Visualising the Urban Imaginary: Failure and Irresolution in an Urban Digital Twin

ABSTRACT Urban digital twins are novel objects of geographical analysis that combine data about and from a city within a visualisation intended to contribute to decision‐making for the planning and management of cities. The majority of academic literature on urban digital twins has focused on the technical functionality of developing and implementing these models. This article analyses, instead, the visualisation encountered in one urban digital twin, Digital Twin Victoria (DTV). I argue that recognising this visualisation as a representation of the city depends, in part, on habituation to the perceptual and computational practices through which urban data resolve into a coherent image. The article first describes the visuality through which DTV visualises the city as a familiar (and therefore invisible) visuality for the intended user of DTV, a figure I call ‘the anticipated user’. For this user, participation in the reproduction of a familiar urban imaginary contributes to resolving the DTV visualisation into a coherent representation of the city. The second part of the article enacts a speculative engagement with the DTV visualisation to suggest that moments of perceptual and/or computational ‘failure’, or irresolution, can be generative and enable a practice of seeing otherwise. Geographic analyses of ‘failure’ and the glitch in data‐driven urban processes have drawn attention to what is technologically, politically and affectively possible within and through gaps in urban data. Less attention has been given to how the visual participates in these processes. By dwelling in moments of visual irresolution, this article highlights the importance of resolution and irresolution within digital geographies and contributes to understanding that visualities and gaps within visualisation practices participate in revealing a politics of possibility that can generate alternative urban imaginaries.