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Ask HN: Are digital twins the future of urban planning?

2 points by oliverbusch93 ↗ HN
Recently I've read a lot of articles how digital twins are the future of urban planning. I see that it may helps decision making in a way but I fail to understand why there aren't many cities using them already. I'm coming from the game industry and I can see that everything is available to create digital twins in a scalable way, google earth 3d data, mapbox data, public data, etc. It almost feels like it's a new buzzword or hype for companies to raise a lot of money without actual value provided.. What do you think?

3 comments

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PaulHoule
It’s been around for a while. The City of Ithaca had a GIS department before 2000 and sent out students to identify every street tree in the city and put it on a map. Massachusetts is well-represented in Open Street Maps since they donated the official maps to OSM.
detaro
What exactly do you mean by "digital twins" and what benefits do you see? In other fields it indeed seems to be massive buzzword with little clarity around it.
perrygeo
Computer models (GIS, CAD, and various database technologies) have been in widespread use in urban planning for over 3 decades now. The core idea of a "digital twin" is not new, IMO it's merely a buzzword for a 3D map. Granted there have been huge advances in Lidar and remote sensing technology so the computer models are now richer with data and provide a more realistic interactive experience.

It's not clear how important the interactive experience is to real actual urban planning concerns. For most use cases, you need a robust data model and process automation - the fancy 3D visuals look cool but the bulk of the real work is still plain old applied database management.