The Volume
*Digital Twins for Sustainable Cities: Bridging Technology and Urban Environmental Management* is a 305 page edited volume to be published by Elsevier on 1 April 2027. Its five editors are Dr Dat Tien Doan, Ruidong Chang, Professor Ghaffarian, Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini and Hossein Omrany.
The book covers digital twin applications across buildings, infrastructure, mobility, logistics, circular construction, housing and urban governance. It opens with conceptual foundations and moves from building level models to integrated urban systems, with chapters on adaptive reuse, climate and flood resilience, water infrastructure, freight, design for deconstruction and housing policy. Integration with BIM, GIS, sensing networks and artificial intelligence runs through the volume, alongside the questions that most often stall implementation: interoperability, data governance, institutional coordination and social equity.
A Research Line Brought to Book
The volume consolidates work Prof Ghaffarian has pursued for several years. His 2022 guest editorial in Construction Innovation addressed the development and implementation of digital twins at a point when much of the literature remained conceptual. Later papers took the question into specific settings: construction supply chains in Automation in Construction (2024), the contribution of urban twins to SDG 11 in New Zealand in Cities (2024), and a wellbeing oriented framework for urban digital twins in Cities (2026).
Two of his co-editors share that history. Hossein Omrany worked with him and Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini on an early digital twin of the AUT campus, presented in 2022. Dr Dat Tien Doan, an associate editor of the School’s Book of Future Environments Research, has co-authored with him on construction waste management and green building adoption in New Zealand.
From the Model to the Institution
The book’s editorial argument follows a position the Head of School has set out elsewhere: a digital twin is only as useful as the institutions that maintain it and the people it is meant to serve. A city twin that cannot exchange data across agencies, or that represents assets without the communities who use them, will inform few decisions. He made that case in Digital Twins Should Represent People, Not Only Places. The volume’s attention to governance, participation and equity gives it a fuller treatment, grounded in applied cases rather than principle alone.
Editorial Standing
The book adds to an editorial record that includes associate editorships of three international journals, nine guest edited special issues and the proceedings of SASBE 2024, published by Springer Nature as volume 591 of Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering. It is also his second forthcoming title with Elsevier, following *Sustainability and Construction: The Global Context and the New Zealand Perspective*, due from Woodhead Publishing in November 2026. For the School of Future Environments, the volume places AUT researchers at the editorial centre of an international reference work on one of the field’s most active questions.