Most urban digital twins are built to watch infrastructure: traffic flows, utility loads, asset performance. That is useful, but it answers the wrong question for a city. Councils and governments are ultimately accountable for how people live, and a twin that cannot see wellbeing cannot inform the decisions that matter most.
Our paper in Cities sets a different brief. With Urva Patel, Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini and Andrew Burgess, we developed a wellbeing oriented framework for urban digital twins, aligned with New Zealand’s Living Standards Framework, the Treasury’s framework for assessing wellbeing beyond economic output. We chose six measurable indicators: carbon emissions, drinking water quality, road fatalities, crime rates, commuting time and internet access.
Each indicator links a physical system to a human outcome. Commuting time connects the transport network to time with family; internet access connects telecommunications infrastructure to education and work; road fatalities connect street design to the most irreversible harm a city can do. We built them into a working analytical dashboard, and the proof of concept shows that the idea is technically feasible today.
The harder questions are institutional rather than technical. Open platforms such as Eclipse Ditto and FIWARE can carry these data, but only with new middleware and shared ontologies that let agencies describe the same city in compatible terms. Someone has to own the integration, and someone has to decide who sees what. Those are governance decisions, and they cannot be left to software vendors.
Once wellbeing sits inside the twin, policy can be tested before it is enacted: a transport investment read against emissions and commuting time, a broadband programme read against social inclusion. That is the shift our sector now needs to make, from twins that measure performance to twins that serve citizens.
The work behind it
Patel, U. R., Ghaffarianhoseini, AH., GhaffarianHoseini, A., and Burgess, A. (2026). Towards a well-being-oriented framework for urban digital twins. Cities, 169, 106579. Open access.
The governance questions it raises are the subject of his proposal for a CIB Task Group on Digital Twin Governance for the Built Asset Lifecycle.