Speaker
Description
Digital twins are enjoying widespread and growing success in both theoretical and practical applications. A recent development that is gaining increasing traction is the application of digital twins to cities. The aim of this paper is to discuss the potential and limitations of city-scale digital twins. The scientific literature on digital twins is dominated by “technical” approaches. Critical investigation of digital twins is still at the beginning. This paper aims to contribute to this stream of inquiry. It examines digital twins and their applications in urban contexts, starting by distinguishing between simple, complicated and complex systems, and reaching the conclusion that, while using digital twins is generally appropriate (and often helpful) in the first two of these systems, some structural limitations on their use in the case of complex systems exist.
References
Batty, M. (2024). The Computable City. Histories, Technologies, Stories, Predictions. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press.
Bettencourt, L. (2024). Recent achievements and conceptual challenges for urban digital twins. Nature Computational Science, 4, 150-153.
Caldarelli, G., et al. (2023). The role of complexity for digital twins of cities. Nature Computational Science, 3: 374-381.
Charitonidou, M. (2022). Urban scale digital twins in data-driven society: Challenging digital universalism in urban planning decision-making. International Journal of Architectural Computing, 20(2), 238-253.
Korenhof, P., Blok, V., Kloppenburg, S. (2021). Steering Representations. Towards a Critical Understanding of Digital Twins. Philosophy & Technology, 34: 1751-1773.
| Keywords | Digital twins; Simulation; Complexity |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
