Check out the episode:

You can find the transcripts through this link.

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Are you interested in the evolution of urban digital twins?

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Debate of the article titled 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 from 2025, by Shervin Azadi, Dena Kasraian, Pirouz Nourian, and Pieter van Wesemael, published in the MDPI Smart Cities journal.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Ruthbea Yesner in episode 458 talking about the opportunities with new technologies, such as digital twins for better urban futures.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how digital twins have been helping urban decision-making. This article advocates for urban digital twins that are interdisciplinarily integrated, consensually contextualised and procedurally operationalised.

Find the article through this link.

Abstract: Urban digital twins (UDTs) were first discussed in 2018. Seven years later, we ask: What has been their contribution to urban planning and decision making so far? Here, we systematically review 88 peer-reviewed articles to map and compare UDTs’ ambitions with their realized contributions. Our results indicate that despite the vast technical developments, socio-technical challenges have remained largely unaddressed, causing many of UDTs’ ambitions to remain unrealized. We identify three categories in these socio-technical challenges: interdisciplinary integration (II), consensual contextualization (CC), and procedural operationalization (PO). Accordingly, we consolidate a socio-technical research and development agenda to realize the ambitions of UDTs for urban planning and decision making: Augmented Urban Planning (AUP).

Connected episodes you might be interested in:

• No.222 – Interview with Adam Dorr about the new technologies being more economically viable
• No.408 – Interview with Jasper Steinhausen about making sustainability (innovation) profitable
• No.442 – Interview with Darren Flynn about the underground urban layer

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