topic of WtE and develop international networks. To this end, LEI and VMU propose TWIN-PEAKS, a Horizon 2020 Twinning project with the Technical University of Munich (Germany), Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) and WIP Renewable Energies GmbH & Co. KG (Germany). TWIN-PEAKS is based on the development of a joint-research strategy between the partners, the pooling of their research infrastructure, the transfer of scientific knowledge and know-how on WtE research and innovation, the building of academic and non-academic networks, the outreach to end-users of WtE solutions, and a plan for joint-applications for research grants to fund further research projects involving the consortium. It is expected that this Twinning collaboration will increase the research excellence of LEI and VMU, build capacities to form the critical mass of researchers in WtE in Lithuania, develop the international networks of LEI and VMU, increase the production and exploitation of intellectual property, grow the opportunities for collaborations with the industry, and allow LEI and VMU to contribute to national and international efforts for increasing the use of renewable energy through the WtE association to be create by LEI and VMU at the end of TWIN-PEAKS.

Scientific evidence about the negative health effects of urban environmental exposures is mounting. Yet key scientific gaps exist. Surveys show that citizens are increasingly concerned about the consequences of these exposures on their own health, and are engaged in data collection and activism efforts around problems such as urban mobility and air and noise pollution. These concerns, along with the availability of affordable crowd-sensing and data processing technologies that allow citizens to measure environmental and health parameters, make environmental epidemiology studies an ideal, yet underexplored opportunity to develop citizen science projects. Enabling collaboration between researchers and citizens to generate solid, unbiased scientific evidence of local relevance can reduce existing information gaps. It can empower people to contribute to novel and bottom-up research agendas, interventions and co-creation of public policies. The aim of the Citizen Science Project on Urban Environment and Health (CitieS-Health) is to develop an effective citizen science model at the maximum collaboration level. The project will develop citizen science projects in five diverse European cities (Barcelona, Kaunas, Ljubljana, Amsterdam, Lucca), assessing urban air and noise pollution, wood burning, urban design and mobility at local levels. An innovative aspect of CitieS-Health is studying the link between these exposures and health impacts. Citizens will participate in defining research questions, designing and implementing studies, and analysing, interpreting and communicating results. The projects will inform the first open toolkit for the development and promotion of citizen science projects in urban environment and health. The project will also co-design a set of governance principles and procedures to allow participants control over project data and outcomes, and will contribute indicators to assess the project's impacts on different sectors.

The principal aim of COHSMO is to investigate the relation between socio-economic structures of inequality, urbanization and territorial cohesion, and how territorial cohesion at different European scales affect economic growth, spatial justice and democratic capacities. The way that public, private and civil society stakeholders counter or cushion spatial injustice varies across localities in Europe. In common, is the need to develop the institutional capacities for place-based collaboration and democratically mobilize communities for policy development and adaption. Although location and place have gained attention in European policy and the theoretical thinking informing regional development policies, it is argued in COHSMO that we need to change our orientation in the direction of making place-informed theories and policies instead of applying existing theories and policies on places. This will be done by providing a cross-case analysis and assessment of territorial cohesion within three different cases in each of the seven national partner contexts based on a mixed-method and locality-sensitive approach. The fieldwork will focus firstly on the relation between policy instruments and local experiences of territorial cohesion, and secondly on how “social investment strategies” relate to territorial cohesion and local conditions. Moreover, the project engages in an assessment of spatial development policies at different governance scales to map the impact of different policy instruments in the fight against spatial inequality and spatial injustice. COHSMO is innovative in its differentiated approach to how location matters, and coupled with its conceptual advances COHSMO will develop groundbreaking policy recommendations in relation to sustainable economic growth, spatial justice and democratic capacity. Because they stem from location-sensitive and cross-contextual research, such recommendations will make it possible to develop the European Social Model.