Addressing social and political dimensions of Urban Digital Twins
More and more cities are developing digital twins of their crucial public infrastructures. The data, models and standards needed to build digital twins are forecast to become increasingly relevant to how cities are run and developed. Many twinning projects involve multiple stakeholders in their design and take the participatory turn in urban planning seriously. However, how we should govern digital urban twins in the future and how they will become part of mundane urban social realities demands more critical engagement.
With this project, you will explore governing urban digital twins or their social implications through applied social scientific research. One possible avenue to develop the project is to take a responsible futuring approach and query how cities currently implementing twins view the future of data infrastructures needed to maintain twins. Another approach to critically investigating urban twinning is to review how different actors (e.g. ESRI) influence how, where and with what functionalities and aesthetics twins are being developed. A more desk-based- literature review mapping out the rise of digital twins can also be a valuable contribution. Student-driven ideas about approaching a critical evaluation of urban digital twins can be discussed in developing a project. Situated in the science and technology studies domain, the envisaged project will allow students to learn about urban digital twins' technical capabilities and how to research their social and governance dimensions.
Cugurullo, F. et al. (2023) Artificial intelligence and the city. London: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781003365877.
Easterling, K. (2016) Extrastatecraft. London, England: Verso Books. (or shorter article in Places Journal)
Karvonen, A. (2020) Urban Techno-Politics: Knowing, Governing, and Imagining the City, Science as Culture, 29:3, 417-424, DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2020.1766011
Korenhof, P., Blok, V. and Kloppenburg, S. (2021) 'Steering Representations—Towards A Critical Understanding of Digital Twins,' Philosophy & Technology, 34(4), pp. 1751–1773. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-021-00484-1.
A challenge from a particular urban context can be chosen to be worked out to query, structure and define potential governance problems linked to the implementation of urban digital twins. The context can either be with a municipality in the Netherlands or an international case where a demand is detected to engage with the future of urban digital twins critically.