Agent based social simulation has been around for quite some time now. It has been successful in a number of areas. Policies for sustainable development require complex decision about resource management, balance of economic, environmental and societal needs and involve many countries, interest groups and individuals. Especially for sustainable societies we are interested in simulations that can capture the behavioral patterns, changes and interactions in a society. This requires large scale simulations with relatively rich cognitive agents. Current approaches to the study of sustainable environments and communities focus on either individuals as the causal unit, particularly with regard to psychological adjustment, or on macro-economic aspects. Macro-models do not provide the instruments to evaluate a policy at the micro-level of implementation and are not able to handle highly dynamic or volatile situations. On the other hand, micro-models of individuals and groups, as used at the lower levels of abstraction, usually based on agent models for emergent global behavior, such as Agent Based Social Simulation (ABSS), don’t provide means to specify and regulate normative global restrictions. However, the societies being modeled in policy making relate to real people with real needs and personalities, often of a multi-cultural composition. Those circumstances require the agents to be diversified to accommodate these facts.Many issues come up in this context, including:What is the influence of current norms and values of a society on the way it reacts to sustainability issues?Can we device policies that take this into account and achieve socially optimal situations?How do we balance rich and complex agents and interactions and large scale simulations?How can we choose the aspects that should be included in the simulation in order for the simulation to be useful for policy makers?Can we zoom in and out to particular areas in a simulation? E.g. look at a street level simulation and zoom out to a nationwide simulation including that street?What kind of agent platforms are best suited for this kind of agent based simulations?http://ict1.tbm.tudelft.nl/absss2011/