Challenges in the transition towards a sustainable city: The Case of GO2Zero

Cities face a challenging task in reducing CO2 emissions. Multiple technical solutions on district level as well as household level are available; multiple stakeholders with different values and possibilities to intervene are involved; and their actions highly influence the performance. To get a better understanding of these complexities and to contribute to a community-based transition process towards a CO2 city, a simulation game was developed. This game, GO2Zero, represents an abstract district that is challenged to reduce the CO2 emission to zero. Multiple stakeholders take actions, observe the challenges, and deal with these challenges with the final objective a sustainable district. This paper illustrates the first sessions with this game and show that different strategies of stakeholders lead to different challenges, ways to solve these, and a variety of outcomes