Smart City Gnosys
Smart city article details
| Title | Digital Twins For Urban Governance: General Desires, Expectations, Challenges |
|---|---|
| ID_Doc | 20297 |
| Authors | Kogut P.; van der Heijden R. |
| Year | 2025 |
| Published | Decide Better: Open and Interoperable Local Digital Twins |
| DOI | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81451-8_2 |
| Abstract | Digital twins appeared under four different names on the Gartner's hype cycle of emerging technologies-as digital twins for business (2018), digital twins of government (2019), digital twins of a human (2021), and digital twin of a citizen (2022). Digital twins of government come closest to exemplifying digital twins for urban governance, however it doesn't mean that the public sector is the technology's sole user or beneficiary. Policymakers are just one of several urban stakeholders that leverage digital twins to achieve their objectives. Architects are using digital twins to create optimal designs to comply with planning regulations. Property developers take advantage of the model-based submission process to expedite an approval by a building authority. Construction professionals see digital twins as an opportunity to better manage on-site operations and de-risk digging. For utility companies, digital twins provide a means to prepare for and mitigate the impact of emergencies when they happen, such as sewage spills or flooding. The pool of use cases has grown substantially over the years. Even so, with an impressive body of knowledge accumulated to date, we barely scratch the surface of what is possible with digital twins. By incorporating a broader spectrum of elements that shape urban dynamics, digital twins have the potential to represent urban reality more holistically than is currently the case. Once more dimensions start getting added to complement a physical city, it may be more appropriate to talk not of digital twins but of digital multiples, such as triplets (with social dimension included), quadruplets (plus cultural), or quintuplets (plus political). It's this enhanced representational capacity combined with the ability to change local reality through a two-way synchronisation with the physical world that separates digital twins from other e-governance tools like Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) or Building Information Models (BIM). That said, the road ahead is far from smooth as there are a number of challenges and challengers to the concept. The paper discusses them and provides a critical reflection on how digital twins can evolve to remain relevant in the future. © The Author(s) 2025. All rights reserved. |
| Author Keywords | Digital twins; Smart city; Urban governance |
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