CE-LEBRATE

CE-LEBRATE runs three comparative Living Labs in Łowicz (Poland), Middelfart (Denmark) and Kaunas (Lithuania), each built around a flagship event: the Corpus Christi Procession, Klimafolkemødet and the Fluxus Festival. All three follow the same three-cycle process – diagnosis, co-creation, testing and validation – so that results stay comparable.

Concrete actions include circular city scans combining waste, visitor-flow and value-chain data; participatory foresight with residents, SMEs and cultural actors; a co-developed Circular Tourism Strategy in each city; a Startup Tourism Zone incubator in Łowicz; a Circular Event Lab with circular catering, reuse logistics and low-impact mobility pilots in Middelfart; circular festival infrastructure and a Regional Heritage Producers Network in Kaunas; and an open, privacy-by-design AI toolkit supporting visitor management.

Results are extended to the Lviv Metropolitan Area with Lviv Polytechnic National University, testing how these models apply to post-war recovery.
 

Each pilot city will hold a validated Circular Tourism Strategy with an implementation roadmap, alongside new tourism products and circular business models tested with local SMEs, craftspeople and young entrepreneurs. Municipalities gain operational toolkits and governance models for circular events that cut waste and resource use, ease mobility pressure and spread socio-economic benefits beyond peak periods.

For residents, the project creates structured opportunities to shape how tourism interacts with everyday urban life, strengthening local ownership, inclusion and social cohesion. For researchers, it delivers comparative evidence across three governance systems on visitor behaviour, circular practices and social innovation.

Beyond the pilots, CE-LEBRATE produces a transferable methodological framework, EU-level toolkits and policy recommendations feeding the DUT Knowledge Hub, so that other small and mid-sized European cities, and Ukrainian cities rebuilding their tourism sectors, can adapt validated solutions instead of starting from scratch.