Connected Urban Twins: Urbane Digitale Zwillinge für die Stadtentwicklung der Zukunft.

The ongoing digitization of urban society represents a key opportunity to actively drive urban transformation processes and make cities more sustainable and resilient. This requires innovative forms of cooperation between politics, administration, civil society, science and business and improved (digital) participation tools. The joint project "Connected Urban Twins – Urban Data Platforms and Digital Twins for Integrated Urban Development" (CUT) of the cities of Hamburg, Leipzig and Munich aims to advance the development of data-driven urban twins (Digital Twins) during the five-year project period until 2025. Through the cooperation of the three cities under the leadership of Hamburg, common standards are to be developed for this purpose that can also be replicated and applied across metropolitan regions and other cities on an international scale. The City Science Lab is leading the research activities in the project and works in close collaboration with the Technical University of Munich and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence in Dresden and Leipzig.

In the project, digital twins will be developed and tested on the basis of concrete use cases for integrated urban development. Cooperation between public and private actors will be promoted and citizens are going be involved as co-researchers. With the help of practice-oriented technology research, exploratory modelling and simulation, as well as social science methods and real-life experiments, insights will be gained for a public welfare-oriented and transformative application of CUT. The project results are to be incorporated into a cross-city exchange of experiences and promote sustainable knowledge building and transfer. For this purpose, they are to be shared at an early stage, solutions are to be developed flexible, cross-city and user-oriented, communicated and made available as modular open source.