Critical Perspectives on Urban Digital Twins
Co-supervisors will be found based on the specific focus of the student project.
More and more cities are developing digital twins of their critical public infrastructures. The data and data models that are needed to build digital twins are forecast to take on more and more relevance in how cities are run and developed. Many twinning projects involve multiple stakeholders in their design but our discussions about how and who should govern urban digital twins going forward demand more critical engagement. This theme invites project that engage critically with Urban digital twins and how these are increasingly shaping urban governance.
Projects may chose to tackle any of the below questions:
Who should own urban digital twins?
How can public procurement processes for digital twins and other urban geotechnologies ensure that those technologies remain contestable?
What ethics concerns do urban digital twins raise and how can those be addressed?
Given a prominent focus on level of detail and hyperrealism, how detailed do twins need to be to be taking computational cost and context specific needs into account?
As planning support tools that are stacking many different models and technologies what practices should the twinning community adopt to ensure transparency?
How are twinning projects unfolding in practice - are they living up to their promises?
These questions are not exhaustive and for this theme other research questions and case studies can be suggested that are interested in critically examining how twins are reconfiguring urban governance.
The primary objectives of projects in this theme should be to:
- Acquire the ability to critically evaluate geo-data technologies and their social implications
- Contribute to an emerging field of research on critical data studies and migration through specific case studies
- Develop and apply social science research skills and (if appropriate) link those with specific GIS skills (e.g., mapping dataflows or actors to explain networks of power).
As this theme allows for different research questions, the methodological approach of the specific project of a student will depend on the precise project question that the student develops during proposal writing. Mixed method approaches are encouraged, especially the creative use of spatial technologies and spatial data in the process of research as well as innovative social science methodologies such as network analytic approaches. It is likely that the analysis of textual data sources (e.g., policy documents, newspaper articles, expert interviews) will be appropriate - but innovative (e.g. artistic) approaches will be considered.
Azadi, S., Kasraian, D., Nourian, P., & Wesemael, P. van. (2025). What Have Urban Digital Twins Contributed to Urban Planning and Decision Making? From a Systematic Literature Review Toward a Socio-Technical Research and Development Agenda. Smart Cities, 8(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities8010032
Borbach, C., Chun, W. H. K., & Thielmann, T. (2025). Making everything ac-count-able: The digital twinning paradigm. New Media & Society, 27(8), 4369–4384. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251338289
Halpern, O. (2025). The geo-politics of resilience: On the historical convergence between ecology, artificial intelligence, and corporate strategy. New Media & Society, 27(8), 4581–4605. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251336420
Guikema, S., & Flage, R. (2024). Digital twins as a security risk? Risk Analysis, risa.15749. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.15749
Lata, L. N., & Andron, S. (2024, January 28). Images shape cities, but who decides which ones survive? It’s a matter of visual justice. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/images-shape-cities-but-who-decides-which-ones-survive-its-a-matter-of-visual-justice-216003
Paché, G. (2025). The Palletized Citizen: Surveillance, Mobility, and Algorithmic Urbanism. International Journal of E-Planning Research, 14(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJEPR.389050
Rose, G. (2024). Visualising human life in volumetric cities: City digital twins and other disasters. Dialogues in Urban Research, 27541258241288812. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258241288812
Safransky, S. (2020). Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44(2), 200–218. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12833
Wilmott, C., Fraser, E., & Payne, W. B. (2025). Expanding the city digital twin in the context of crisis, cartography and computation. Dialogues in Urban Research, 3(2), 192–198. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258251318986
The use of urban digital twins increasingly shapes how urban governance is done. This creates wicked problems as new socio-technical entanglements are often insufficiently understood. By choosing this topic, you can critically explore the link between urban governance and remote sensing applications - questioning the values and priorities that go into solving wicked problems. To take this kind of viewpoint, you will need to be able to read across disciplines and enjoy critically questioning the why and where to of novel geospatial technologies.