Sustainable cultural tourism, understood as heritage-based tourism, can support inclusive and sustainable development, especially in remote or peripheral areas. While participatory processes are mandatory, they are not sufficient to ensure sustainable cultural tourism planning. For the latter, cultural tourism must embrace the four pillars of sustainable development: focusing on economic, cultural, environmental, and social sustainability. Nevertheless, a comprehensive methodology that addresses all the aspects of sustainable planning at each stage of the process through inclusive and diverse participation of local communities is still missing. The paper introduces a specific participatory methodology for cultural tourism developed and tested in eight case studies across Europe and beyond and analyzes how the devised participatory process and tools guarantee proper incorporation of the different pillars for sustainable development at each stage. The methodology and tools presented are based on three replicable steps that aim to enhance cultural tourism in a sustainable, diverse, inclusive, and innovative way. The paper specifically focuses on three activities designed for the participatory workshops: the co-mapping exercise, the Action Co-creation, and an adapted Business Model Canvas, providing an analysis of how those contribute to an innovative participatory process, constantly considering the four pillars of sustainable development.

Civil society actors engaged in social innovation supporting activities provide crucial services that address unmet social needs and empower communities. Yet, creating a resilient framework that not only supports their activities but helps to sustain them as an organization is often difficult. It necessitates resilience strategies that help them survive and overcome crises even without former institutionalization. The paper identifies three distinct strategies that can be followed: adaptability, diversification and ecosystem building. While all three represent different ways of resilience, the latest provides the most complex safety net, allowing bottom-up organizations and partnerships to share resources, develop complementary services and sustain social innovation. Choosing the time of the first COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown for the analysis, the paper illustrates with eight selected case studies how these strategies enfold during a crisis. The paper analyses the activities of different civic initiatives, gauging their capacity to adapt flexibly to radically new situations. While doing so, it brings together the concept of social innovation and resilience and enriches resilience studies with a less frequently found focus on small, civic initiatives.

Purpose: Post-socialist urban development changed cityscapes and city life profoundly, reusing public space in a different manner and reinterpreting the role of work, heritage, and consumption among others. Focusing on two case studies – the Outer Józsefváros in Budapest and the Praga North district in Warsaw – the paper examines this transformation, following how and to what extent these characteristic neighbourhoods have changed, how local heritage has been reconceptualised and what role work has played in this process.Design/methodology/approach: The comparative analysis combines a literature review with a case study investigation that includes interviews, on-site visits, experiments with locally driven adaptive reuse, and document analysis.Findings: The two case studies put heritage conservation, identity building and value determination processes in the context of architectural design, economic investment and labour market. The paper shows the relation between aesthetics and economic transition, how work, or its loss, has shaped the areas, creating a milieu of transition in a physical and a social sense, offering a reconceptualization of local identity. It also highlights the seminal value of civic initiatives and artists/artisans to increase the engagement of the local community.Originality/value: The paper provides a rarely done comparison between two former Socialist cities undergoing similar transformations. It focuses on work as intangible heritage, the connected architectural aesthetics and their role in shaping the identity of various groups.

Sustainability has become a key concept for tourism development. Understanding and using local resources, developing an area in a way that is in line with the wishes and aspirations of the local community is essential, however, not without complications. Communities themselves are multi-faceted entities, with diverging interests and understandings about local heritage, its value and its possible social/economic role. Relying on the research carried out in the TExTOUR (Social Innovation and Technologies for sustainable growth through participative cultural TOURism) project the paper explores community attitudes towards local heritage and tourism, and creates a more in-depth picture about the challenges and perspectives of bottom-up driven cultural tourism development, as well as its social context. The paper uses the results of the qualitative interviews and focus groups carried out in 8 pilots in the course of 2021, and relies on deliverables produced in the project.TExTOUR is an EU-funded project operating for 45 months, which co-designs pioneering and sustainable cultural tourism strategies to improve deprived areas in Europe and beyond. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No.101004687. The project started in January 2021 and finishes in September, 2024. More details about the project can be found in its website: https://textour-project.eu/The two deliverables in question are TExTOUR D1.3 “Data collection methodology” and TExTOUR D1.4 “Results from the data collection phase”.