The concept of city digital twins is being explored through various lenses, including crisis management, cartography, and computational technology. This exploration comes as a response to Gillian Rose’s work titled "Visualising human life in volumetric cities: city digital twins and other disasters." Her analysis examines the relationship between filmic depictions of disaster and the imaginaries of an ordered rational city, often represented through white and masculinist perspectives.
In addressing Rose's call to investigate the 'untwinnable' aspects of cities, this commentary re-evaluates city digital twins by considering multiple genealogies. These include the concept of the twin itself, the software that creates 3D visualizations, and the panoptic fantasies inherent in techno-surveillant discourses.
The discussion extends Rose's arguments into industrial settings by reflecting on the origins of digital twins as quality control systems in production lines. It also revisits a technological vision of cities offered by digital twins that not only emphasizes masculinist narratives but also highlights issues within capitalist structures.
