Chapter 1: Introduction

In simple terms, a digital twin has been defined as

While digital twin technology has been in use in manufacturing and aerospace engineering for some time (see early applications developed by NASA for the Apollo programme (Rosen et al., 2015)), simply replicating digital twin cases from these domains to city planning and management is likely to present a number of distinct challenges. The determining features of digital twins broadly agreed upon in engineering terms (see Bolton et al., 2018; Niederer et al., 2021) will require adaptation and refinement when applied in the urban context to address the inherent complexity of the various ‘socio-technical’ systems (systems made up of co-evolving social and technological elements) that constitute cities (Tzachor et al., 2022).