Contemporary development directions for urban digital twins

Abstract. Urban digital twins have become an interest for cities worldwide. The current urban digital twins frequently build on earlier 3D city modelling efforts, and thus also share many of the applications. At the same time, the ongoing digitalization offers potential routes for further development of urban digital twins. We present some of the ongoing development projects from the Helsinki region. Based on these, we then try to identify the contemporary development directions for urban digital twins, with the three emerging main themes being: 1) the inclusion of new data sources such as satellite remote sensing, crowdsourcing and various sensor systems, 2) a stronger presence of social aspects and qualitative data and 3) modular technical architecture.