Urban futures in the mirror of technology? The politics of urban digital twins

Abstract

Urban digital twins (UDTs) represent a growing trend in urban governance, offering the promise of enhanced prediction, decision-making, and public participation. Adopting a constructivist perspective toward UDTs, this article contributes to the emerging literature on “twinning”: the making of UDTs, which produces an interrelation between tangible reality and its digital representation in order to enable new forms of knowledge and urban governance. Through a comparative analysis of UDT projects in Boston, Namur, and Munich, we explore how digital representations of cities are co-produced with ideas about desirable governance. Our locally situated perspective highlights the interrelations of twinning in three dimensions: representation, epistemic promise, and ideas of desirable urban governance. The analysis provides crucial insights into the role of digital technologies in shaping urban futures, offering a critical reading of the current trend of UDTs in urban governance, and is attentive to its social and political implications.