Urban Digital Twins as socio-technical infrastructures for city regeneration and decarbonization

Abstract The awareness of the huge carbon footprint and the related targets aimed at reducing it, require cities to be supported in their climate neutral transition. Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) have emerged as cutting-edge technologies to address urban complexity and to exploit the massive amount of machine-readable data produced by the city physical and non-physical systems. At the centre of the recent debate and scientific research, UDTs are addressed in a rapidly growing literature, pilot projects, proof-of-concepts and applications to several contexts. Studies and prototypes are leading the maturity development of UDT to gradually improve, contributing to gaining consensus among key stakeholders and urban decision makers, but the state of the art has not proved how exactly its potential benefits will be pursued and sustained. In this evolving scenario, the paper objective is the analysis of a literature review and a case studies selection, to identify the current use of the UDT as enabling tool in the comprehensive and joint framework of urban regeneration and decarbonization, addressing, in particular, the under-researched and poorly conceptualized integration of socio-economic-cultural systems.