Digital Twins of Cities - A Transformative Approach to Modeling and Managing Urban Dynamics and Complexity

Abstract:

“Digital twins of cities” will play an important role in geographical research and urban studies. To avoid jumping on the bandwagon without a thorough understanding of what it means and what it takes to address the genuine needs of our cities, this lecture targets the nature and necessity of developing digital twins for the modeling and management of dynamics and complexity in our ever-evolving cities. It is argued that the current emphasis on information technologies and digital representations of cities is a lopsided effort in the construction of digital twins of cities. It falls short in developing a transformative paradigm instrumental in bringing urban theories, particularly on urban dynamics and complexity, into the analysis, simulation, prediction, and management of our urban systems. This lecture introduces a general framework for the learning and incorporation of urban dynamics and complexity into digital twins of cities to ensure that models closely capture the underlying processes that govern the development of cities throughout their lifecycles and they can be dynamically updated according to new information and developments, and data can be made theory-informed and dynamically collected and updated to better empower our analysis and decision making about our urban future.

About the Speaker:

Yee Leung is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Geography and Resource Management, and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a pioneer in applying fuzzy set theory to geographical research, with expertise in uncertainty analysis, spatial information, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and optimization. He has published six monographs and over 200 articles in leading international journals. His landmark books include Spatial Analysis and Planning under Imprecision (1988), Intelligent Spatial Decision Support Systems (1997), Knowledge Discovery in Spatial Data (2010), and Digital Twins of Cities – Modeling Urban Dynamics and Complexity (2026).