Visualising human life in volumetric cities: City digital twins and other disasters

City digital twins (CDTs) are attracting considerable attention as a tool for the management of cities facing many kinds of crises. CDTs are three-dimensional, animated digital models of cities that display the big data generated by urban sensors in near-real-time. Most of the academic literature on CDTs consists of technical discussions of their design or implementation. This paper instead proposes a different context for understanding CDTs. It adopts an intersectional feminist and techno-cultural analysis of the visual form of power enacted by CDTs, as exemplary of a much wider turn in contemporary visual culture towards visualising the world digitally in three dimensions. Many critical accounts of this visual and volumetric regime are attentive to the forms of corporealised human life that emerge in relation to the picturing of various volumes. This paper examines how CDTs visibly co-constitute a number of digitally-mediated forms of human life, including its user and its human inhabitants. The paper argues that, while both the technological affordances and the cultural imaginary of CDTs perform the kind of powerful white masculinity that sees space as transparent and actionable, discussions of CDTs also persistently generate an excessive form of human life that is understood as untwinnable. The paper argues that masculinist anxieties around this excess erupt in another form of digitally-animated volumetric city facing disaster: the disaster movie. The paper thus makes an argument about the specific form of white masculinity co-constituted with CDTs and insists on the necessity of critical techno-cultural analyses of urban management technologies.