Co-Creating Digital Twins for Planning of Water Resources and Housing Development

The potential to deliver better, more efficient and sustainable cities has motivated recent research on Digital Twins (DTs) that seek to support planning decisions by displaying analytical evidence to inform collaborative design actions. Prior research identifies different types of DT tools and gives recommendations for their use, but it has not been grounded in engaged research that co-designs DTs with planning users from the context description and problem formulation stage. We report on a research project to co-create DTs with local government planners to visualize interactions between water resources and housing development. We describe co-creating two different DTs starting from the context and problem for water management and assess the steps against these three categories. While engaging with the field we built on prior studies to identify a set of categories relevant to co-creating and assessing DTs: context, governance, spatial and technical definition.  By recording the steps of the DT design process, and contrasting the results with the theoretical proposals, we develop a three-step framework for the co-creation of DTs. This step-by-step framework, illustrated by examples, provides a contribution to the literature on the co-design of DT, and we conclude by discussing implications for practitioners and areas for further research.