Creative Events Attract Creative Minds in Daugavpils
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12 January 2018Daugavpils is the engine of innovative economy and the capital of well-being in the Eastern Baltics– this is the vision for 2020. The year 2017 already have been breath taking for active youth in Daugavpils. Many interesting, innovative and creative events are held here.
Within the frameworks of Gen-Y City (“Get into the swing of the City!”) project there were organized several ULG meetings, which helped people to get inspired to do useful and creative things, and even implement crazy ideas. The ice has started to move and people, institutions, organizations, entrepreneurs and Daugavpils citizens in general has started to cooperate. Municipality has showed its openness and it actually works!
This year was organized bench of discussions “LAVKA” where Daugavpils ULG and professionals of tourism field from Latvia participated. It helped to apprize Daugavpils tourism treasures and to dream about new, unimaginable tourism products in the city. The creative team of LAVKA continued their work on cooperation with different institutions and in May organized “Breakfast LAVKA” within the frames of Latgale Centenary Congress and Daugavpils Forum of Nationalities. This event was organized in cooperation with Daugavpils City Council, Ministry of Culture and State Chancellery. President of Latvia Raimonds Vējonis participated in this event. It was great honour to welcome the president. This showed that in cooperation and with little municipal support organizations actually can do global things.
Organization “Heyday Latvia” started their cooperation with Gen-Y City project team and Daugavpils ULG to develop common projects. Now they continued cooperation and made great agiotaze with presenting a co-working space in Daugavpils Fortress. This will be something extremely new in the city - the first co-working space in Daugavpils. The co-working space idea will be implemented in cooperation with the brand of Riga co-working space “The Mill”. The initiator of the project Jevgiņija Žiģisova admits: “By using the good practice of “The Mill, we want to develop a community of creative people and IT professionals, who believe that Daugavpils is a good place for living and working, and for creating successful new enterprises together. Our primary goal is to create an effective social and economical environment in Daugavpils for the development of creative and IT joint projects. “The Mill Daugavpils” will be the first co-working space in Daugavpils, which will unite creative and technically thinking minds!”.
Research carried out in Daugavpils within the framework of the project “Gen-Y City”, aiming to find out the understanding of citizens, students and those, who are working in the city, about creative industries, creative potential of the city. During the survey, respondents’ opinions about creative sites and events in the city, popular tourism objects and development perspectives of Daugavpils city as a creative city were summarized. Respondents admitted that citizens must involve in the processes of urban planning and development, city community is creative and open for cooperation and partnership. The results obtained during the research will be used for the development of the Local Action Plan.
These several events and initiatives of Daugavpils ULG members show that the city is on the right way to the development of creative industries. Daugavpils moto is “Daugavpils is diversity”, so Daugavpils City Council will keep working on creativeness in diverse directions. Daugavpils City Council plans to cooperate with the creative teams of LAVKA and Heyday in the future within the framework of the project “Gen-Y City” to encourage the involvement of creative people in Daugavpils for the development of the city.
Submitted by Karolina Prymas on