Prof. Bianca Howard along with the her co-investigators, Prof. Josh Whitford of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University and Prof. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Director of the Urban Democracy Lab at NYU, have been awarded a year of funding to support the research project "Illuminating the co-benefits of building stock decarbonization". This interdisciplinary project seeks to use quality-diversity (or illumination) optimization algorithms to evaluate the co-benefits of building stock decarbonization and use the generated solutions to act as a “coordination device” to help street-level bureaucrats and community stakeholders identify mutually acceptable approaches to building stock decarbonization. We have gathered an interdisciplinary team of engineers and sociologists to capture the fact that (1) this problem requires an understanding of how people with different values can work towards consensus within complex organizational structures and that (2) quantitative tools can enhance the consensus process by iteratively generating candidate solutions. The project will focus on a case study region of the Bronx and engage with community organizations and public institutions to understand their definitions of co-benefits and what outcomes they would expect from the coordination tool. As this will be the first application of quality-diversity algorithms to urban building energy modeling, the generated solutions from the quality-diversity algorithms will be evaluated against a standard multi-objective optimization to understand the difference in the amount of diversity in the solution set as well as the computational cost. The resulting diverse solutions will be presented back to the various stakeholders to solicit their feedback and study how engagement with the coordination tool led to knowledge generation, consensus and action.