Redefining urban tourism. How CULTIGEN aims to balance growth, identity, and community

​When I go on a site visit, I usually run a series of one-to-one interviews with the partners, and at the end, I ask them for three keywords to define their project. It’s a nice exercise because it helps them boil things down to the essence of what they’re doing, but it also shows the different lenses through which each of them sees and understands the project, and what their priorities are, depending on their role.

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Doing this exercise in Copenhagen really unveiled the multifaceted nature of CULTIGEN, and it’s a good way to provide an initial overview of the project’s focus: sustainable tourism, addressed through a combination of digital solutions, governance arrangements, data-driven policymaking, and cultural and economic development initiatives.

But let's now dive deeper into CULTIGEN and see what challenges it addresses and what solution it proposes.

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Tourism in Copenhagen has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. It wasn’t a major destination two decades ago, but today it’s one of the fastest-growing urban destinations in Europe, with a projected 25% increase in tourism over the next five years.
According to regular surveys conducted by Wonderful Copenhagen – the city’s tourist board – the Danish capital has a strong international brand. Visitors, aside from seeing key landmarks such as Tivoli Gardens or the Little Mermaid, come primarily for the atmosphere and to experience the way locals live. Nonetheless, most tourists perceive the city as a compact, two-football-field-sized destination, which leads to a concentration of activity in the inner city. Although overtourism is not yet a reality, the increasing pressure in central areas is beginning to raise concerns among residents about overcrowding.

In this context, the City of Copenhagen is working to promote a model of sustainable tourism that coexists harmoniously with everyday urban life. As Mathias Qvist Christensen, Special Consultant in the Department of Tourism, Internationalisation and Cultural Businesses, explains:

We aim to avoid the issues seen in other European cities suffering from overtourism. We’re working proactively to ensure that doesn’t happen here by promoting a balance between visitor interest and local well-being. We also want to equip the city and tourism actors with the tools to support tourism in a balanced, sustainable way.

CULTIGEN comes at exactly the right time, as the city is currently at a pivotal point in defining the direction of its tourism development strategy. According to Qvist:

There is growing interest in tourism policies and approaches, but we lack the data and understanding to choose the right path – or the right tools to support our decision-making. CULTIGEN offered a way to address this gap.

In a nutshell, CULTIGEN seeks to broaden how visitors experience Copenhagen, encouraging them to venture beyond the usual spots and discover lesser-known areas. The goal is to ensure that tourism – and its benefits – are more evenly distributed across the city. To achieve this, CULTIGEN combines participatory, place-based, and data-driven approaches.

In the short term, we aim to establish a strong internal network among local tourism actors. This will help build capacity and shared understanding of how to work with tourism – not just to grow businesses, but to enrich the neighbourhoods culturally and socially. In the long term, we hope this foundation will evolve into lasting governance structures and policies that guide tourism development city-wide.

Mathias Qvist Christensen, City of Copenhagen

Specifically, the project acts on four interconnected dimensions: digital tools, neighbourhood-level solutions, governance arrangements, and business development.

Digital tools

Perhaps the main innovation element introduced by CULTIGEN will be the Urban Listening Toolkit (ULT), a set of new digital tools and methods designed to better capture how people (residents and visitors) experience the city.
Building on the experience of the Urban Belonging project by Aalborg University, the ULT will include a mobile app that lets users upload geotagged photos with comments or sentiments, a public-facing platform with data visualisations so users can see contributions from others, and a back-end interface for data analysis, aimed at municipalities and tourism planners. The app will focus primarily on unstructured data – photos, text, and geotagged media – to capture the lived language and impressions of city users. Artificial Intelligence will then be used to elaborate on this data, identifying recurring patterns and themes.
Ultimately, the ULT will provide ground-level insights into what matters to people, going beyond what can be captured through surveys or top-down analysis. For locals, it helps uncover the true social and cultural value of neighbourhoods. For tourists, it reveals how well they “fit” into those local contexts. This enables planners to identify opportunities, as well as to spot potential tensions before they escalate. 

Neighbourhood-level solutions

As one of the main goals of CULTIGEN is to disperse tourist flows more evenly across the city, the second core pillar entails the definition of neighbourhood-level solutions, aimed at empowering and enhancing cultural identity of three selected non-central districts that hold the (latent) potential of becoming attractive destinations: Nordhavn, Sydhavn, Carlsberg Byen.

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Nordhavn. A relatively new waterfront district connected to an older borough, Nordhavn holds great potential for tourism development. It has seen significant local entrepreneurship but has not yet been developed from a tourism perspective. The area has attracted heavy investment from real estate developers and features striking architecture, a growing cultural scene, and a diverse international community. With its waterfront appeal and strong presence on social media, Nordhavn is likely to attract visitors not for its historical significance, but for its vibrant, contemporary lifestyle.

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Sydhavn. Historically a working-class neighbourhood, the old Sydhavn is today experiencing gentrification to some extent, while continuing to preserve a strong local identity and proud community spirit. This grassroots character is still very visible, for example in the local football club’s chants of “Love and Class Pride.” Sydhavn remains culturally rich and deeply rooted in community life, with old pubs, local institutions, and longstanding traditions. The aim is to foster tourism by co-creating a local narrative that residents support and identify with, rather than imposing a top-down tourism brand.

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Carlsberg Byen. A former industrial and brewery site, Carlsberg Byen has been transformed into a vibrant commercial and residential district. As the newest of the three areas, it offers an ideal setting for testing early-stage tourism initiatives. The neighbourhood combines architectural and historical depth with a growing number of small, up-and-coming businesses eager to engage with tourism. Although parts of the area may still feel in transition, reflecting its recent development, Carlsberg Byen is steadily establishing itself as a lively and dynamic urban quarter.

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In each of the three neighbourhoods, CULTIGEN partners will work with the local community – including residents, businesses, and associations – to collaboratively define a comprehensive tourism offer. A network of local ambassadors will be created to act as a bridge between the project and the community, and to facilitate co-creation activities aimed at shaping each neighbourhood’s cultural identity. This process, also supported by the data gathered through the ULT, will include the development of tour guides to highlight the breadth of opportunities available at the local level, as well as the organisation of signature cultural events.

Governance arrangements

The ambition of CULTIGEN goes beyond activating and promoting new tourist destinations across the city; it aims to ensure the meaningful participation of citizens and local stakeholders in shaping future tourism and governance strategies. As tourism spreads across Copenhagen, the project seeks to make sure that local voices are an integral part of that development process.
To achieve this, the project will first organise two Citizen Assemblies, a structured and inclusive method of engaging people in complex discussions. Participants will be selected through a stratified lottery to ensure demographic representation in terms of age, gender, location, education level, and more. Each assembly will involve approximately 20 hours of deliberation, spread over several sessions. During these sessions, participants will hear from experts, deliberate in groups, and take part in an open hearing where outside perspectives are welcomed. The goal is to reach collective recommendations that can inform for instance a citywide tourism strategy or neighbourhood-level development plans. Ultimately, the outcomes will reflect the insights and knowledge shared by the citizens themselves.
Building on this process, the project will produce a blueprint – a practical guide on how to incorporate citizen input into tourism governance – intended to support policymaking in Copenhagen and offer inspiration to other cities seeking to adopt similar participatory approaches.

Business Development

Lastly, CULTIGEN aims to promote sustainable tourism as a driver of socio-cultural, economic, and environmental development, and will do so in two interconnected ways. First, the project will analyse a combination of data sources—including real-time data from the ULT, such as photos, impressions, and sentiments shared by tourists about specific places. This analysis will help identify where visitors go and why, and will inform the development of business models that reflect visitor interests, generate local benefits, preserve the character of each neighbourhood, and support a balanced coexistence between residents and tourists.
Building on this, the project will launch an accelerator programme to support new sustainable tourism start-ups. Five start-ups will be selected through an open call and a selection process involving an independent panel. The selected teams will receive mentorship, support with business development and product creation, and take part in a structured training programme. The process will conclude with an Inspiration Day, where the start-ups will present their ideas, and the most promising teams will receive cash prizes to facilitate the kickstart of their innovative activities.

As with any ambitious project aiming to bring about innovation and transformation, CULTIGEN may face a range of challenges, both operational and social or ethical in nature.

Operational Challenges

Participant and contributor engagement will be a common thread across all project activities. For the ULT, recruitment will be the main challenge, as it is essential to ensure meaningful contributions from both locals and tourists. If the use the app is limited, or if the data is scattered, it will not be actionable. In this respect, broad communication initiatives will be essential to ensure visibility and to reach a sufficient critical mass of app users from the testing phase onward.
For the Citizen Assemblies, a major challenge will be motivating participation, as these require a significant time commitment. It is crucial that people understand their input will have a real impact. CULTIGEN must therefore create a strong mandate for participation, ensuring that people feel their time is respected and their voices matter. Similarly, it will be important to attract a critical mass of participants to local workshops and interviews, in order to make experience-based research activities truly valuable.
Lastly, startups also need to see the value in participating in CULTIGEN’s accelerator. This requires clear communication of the benefits and added value of joining the programme.
The ULT will also bring an additional set of challenges. In terms of GDPR and public perception, people may feel wary of surveillance or the misuse of their data. From a technical perspective, platform volatility is another concern, as social media policies can change rapidly, and what is possible today may not be possible in the near future.

Social and ethic challenges

On another level, social and ethical challenges might also come into play when promoting non-central neighbourhoods as touristic destinations.

Tourism is a major economic driver, but it also brings tension especially in areas like the old Sydhavn. One risk is when “hidden gems” locals love become overrun. It’s a delicate balance between growth and identity.

Mikkel Heller Jensen, National Museum of Denmark

This will be especially true in Sydhavn which, unlike the newer developments in Nordhavn or Carlsberg Byen, has a long-standing social fabric. The stakeholders and values at play are different; therefore, any tourism development must be carried out in partnership with the community, not imposed from the outside.

CULTIGEN is working to mitigate these risks by involving local actors in shaping how the area is presented to visitors, with the expectation that this will help ensure tourism reflects the neighbourhood’s authentic identity and supports, rather than displaces, existing businesses and residents.