Professor Simon Marvin and his colleagues have released a new open-access article titled "Capitalising urban futures: digital twin cities and the simplification of urban prototyping" in the journal City. The paper contends that while Digital Twin Cities (DTCs) are promoted as the next evolution in urban governance, promising real-time simulation and predictive modelling, they actually represent a significant simplification of urban prototyping.
The research posits that DTCs transpose the complex, material, and political aspects of city-making into closed computational systems. Instead of fostering greater experimentation and participation, they streamline these processes through technology.
Drawing on critical urban theory, the paper develops a 'simplification thesis'. This thesis outlines how digital twins substitute material experimentation with simulation, accelerate urban temporality to match machine logic, and restrict political discourse through technocratic expertise and proprietary infrastructures. These simplifications are presented as both epistemic and economic, enabling new forms of capital accumulation via data extraction, platform investment, and anticipatory governance.
The authors argue that the DTC transforms the city into an 'investable, programmable artefact', where prediction and optimisation supersede deliberation and politics. In response, they advocate for reasserting the urban as a space for friction, contestation, and collective imagination, and for reclaiming prototyping as a democratic, material, and open-ended practice for shaping future cities.
