Legal issues of the digital twin cities in the current and upcoming European legislation: Can digital twin cities be used to respond to urbanisation problems?

ASBTRACT: The paper describes the ongoing research on “Digital Twin Cities” (DTCs), aiming to investigate the possibility of combining existing instruments in legal fields, as well as best practices and projects, in order to develop a digital twin city model that is open, compliant with standards and respectful of citizens’ rights. This goes through the response to four orders of legal and ethical questions: a) the problem of the usage of personal data; b) ethics behind the software and its use; c) the compliance of the DTCs in Europe with the current and approaching legislation that aim to regulate the infosphere; d) the role of the Independent Authorities that discipline standard and technical issues. Larger and larger cities, increasingly interconnected, in search of new balances (even where “classic” surveillance tools are limited or banned), become the ideal training ground for experimenting with a new vocabulary and concepts at the basis of the governance of “native” digital communities.