Groundtruthing the Digital Twin

Abstract

More recently, coverage and promotion of urban digital twins within mainstream media outlets, urban and technology focused publications, trade press, and scholarly journals has increased visibility and awareness of these 3D, interactive images as tools for urban management and urban planning. Rose offers compelling theoretical foundations for understanding these types of urban data imaginaries and technologized visions of cities. In this response, I recognize the importance of Rose's cultural reading and critique of urban digital twins while briefly looking at the discursive construction of digital twins through slightly different cultural comparisons. It is imperative to investigate the types of changes enacted, ethnographic understandings of how decisions are made, technological affordances that inform these decisions, and the types of places created through the use of urban digital twins. In considering similar issues of race and gender in the “volumetricisation” of the city, I want to suggest that urban digital twins are more closely related to spectacles of prevention and preparation than disaster as well as sensory experiences of media that spotlight the apparatus of their own production (satellite or live television, video games, operational aesthetics) rather than disaster films. In fact, there may be a de-emphasis of disaster in the discursive construction of “actually existing” urban digital twins. The mundane simulation of risk and risk mitigation may indicate a shift in smart city rhetoric overall, albeit not in the socio-technical imaginaries and power relations that substantiate and benefit from “smartness”.