Capitalising urban futures: digital twin cities and the simplification of urban prototyping

Source abstract

Digital Twin Cities (DTCs) are promoted as the next frontier of urban governance, promising real-time simulation, predictive modelling, and frictionless management of urban futures. This paper argues that DTCs exemplify a profound simplification of urban prototyping. Rather than expanding experimentation and participation, they transpose the messy, material, and political work of city-making into closed systems of computation and control. Building on the CITY journal tradition of critical urban theory, we develop a simplification thesis that traces how digital twins substitute material experimentation with simulation, accelerate urban temporality to the pace of machine logics, and close political space through technocratic expertise and proprietary infrastructures. We show that these simplifications are both epistemic and economic as they enact new circuits of capital accumulation through data extraction, platform investment, and anticipatory governance. The DTC thus transforms the city into an investable, programmable artefact in a mode of urban governance where prediction replaces deliberation and optimisation supplants politics. Against this technocratic enclosure, we call for reasserting the urban as a site of friction, contestation, and collective imagination, and for reclaiming prototyping as a democratic, material, and open-ended practice of futuring.