Thriving Smart Cities

Abstract

Sustaining our cities by providing them with the tools to flourish is a key objective if we are to safeguard humankind and ensure that the places we live, work and play in remain resilient. The ecosystems that provide our urban livelihood and quality of life are highly complex and extremely fragile. City leaders strive to keep up with the growing population, limited resources, and expectation of society. Digital Twins, where the physical world is reflected and mirrored with technology with real time data, are already demonstrating how invaluable they are in providing resilient and sustainable solutions and helping to deliver the promise of smart cities. In their most basic form, digital twins of cities, i.e., in this case interactive models of cities, are already being used by city stakeholders for the understanding, communication and simulation in key areas such as urban planning, mobility and resource management. They drastically reduce the cost, not only during design, but provide a far greater likelihood of success and achieving community engagement and adoption. As technology evolves and open urban data becomes readily available and interoperable, the future of digital twins promises to deliver decision support systems. Platforms that will model not just the physical world but integrate the complexity that reflect the many facets and knock-on effects of our cities: from its differing social, cultural, political and multidisciplinary flavours. These decision support systems will provide local authorities with digital twins of their cities. The core tools to help them on both strategic and operational levels to: build evolving strategies; simulate and communicate what they wish to achieve to stakeholders and local communities involved; analyze the budgets and resources required to achieve success; monitor solutions based on KPIs; predict pain points and resolve before they become reality. The goal of digital twins for cities is to help bring about resilience and sustainability and stimulate smart growth to remain competitive and thrive.