Preface : Games for Urban Sustainability

The issues related to the growth of the urban population are among the mostimportant challenges of our time. T he recurring question is why it is so important to address sustainability at city scale and our answer is quite simple: the bulk of non-renewable resource consumption occurs in cities and this implies they are the firstplace where the innovations which must guide us towards a new model of sustainabledevelopment,i.e.the development that meets the needs of the present withoutcompromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs [1], must be experimented.The main issue is therefore to design and to plan cities so that all the processesthat take place inside them become fully sustainable from a social, economic and environmental point of view, the so-calledTriple Sustainability [2] and this issueposes an interesting research question:How is it possible to design more sustainable cities in an era of zero resources, rifesocial conflicts and unprecedented environmental issues?