The role of complexity for digital twins of cities

G. Caldarelli^1,2,3,4, E. Arcaute^5,6, M. Barthelemy^7,8, M. Batty^5,6, C. Gershenson^9,10, D. Helbing^11,12, S. Mancuso^4,13, Y. Moreno^12,14,15,16, J. J. Ramasco¹⁷, C. Rozenblat¹⁸, A. Sánchez^14,19 and J. L. Fernández-Villacañas²⁰

¹DSMN University of Venice Ca’Foscari, Venice, Italy.
²ISC-CNR, Dipartimento di Fisica, Università Sapienza, Rome, Italy.
³London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, London, UK.
⁴Fondazione per il futuro delle città, Florence, Italy.
⁵CASA,The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL, London, UK.
⁶The Alan Turing Institute, The British Library, London, UK.
⁷Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, CEA, Institut de Physique Théorique, Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
⁸Centre d’Analyse et de Mathématique Sociales CAMS, UMR 8557 CNRS-EHESS, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France.
⁹Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City, México.
¹⁰Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA.
¹¹ETH Zurich, Computational Social Science, Zurich, Switzerland.
¹²Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria.
¹³Department of Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry (DAGRI), Florence, Italy.
¹⁴Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain.
¹⁵Department of Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain.
¹⁶CENTAI Institute, Turin, Italy.
¹⁷Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
¹⁸Institute of Geography and Sustainability, UNIL, Lausanne, Switzerland.
¹⁹Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC), Departamento de Matematicas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Getafe, Spain.
²⁰Technologies for Smart Communities, DG CNECT, European Commission, Brussels, Belgium.

(May 2023)

We argue that theories and methods drawn from complexity science are urgently needed to guide the development and use of digital twins for cities. The theoretical framework from complexity science takes into account both the short-term and the long-term dynamics of cities and their interactions. This is the foundation for a new approach that treats cities not as large machines or logistic systems but as mutually interwoven self-organizing phenomena, which evolve, to an extent, like living systems.

BACK