Urban digital twins and digital twinning as a continuing planning practice

Urban digital twins are increasingly used to support planning, policy, and urban governance, yet cities cannot be fully captured as stable digital representations. Building on existing understandings of digital twinning, this article argues for conceptualizing urban digital twinning as a continuing institutional planning practice. We distinguish the digital twin as a configured representational and analytical system from digital twinning as the broader practice connecting digital representation with interpretation, deliberation, governance, planning decisions, urban interventions, monitoring, institutional learning, and model revision across successive planning cycles. This perspective emphasizes the role of human judgment and institutional knowledge in responding to evolving urban conditions and planning uncertainty, offering a basis for more adaptive, transparent, accountable, and context-sensitive urban planning and governance.