The RenOlympics: A Card-Based Game for Just Renovation Decisions
A toolkit to bring residents' needs into the heart of renovation choices
What the toolkit contains
- Decision-making criteria cards: 19 cards representing socio-technical criteria for renovation, grouped into liveability, cost, environmental impact, and construction impact.
- Intervention cards: 24 cards representing concrete renovation measures at the dwelling, building, and neighbourhood scale.
- Vulnerability-context vignettes: five resident-centred scenarios depicting recurring vulnerabilities in Dutch social housing, from energy poverty to social isolation, grounded in fieldwork and direct resident quotes.
- Justice Wheel: a visual evaluation framework structured around recognition, procedural, and distributive justice.
- Individual ranking sheet: a personal worksheet completed before and after the workshop to capture how participants' priorities shift through collective deliberation.
- Facilitator guide: workshop structure, game rules, and guiding questions.
A further refinement of the game/workshop was made by introducing initial use cases from which participants can select scenarios representing critical situations (vignette-type households or neighbourhood characteristics). These provide a more concrete reference point that helps participants prioritise criteria (cards) and co-create renovation scenarios. This process then feeds into a discussion on justice based on the developed scenarios.
For example, the use cases may represent conditions of severe energy poverty, material or physical deficiencies at the building and neighbourhood level, overheating stress during summer, and a lack of social connection, including isolated neighbourhoods.
Why we share this
We believe that translating energy justice from an abstract principle into a concrete practice requires accessible, hands-on tools that can be picked up and adapted by others. The materials below are freely available for use in workshops, training sessions, and educational settings. We hope they support practitioners and researchers in starting conversations that put residents' lived experience at the centre of renovation decisions.
Diletta Ricci
PhD at Technical University Delft



































