Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Urban digital twins are described as virtual replicas or representations of physical space. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of Digital Twin Victoria alongside promotional materials and interviews with spatial and technical professionals developing urban digital twins in Australia, this paper addresses the visuality through which an urban digital twin visualises the past, present and future of a city. Promotional materials and digital twin developers emphasize the importance of visualisation for what an urban digital twin is, does and enables. By making data visually accessible and visually ‘putting data in context’, they argue that digital twins will contribute to decision making for the planning, design and emergency/disaster management of future cities. Through a combination of aerial imagery, 3D modelling and vector graphics layered within an interactive interface, an urban digital twin embeds histories of photography and cartography within a visual space that interviewees often described as constructing a representation of the world ‘as it is.’ By addressing how urban digital twins promote visual dominance in how we experience, relate to and think about cities and analysing the various scopic regimes through which a digital twin visualises the city, I will argue that the presumed neutrality of the visuality through which the digital twin represents the world risks precluding opportunities for alternative representational practices and therefore alternative futures. I aim to show how a digital twin, as a place for decision making, could represent potential for ‘glitch’ politics yet also risks perpetuating the marginalisation of alternative experiences and representations of place.