Digital Twin For Improvement of The Sustainability of Neighbourhoods Through Scenario Planning

Digital twins as complex decision-making systems are increasingly used in climate adaptation and sustainability planning. However, most of the applications currently available remain largely sector-oriented, thus limiting their capacity to capture interactions between different domains with multiple interrelated indicator systems. This constraint is particularly applicable at the neighborhood scale, where planning interventions are applied, and trade-offs between competing objectives become most visible.  

This work introduces the prototype of a neighborhood-scale digital twin system, which is designed to support integrated, scenario-based analysis of urban ecology and energy systems. The digital twin implemented in the post-war residential neighbourhood of Twekkelerveld, Enschede, the Netherlands, attempts to solve major issues, such as the ageing building stock, limited green infrastructure, and relatively high energy demand. The framework incorporates open and municipal datasets, including tree inventories, green spaces, urban heat potential, building geometry, energy-use intensity, energy estimation, solar electricity potential, and carbon footprint. The system explicitly represents interactions among ecological and energy interventions at the neighbourhood level, unlike the existing tools.

The digital twin is designed to facilitate interactive "what-if" exploration of typical urban interventions across multiple domains. Ecological scenarios, such as tree planting strategies and green facade deployment, enable users to assess the impacts on greenness, urban heat mitigation, carbon sequestration, and investment costs. Energy scenarios include building insulation improvements, rooftop solar deployment, heat pump transitions, and local energy sharing, measured by the indicators on the level of the neighborhood and buildings. The interrelation module explicitly connects the ecological and energy measures, which allow the comparison of the combined effects on cooling, energy demand, emissions, and overall performance.

Instead of making sustainability planning a one-sector endeavour, the prototype assists in the exploration of options: what changes, what gets better, and what gets worse when various measures are combined. Presenting baseline and scenario outcomes side by side makes trade-offs clearer across ecological, energy, and environmental indicators. The work shows how neighbourhood-scale digital twins can operationalise multi-domain data and scenario logic in a form that is usable by urban planners, municipalities, and local decision-makers. This complements Earth system-scale digital twins, which are centered around the local level where interventions are discussed and implemented.