Creators of Sustainable Vilnius
- Lauryna Gružaitė
- Žemartas Budrys
- Regina Terekė
- Deividas Juozulynas
Vilnius City Municipality
Exhibition, Behavioural change, Communication campaigns, Editorial, Brand identity, Placemaking
2026, 2025
Vilnius City Municipality has been awarded as European Green Capital 2025. The municipality through the year pushed forward their green agenda even stronger than usual.
The Challenge
Vilnius had a rich and growing ecosystem of sustainability initiatives — community projects, NGO programmes, activist movements, and local businesses all quietly shaping a greener city. Yet most residents remained unaware they existed. The challenge was twofold: how do you surface stories that are already happening, and how do you make people feel invested in them?
The Context of the Challenge
The project was commissioned as part of Vilnius – European Green Capital 2025, a landmark year for the city’s environmental ambitions. The Municipality needed a format that could translate the abstract promise of a “sustainable city” into something tangible, local, and human — something that could reach people where they already were, rather than asking them to seek it out.
The Insight
This is a travelling exhibition that weaves itself into everyday urban life and actively finds its audience. It presents local initiatives in Vilnius that respond to urban, social, and environmental challenges, highlighting sustainability, community building, and active citizenship. The exhibition not only informs but also encourages action — inviting visitors to join initiatives or create change in their own surroundings.
The exhibition moves through libraries, neighbourhoods, and museums, integrating itself into everyday urban life and actively reaching diverse audiences.
It explores key urban challenges and presents how local communities, activists, NGOs, businesses, and the city respond to them through concrete initiatives.
Vilnius-based initiatives address local issues while contributing to global goals, combining social inclusion, environmental care, and regenerative practices that strengthen ecological, cultural, and economic systems.
Each initiative follows a consistent structure — Context → Challenge → Initiative → Impact → Ways to Get Involved — supported by a strong visual identity that conveys not only information but also values and emotion.
The exhibition was created with its full life cycle in mind: elements were borrowed or made from recycled materials and clearly labelled according to their level of circularity, minimizing environmental impact.
The System
Exhibition represents not only Environmental Sustainability but also Social Sustainability and Sustainable Governance. Each exhibit is labeled to indicate which type of sustainability it corresponds to.
Typography
Since the exhibition also addresses social sustainability, the exhibition’s typeface was deliberately chosen to be Atkinson Hyperlegible—black on white, with a clear compositional system—so that it is accessible to people with visual impairments.
Exhibition Structure
Our mission was to create a portable and truly self-sustaining exhibition not by building something entirely new, but by crafting the exhibition structures from reclaimed construction materials and pallets.
The Change to The Context
From July 2025 through January 2026, residents and visitors across Vilnius were invited to discover local community, NGO, municipal, activist, and business initiatives contributing to a more sustainable city. Spanning environmental, social, and governance dimensions of sustainability, the exhibition prioritised initiatives creating positive change across multiple levels simultaneously — making it one of the most comprehensive celebrations of civic sustainability action Vilnius has seen. It was a first of its kind: a city-scale, people-centred initiative that brought sustainability out of policy documents and into the streets.
