Digital technologies have pervasive on the way cities are governed. One of the latest iteration of urban governance innovation is the development and use of a ‘Digital Twin’ – a dynamic virtual re-creation of a city using big data. Digital urban twins are designed and used for digitally visualizing and interacting with the city, for example to develop future scenarios and test them virtually before implementing them in the ‘real world’. They are therefore considered as key to better predict and act upon futures of so-called ‘smart cities’. As such, they are the most illustrative recent example of the emergence of virtual modes of experimenting in urban governance, which developed as a major feature of smart cities agendas in which urban spaces are more and more established as ‘testing grounds’. Through city experiments, not only technologies but also society at large are subjects of experiments: specific socio-technical orders are tested, including ways of governing the city. _x000D_
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Based on an in-depth analysis of an emerging project of digital urban twin in Liège (Belgium), this presentation proposes an analysis of digital twins as an empirical entry point to study the mutual shaping of AI-based technologies and the broader contexts in which they are developed and used for urban governance purposes. It shows how conceptions of what an urban twin ought to be – its usefulness, specific technologies, uses, and scope – are consubstantial to conceptions of desirable ways to govern. In all, we show that depending on the issues they face and the practices they develop, public authorities deploy experimental ways of not only governing digital twins themselves (e.g. how to collect, manipulate, store and analyse data) but also of governing through digital twins, which entails reinventing their role in digital urban governance.

Hadrien Macq; Roland Billen
FRS-FNRS – Université de Liège；Université de Liège

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ID Abstract: 602