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Short abstract:

This paper examines how classifications shape stakeholder involvement in an urban Digital Twin. The study focuses on how stakeholder engagement methods and co-design platforms enable specific design processes, perform socio-technical actors and negotiate the tension between inclusivity and control.

Long abstract:

This paper explores how classifications can be used to control the interest and the inclusion of the actors involved in the development of the urban Digital Twin (UDT) in an Italian city. We are looking at the UDT as an experimental urban knowledge infrastructure whose success depends on the cooperation of a large number of socio-technical actors (public administration, researchers, sensor technologies, algorithms, etc.). We argue that this coordination work is especially delegated to classifications, "boundary objects" (Star and Griesemer 1989), which establish commensurability between the different social and technological worlds that interact within the UDT. However, they do so by enacting some identities, viewpoints and practices while rendering others invisible. More specifically, this paper will focus on the process of stakeholder identification, selection and engagement in the UDT, and on the issues arising from the effort to make the process as inclusive as possible. First, we will interrogate the various stakeholder engagement methodologies (e.g. Value Sensitive Design, Constructive Technology Assessment, etc.) deployed to ensure the sustainable embedding of stakeholder values in socio-technical planning, asking which design methods are enabled by each framework. Secondly, we will look at the action of software platforms facilitating the visualization and discussion of the stakeholder network (e.g. Miro board and the likes), inquiring how they configure and perform the socio-technical actors, assigning them roles in the process. Thus, we will question how the engagement frameworks and co-design platforms negotiate between the drive for inclusiveness in UDT and the operative necessity for delimitation and control.