Digital Twins at the Edge
Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Urban Digital Twins are emergent and are part of the next iteration of smart cities and mark an age of data hypermobility. Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) are defined as "digital representations at a set fidelity, of physical element(s) including its behaviour, which is connected and integrated for efficiency" (Cureton, 2024). Urban digital twin definitions are currently undefined and vague. However, they are generally understood to be a collection of sensors and models, contain near-real-time data analytical tools, and have the capacity to create future scenarios for data-driven decision-making. Urban digital twins are being explored to understand emerging ecosystems concerning data, access, and standards and have generated a number of applied cases, such as transport planning, MaaS, wayfinding, urban air space, and environment, among other areas. This paper will trace the genealogy of urban digital twins to clarify their potential functions and systems utilising back-casting methods. Following this basis, through an analysis of twenty cases, the paper will set out the Latour ‘controversies’ that urban digital twins enable through a taxonomic approach regarding territorial coverage, data and infrastructural design and how decision-making is derived. The taxonomic analysis and findings evidence that urban digital twins are at the edge regarding the optimal social impact and are ongoing ‘matters of concern’ in relation to mobilities. Urban digital twins are often presented as systems for ‘optimisation’ and ‘efficiency’, yet there are many nuances and lenses to analyse these systems. As federated systems, for example, they can potentially escalate spatial injustice and affect climate responsiveness and the ability to predict futures in terms of the geographies they cover. Urban digital twins could also repeat earlier failures of first-generation ICT-centric smart cities. However, the paper's findings also indicate a rich potential for UDTs to shape planning in terms of engagement and environment in terms of resilience.
- Conference Theme
To state that the world is facing challenges seems to be an understatement. Not since the Second World War has a totality of nations and continents been hit by so many challenges and crisis as now. The environmental, energy and ecological crisis has been building up over decades, but it’s coinciding with the global epidemics of Covid-19, the global refugee crisis, the war in Ukraine and now the conflict in Israel and Palestine almost seems like the ‘perfect storm’. The facing of ‘wicked problems’ on an unpresented magnitude is a wake-up call not just for policy makers, business leaders, and the civil society. The global research communities are also called upon by these troubled times. Various forms of research that addresses such challenges - from the globe to the body - is highly needed.
During this plethora of troubles, we find mobilities to be at the very heart of contestation and controversy. The sheer magnitude of moving of matter, goods, people, information, data, virus, weapons etc. should make it clear that we are facing serious global challenges. Next to this ‘hypermobility’ we are also facing problematic immobility or restricted mobility as for instance when humans are moving for survival but curbed on their mobilities due to ‘politicized forms of friction’.
The ‘Mobilities Controversies’ want to chase the genealogies of these controversies. Not only in time, but also across spaces and infrastructural landscapes. Mobilities are contested in various fields of policy and planning, as well as multiple research disciplines offer different interpretation of the causes and consequences. By applying the notion of ‘controversy’ we partly want to pay homage to the now late Bruno Latour, an unorthodox thinker whose oeuvre has left a permanent imprint on the mobilities turn. Partly we want to acknowledge the line of enquiry coming out of ‘controversy studies’ that critically problematize notions of singular causality and foundational explanations in a hunt for ‘matters of fact’. Exploring contemporary mobilities as ‘matter of concern’ in the light of controversy is thus to have an open mind to the many human and non-human systems, agencies, and infrastructures that shapes the world we now inhabit.
To reduce some of this complexity the conference wants to home in on three important dimensions of these mobilities controversies. Firstly, the conference explore how places becomes central in all this? Both in terms of the obvious fact that mobilities controversies are ‘placed’. There is a complicated geography and territoriality to these issues. But also, on the more fundamental level we want to ask what place is and what it becomes in the light of these controversies. Secondly, the conference brings questions of justice and injustice to the table. Much focus is on the two dimensions of sustainability relating to the environment and the economy. Important as these are, we here, however, remind that the social exclusionary effects of multiple mobilities controversies should not be forgotten. Issues of mobility justice and mobility injustice prevails. Final and thirdly, the conference inserts this discussion in a context of democracy. Not as a solution based on the best ‘system’ but rather as a prism into issues of co-creation, transparency, and citizen engagement. Democracy might be troubled but nevertheless a set of practices and a way of thinking that seems to be the best way forward. Whether one perceives democracy as a system or a way of living, and whether one believes that democracy is about rational consensus or agonistic co-existence we believe it is necessary to have a platform for normative and critical deliberation.
On this rather gloomy background, the Center for Mobilities and Urban Studies (C-MUS) at Aalborg University calls to an internationally anchored, critical-concerned conversation across professions and professional disciplines. We invite papers on mobilities controversies to fit under the following thematic headlines (but not only these):
- Everyday life mobilities
- Rural / urban mobilities
- Territorial and geo-political mobilities
- Infrastructure, infrastructural landscapes and
mobilities systems
- Aeromobilities
- Automobilities
- Cycling
- Pedestrians
- Harbors and water-based infrastructure
- Architecture
- The human and multisensorial body
- Urban design and planning
- Digital network technologies
- Mobilities of ageing populations
- Mobilities of disabilities
- Gendered mobilities
- Racialized controversies of mobilities
- Refugees and immigration
- Warfare and geopolitical conflict
- Environment and ecology
- Mobilities and geosocial classes
| Title | Mobilities Controversies<br/>- Place, Justice, Democracy |
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| Date | 22/08/24 → 23/08/24 |
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| Location | Aalborg University |
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| City | Aalborg |
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| Country/Territory | Denmark |
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| Degree of recognition | International event |
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