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The urban economists have stressed the importance of various amenities for the attractiveness of urban areas for residents and businesses and built cultural heritage can be considered as one of such amenities, the benefits of which should not be overlooked. This research was aimed to analyze the influence of heritage aspect including the heritage status or features of the building and the historic built environment in general on the real estate prices and development in Kaunas using hedonic price method. Two sets of data were collected for the analysis - general, including heritage buildings and including new construction since 2013. The research has demonstrated that heritage status and the year of construction (as older buildings can be considered having heritage features) have no significant positive influence on the real estate prices. Meanwhile, the location, heritage context and the architectural distinctiveness of new architecture have a direct influence on the real estate prices. The heritage context correlates with architectural quality of new construction as well. This reveals the benefits of heritage context both for the real estate developers and households; however, the study shows the unemployed social-economic potential of historic buildings as generators and maintainers of heritage context.

For sustainable development, it is important to ensure healthy life and well-being for all ages, promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, productive employment and decent work, take urgent action to combat climate change and its effects and protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems. Taking into account the negative effects of climate change, the degrading effects of contemporary conventional industrial scale agricultural practices, the declining everyday physical activity of the working age people in developed countries, and other problems related to indoor work, this research proposes the office concept entitled FO-AM (Forest-Office Administrative (function) Movement) that allows to gradually move from sitting to walking while working in purposefully created or adapted forest areas. Numerous studies have been conducted on the positive effects of the natural environment on human health and productivity. A study published by Australian researchers revealed that sitting time is directly linked to all-cause mortality. While research results call for effective innovations for reducing the amount of time spent sitting and encouraging people, especially urban residents, to connect with nature, no effective holistic solutions have been found yet. The article presents a literature review on the contemporary office-nature space integration trends and the existing technical and design solutions and contemporary re-naturalization practices of ex-urban areas and presents the conceptual idea of landscape technology FO-AM allowing to transfer the functions of administrative buildings to the semi-natural and natural environment, including partially anthropogenic environment, park, forest park and natural forest, and in this way to address public health and well-being, economic innovation and climate change issues, thus contributing to the long-term sustainability goals.

The article analyzes an efficient method for planning the execution of construction work. Construction companies are looking for ways to reduce the essential factors in executing the construction work project, i.e. cost and time influencing the forthcoming company’s operating results are offered to perform engineering pre-construction activities. Engineering pre-construction is a set of technical, legal, economic, technological and organisational measures that shall ensure a consistent start of construction and a rhythmical organisation of major construction works employing optimum technology. Engineering pre-construction provides great potential for working out rational design solutions with respect to the execution of construction works applying a range of methods for assessing the aforesaid solutions. In this case, mathematical methods play the main role. Mathematical methods enable more effective tackling of the execution issues of construction works as well as developing rational design solutions with respect to the execution of construction works (Janušaitis, Juodis 2001; Juodis, Apanaviciene 2003; Viliuniene, Juodis 2002; Malinauskas, Kalibatas 2005; Viliūnienė, Viliūnas 2005; Viliuniene, Viliunas 2007; Žiogas, Juočiūnas 2005; Janusz, Kapliński 2006; Zavadskas et al. 2009; Šiškina et al. 2009; Medeliene, Ziogas 2010). Practical implementation of such solutions in the course of executing construction works would allow cutting down construction costs and construction time by 15–25% and 16–25% respectively (Viliūnienė, Viliūnas 2005). Besides, the rapid development of computer technology enables both faster preparation of rational design solutions to construction works through the application of mathematical methods and integration thereof into special software packages designed for construction management. Therefore, contractors should realise the significance of engineering pre-construction that is especially important to the execution of expensive large-scale projects. The process of construction execution should be improved applying the project management technique that helps to achieve the set goal within a limited time and with the optimum usage of limited resources. The objective of project management is to plan, organise and control project resources in order to implement the goals of the project. Hence, engineering pre-construction should be considered as an individual construction project stage acting as an engine for planning construction execution, organisation and control, thereby enabling a construction company to focus on profitable results. The article presents the methodology for preparing design solutions to the execution of construction work, which is adapted to handle the practical issues of engineering a pre-construction stage. The execution of complex earth works has been chosen as the subject matter of research.

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