Six cities, three years, one shared exploration: What happens when creative industries and circular economy practices come together?

For three years, the Interreg Baltic Sea Region project Creative Circular Cities (CCC) looked to see what happens when creative practices and circularity come together, and whether we can change the narrative around circular economy from technical language to showing how people value and interact with things. Across six cities, Aarhus (DK), Gdynia (PL), Kiel (DE), Riga (LV), Tallinn (EE) and Turku (FI), the project explored how designers, makers, festivals, and community organisations can work with local authorities to change how cities relate to the resources they already have. On 29–30 September, partners, creatives and policymakers gathered in Kiel for the project’s final conference to share what worked, what did not, and what is needed to move from city pilots to lasting circular change.

Micro-scale pilots exploring circular transition

Throughout the three years of implementation, CCC fostered the possibility for six pilots focused on the need to reuse, develop and change the perspective around current challenges, integrating creative approaches and community-based practices when addressing topics like bulky waste, business development, social innovation, or collective awareness and collective action around environmental and lifestyle concerns. The project looked to design and test micro-scale models that are grounded in the context and needs of each of the municipalities involved. “We chose to work small because small is where cities can actually try things, adjust them and share what they learned. A festival, a library garden or a furniture-reuse pilot won’t change a city’s resource flows on its own. But each one shows how creative practice can make circular choices easier to understand and easier to join, and each can be adapted by another city without starting from scratch,” says Indra Levite, Project Manager of Creative Circular Cities. The examples below highlight some of the pilots and activities developed in each city, illustrating the different ways CCC partners explored circularity through creative and community-based approaches. Gdynia: Reuse and exchange. The Pomeranian Science and Technology Park (PPNT) Gdynia Design Centre and the “Pomorskie in the European Union” Association tackled bulky waste, one of the least documented municipal waste streams. A two-month pilot in 2025 received 32 submissions and collected 34 pieces of furniture, giving 52% of them a second life. This solution gradually became a prototype of the circular bulky waste management service “Pass It On” that creative and local communities could use to trace bulky waste around the city. The model can be easily adopted by other municipalities looking for approaches to reduce the amount of bulky waste. Kiel: Repair, design and behaviour. The Repair & Upcycling Festival, organised by Anscharcampus, the Heinrich Böll Foundation Schleswig-Holstein and Zero Waste Kiel, welcomed more than 1300 participants across the two editions that took place within the Creative Circular Cities project. The organisers published an open letter on the right to repair, backed by more than ten organisations, asking the city for repair centres and repair in public procurement. Anscharcampus in cooperation with Muthesius University and the Circular Design Hub Hamburg implemented Goldmine, a five-day intensive course where design students made over 20 products from discarded materials. Riga: Place and public space. The Riga Energy Agency built a community space from reused materials in the Bolderāja Library Garden, a neighbourhood characterized by low civic participation. Residents proposed ideas through a competition and a youth hackathon, and those ideas were written into the public tender for the garden’s design and construction. The garden was open to receive residents by the end of May 2026, and the garden pavilion has been nominated for the Latvian Architecture Award. Riga also hosted Latvia’s first Circular Economy Forum, with about 350 participants and more than 100 speakers. Cultural and creative sectors and industries are integrated into the city’s Circular Economy Strategy 2040, drawing on the experience from the CCC project. Tallinn: Business development and demonstration. The Tallinn Business Incubator organised training seminars, an incubation programme and international study trips that altogether engaged more than 1500 participants, supporting creatives in developing more sustainable products and services. The organisation also opened an interactive exhibition in their premises, The Circular Economy in Practice, highlighting businesses already working with circular practices. Turku: Culture as a connector. The ReTurku Circular Economy Carnival, organised by Valonia, City of Turku and Humak University, ran in two city neighbourhoods with more than 30 events and around 1,000 visitors. Over 80% of surveyed festival participants responded that they left with new ideas for sustainable everyday actions. Through CCC co-creation arenas, culture and climate staff across the city administration, as well as creatives, circular economy actors and businesses met regularly to encourage cross-sectoral collaboration. Turku’s Climate Plan now describes the creative industries and the arts as co-builders of the city’s climate story. Aarhus: Community spaces and social innovation. In Aarhus, community spaces like the Dome, which hosted 180 events in 2025, and K10 in Tranbjerg became a place for hands-on circular activities, from turning workwear, football jerseys and hospital linen into new products to training women in circular textile work. The Lifestyle Hub Aarhus brought together around 40 designers, creative entrepreneurs and businesses, while connecting them with students and knowledge institutions, resulting in a project where design students turned leftover clothing into a new fashion collection. The case of Aarhus also illustrates the need to constantly adapt to change: despite a citizen petition to keep it open, the Dome closed in December 2025 as the area is being redeveloped, while efforts continue to carry its activities and momentum forward.

The need for support structures and policies 

The process that Creative Circular Cities looked to sustain across the region came with two very important points of reflection that concern infrastructure more than ideas:

1. Continuity needs to be built into the structure. Cooperation between culture and sustainability departments often depended on individual officers. It is, therefore, fundamental to anchor coordination in positions rather than people, and to facilitate transition processes whenever there is a change in administration or staff, so that on-going initiatives are not altered, suspended or permanently cancelled.
2. Budgets should be designed to fit cross-sectoral work. Projects combining culture and circularity fall between cultural funding and circular economy funding, so the services they create often rely on project money or volunteers. This calls for a reassessment of the existing granting schemes that would allow creative and circular fields to collaborate and co-design solutions under more flexible and sustainable conditions.

These needs are reflected in the CCC Policy Roadmap, presented at the Kiel conference, which turns the pilots’ experience into a reference framework for national, regional and local decision-makers, addressing the gaps or fragilities exposed in the implementation phase. “Projects like this show how multi-layered the circular economy is. There isn’t one approach or measure that will change how we see materials and circularity. All levels – policy, business, creative, non-governmental and lifestyle – are needed. One question, however, remains: how do we fund circular initiatives in the long-term, especially if policy level takes time to fix? Sustainable financing and long-term funding models are yet to be developed. That could definitely be subject of another project,” says Maija Krastiņa, a Board member at Zero Waste Europe. Instead of proposing new structures, the roadmap asks existing policy fields to recognise and fund what is already happening, and it names a first step for each audience: ministries can include the cultural and creative sectors in national plans, cities can give coordination and services a named owner and a budget, and funding bodies can open their calls to culture-led circular work. The timing is practical, with the Circular Economy Act proposal due before the end of 2026, the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region action plan under review, and several national plans, including Estonia’s, now being drafted. The Policy Roadmap, as well as other project CCC resources are available on creativecircularcities.com.

About Creative Circular Cities (CCC)

Creative Circular Cities (CCC) is a transnational project co-funded by the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme and the European Union. The project explores how culture and the creative industries can help cities move from linear consumption to circular lifestyles. Across six Baltic Sea Region cities, Gdynia, Aarhus, Kiel, Riga, Tallinn and Turku, CCC develops and tests tools, models and local activities that connect circular economy with creativity, citizen engagement, business development and policymaking.