Digital Twins of Cities vs. Digital Twins for Cities

The notion of Digital Twin (DT) gained attention about 15 years ago when sufficient computational capacities became available allowing to develop and run so-called virtual copies of a given physical product. As the evolution of so-called smart cities led to the integration of data-driven decision systems in the traditional urban infrastructure, DTs may become an important element for decision-making in urban contexts but, given the specificities of the latter, here DTs cannot be passively adopted. Information devices and artificial intelligence made their way into city management, but the city cannot be reduced to a digital computer nor an automatised factory indeed. As argued in literature, a city can show a number of structural components such as place, agents, knowledge, and their diverse interaction can make each city special, the urban environment a category on its own. We propose to analyse DTs in the light of these characteristics of cities to understand what role they could play.