A policy-relevant serious game to guide urban sustainability transformation

Abstract Cities are faced with the complex task of addressing their climate mitigation and adaptation goals rapidly while ensuring the provision of housing and functional mobility systems for citizens as well as addressing biodiversity decline. Trade-offs between goals change dynamically with time, and they are hard to grasp in everyday urban planning. We introduce a novel serious game (SG) methodology for simulating urban planning decision-making in a realistic legal and policy context that supports overcoming the trade-offs in cross-sectoral deliberation. The SG is tested with doctoral students and applied in cross-sectoral groups of urban planners in the context of sustainable urban mobility system transformation during the next 15 years in Helsinki, Finland. Results show that the SG works both as an “active sensing” method of planners’ views regarding transformative urban climate governance and as a learning intervention that educates participants on the complexity of urban sustainability transformations in practice.