Who Is Your Town Twinned With? The World's Web of Twin Towns and Sister Cities from Wikidata

Town twinning links tens of thousands of places across the world, yet it is rarely seen as a whole. I assemble every twinning recorded on Wikidata (property P190, "twinned administrative body") into an undirected network of 29,437 pairs between 19,976 places in 208 countries and territories, with start dates for 10,292 pairs (35%) and end dates for 254. Among dated pairs, new twinnings grew from 257 in the 1950s to 2,558 in the 1990s, and the single busiest year was 1990 (298). France and Germany form the most common pair of countries (1,442 pairs), with a peak in the 1960s. Links between the Cold War camps, defined by present-day countries, made up 15% of dated pairs begun before 1990 and 28% of those begun in the 1990s; 654 pairs join towns in the former East and West of Germany. Twins have moved further apart: the share of new dated links between continents rose from 14% in the 1950s to 44% in the 1980s, led by Japan and then China. Wikidata records 90 twinnings with Russian or Belarusian places as ended since 2022, a documented minimum. Compared with English Wikipedia's country lists, 56% of listed pairs are found on Wikidata by name, so the network is a large sample rather than a census, and most of its timing evidence rests on the dated third. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/twin-towns/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/twin-towns. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/29/twin-towns/.