Expanding the city digital twin in the context of crisis,cartography and computation

Abstract

This commentary responds to Gillian Rose's ‘Visualising human life in volumetric cities: city digital twins and other disasters’ as a framework for thinking about crisis and visual cultures in digital twinning practices. It frames Rose's analysis as a specific intervention into the visual and cultural relationship between filmic depictions of disaster and catastrophe replicated through white and masculinist imaginaries of the ordered rational city. We respond to her call for investigation of the ‘untwinnable’ elements of the city by re-approaching the city digital twin from multiple genealogies including the concept of the twin, the software used to produce 3D visualisations and the panoptic fantasies of techno-surveillent discourses. As a result, we conclude by expanding Rose's arguments into the factory, the originary vision of the digital twin as a quality control system in production lines, and returning to a technological vision of the city presented by digital twins that is not only deeply masculinist, but symptomatic of the crisis of capitalism.