A Socio-Technical Perspective on Urban Analytics: The Case of City-Scale Digital Twins

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that a shift from a purely technical to a more socio-technical perspective has significant implications for the conceptualization, design, and implementation of smart city technologies. Such implications are discussed and illustrated through the case of an emerging urban analytics tool, the Cityscale Digital Twin. Based on interdisciplinary insights and a participatory knowledge co-production and tool co-development process, including both researchers and prospective users, we conclude that in order to move beyond a mere "hype technology," City-Scale Digital Twins must reflect the specifics of the urban and socio-political context.

City Digital Twin Potentials: A Review and Research Agenda

“…Several potentials and advancements have already been obtained by the city digital twin regarding data management, yet some challenges are still hindering the full utilization of its benefits. For instance, to process and integrate various city domains' heterogeneous data, data standardization and data-sharing frameworks for improving data exchange among software applications are major challenges [37,46].…”

“…For instance, Dembski et al developed traffic scenarios and air pollution simulations to test their urban planning impact [66]. Nochta et al illustrated the evaluation of different scenarios of electric vehicles' charging locations and the cross-sectoral impacts through the city digital twin [46]. Other applications were experimented with for supporting decision-making by providing "what if" scenarios for several domains of the city.…”

“…Furthermore, by assigning different levels of authorization, the city digital twin can be accessible, navigated, and discussed by the public for urban planning purposes [27]. A good deal of research pointed out the potential of constructing linkages among the stakeholders of different city domains and the benefits from citizens' engagement via the digital twin [40,46,56,63,[70][71][72].…”

“…In addition, inadequate situational awareness would challenge the quality of planning and prediction capabilities of the digital twin. That is, the incompleteness of the city model, whether due to lack of accurate data or how it is visualized [38,46], will affect the city digital twin's ability to provide useful planning decisions or predictions of future scenarios.…”

“…Thus, developing more enriched semantic information [47], understanding and modeling system interactions [69], and identifying requirements for interoperability among the various systems [45] are required for further development of the city digital twin model. In addition, the need for engaging the public and the different sectors of the city and providing accessibility to the model is still challenging due to several issues related to lack of governance structures, data-sharing frameworks, and participants readiness, awareness, and willingness [40,46,64]. In addition, enhancement of the integration and collaboration qualities of the city digital twin implies societal challenges that need to be investigated, such as privacy and security issues [33,35,69].…”