Exploring the Potential of Citiverses for Regulatory Learning with a People-Centric Focus

Citiverses offer virtual environments for regulatory learning via experimentation with governance, policy, and technology scenarios in safe, immersive settings. This paper proposes a science-for-policy agenda for regulatory learning in citiverses, developed through an expert consultation and informed by the literature and by international policy frameworks from the European Union and the OECD. It identifies four key research areas, including scalability, real-time feedback, complexity modelling, cross-border collaboration, risk reduction and citizen participation. In addition, the paper outlines a set of experimental topics, spanning transportation, urban planning and the environment/climate crisis, that could be tested in citiverse platforms to advance citiverse-enabled regulatory learning in these domains. The agenda emphasizes a responsible, human-centred approach, prioritizing ethical, social, environmental, and governance [ESG] considerations to inform future policy. To our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly introduce regulatory learning as a citiverse use case, thereby contributing to ongoing debates on people-centric digital governance and the future of experimental policymaking in smart cities.