Towards Civic Digital Twins: Co-Design the Citizen-Centric Future of Bologna

TL;DR

This paper introduces Civic Digital Twin (CDT), a citizen-centric urban modeling tool designed to support urban planning, governance, and civic engagement by simulating social dynamics and involving stakeholders.

Contribution

It defines the concept, modeling aspects, and research challenges of CDT, illustrating its application in urban mobility and development.

Findings

CDT can model social behaviors and preferences.

Engages citizens and stakeholders in co-design.

Supports decision-making in urban planning.

Abstract

We introduce Civic Digital Twin (CDT), an evolution of Urban Digital Twins designed to support a citizen-centric transformative approach to urban planning and governance. CDT is being developed in the scope of the Bologna Digital Twin initiative, launched one year ago by the city of Bologna, to fulfill the city's political and strategic goal of adopting innovative digital tools to support decision-making and civic engagement. The CDT, in addition to its capability of sensing the city through spatial, temporal, and social data, must be able to model and simulate social dynamics in a city: the behavior, attitude, and preference of citizens and collectives and how they impact city life and transform transformation processes. Another distinctive feature of CDT is that it must be able to engage citizens (individuals, collectives, and organized civil society) and other civic stakeholders (utilities, economic actors, third sector) interested in co-designing the future of the city. In this paper, we discuss the motivations that led to the definition of the CDT, define its modeling aspects and key research challenges, and illustrate its intended use with two use cases in urban mobility and urban development.