ABSTRACT
The digital twins in various forms have recently drawn considerable attention in the city innovation and urban governance discourses. The core of traditional digital twins lies in describing and monitoring objects and creating mathematical simulations, e.g., for optimization and risk management purposes. In the urban context, this technological approach has been seen as lacking some key elements to better understand real-life processes and in general urban living and citizens. Such elements include agent-based simulations, participatory activities, and citizen engagement. This chapter argues that to progress from industrial digital twins, the urban digital twins should be based on a sophisticated and extensible information model to allow including the key artifacts of social structures such as space, population, and resources. This could create a starting point for various applications where social links and human behavior are ingredients for meaningful citizen service. The socio-technical approach could thus provide valuable tools and insights to support the shift from technology-centric to human-centric design of urban digital twins.
