The Urban Model Platform: A Public Backbone for Modeling and Simulation in Urban Digital Twins

Abstract: Urban digital twins are increasingly perceived as a way to pool the growing digital resources of cities for the purpose of a more sustainable and integrated urban planning. Models and simulations are central to this undertaking: They enable "what if?" scenarios, create insights and describe relationships between the vast data that is being collected. However, the process of integrating and subsequently using models in urban digital twins is an inherently complex undertaking. It raises questions about how to represent urban complexity, how to deal with uncertain assumptions and modeling paradigms, and how to capture underlying power relations. Existent approaches in the domain largely focus on monolithic and centralized solutions in the tradition of neoliberal city-making, oftentimes prohibiting pluralistic and open interoperable models. Using a participatory design for participatory systems approach together with the City of Hamburg, Germany, we find that an open Urban Model Platform can function both as a public technological backbone for modeling and simulation in urban digital twins and as a socio-technical framework for a collaborative and pluralistic representation of urban processes. Such a platform builds on open standards, allows for a decentralized integration of models, enables communication between models and supports a multi-model approach to representing urban systems.