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Paper short abstract

Urban Digital Twins seek to provide virtual city replicas for governance purposes. This presentation analyses how they transform existing governance arrangements, prompting critical reflection on the present and potential futures of urban democracy through geospatial data platforms.

Paper long abstract

Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) are increasingly being promoted as the future of urban governance and democracy. UDTs are presented as dynamic virtual replicas of cities and consist of interconnected data infrastructures that can extract, manage and analyse multi-sourced spatialized big data. I argue that UDTs are particularly insightful sites through which to examine how geospatial data platforms redefine existing orders by shaping relationships between citizens, public authorities and markets, and to critically consider possible future avenues for urban democracy and governance. Analysing and comparing experiments with UDTs within the EU and asking how they are transforming urban governance, I develop an understanding of UDTs as data assemblages — complex socio-technical systems infused with politics and context — and scrutinise how the generation, circulation and deployment of data are constituted by technological, political, social and economic elements, including imaginaries and discourses. This highlights the specific situated ways in which UDTs redefine the norms and values of a governance deemed desirable: how they reposition citizens in relation to public authorities (e.g. by involving them as data providers through urban sensors or by governing them in more individualised ways through the increasing use of digital platforms) and reorganise political institutions and procedures (e.g. by developing more participatory decision-making processes or by delegating part of urban governance to digital contractors). Overall, this perspective highlights the ongoing and future reconfigurations of crucial issues in urban governance, notably public mastery over data and the specific forms of digital citizenship that are enacted through digital platforms.