What Have Urban Digital Twins Contributed to Urban Planning and Decision Making? From a Systematic Literature Review Toward a Socio-Technical Research and Development Agenda

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The aim in the article to answer these questions:

‘(1) what are the ambitions of UDTs for urban planning and decision-making; (2) what are the actual contributions of UDTs to urban planning and decision-making; and (3) how can we bridge the large gap between (1) and (2)’,

I believe this has been achieved. The study is very useful for researchers in the field of development and application of Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) for urban planning and decision making.

But the article could be improved by further specifying the limitations of the study and elaborating on the practical implications of the proposed UDT agenda. Also section 6 Towards a Methdological Framework could be further developed, perhaps including a conceptual diagram. The quality of the images could be improved by changing the text filler from dark grey to black to make the text more readable.

Author Response

Intro:

Dear Reviewer, we deeply appreciate your insightful comments. We have made several minor changes across the text to address your valid concerns. These changes are all highlighted as red in the text for ease of access. In the response to each comment we further elaborate on the exact location of the relevant changed text. 
We have also updated the review with all the extra publications in December 2024, and now it is updated until the end of 2024. This changed all of the figures and some of the text which is also highlighted red across the review.
Thanks again for your time and considerations. Best Regards. Shervin Azadi (on behalf of all authors)

 

comment 1: "But the article could be improved by further specifying the limitations of the study and elaborating on the practical implications of the proposed UDT agenda."
Response 1: Thanks for your comment. We fully agree and have made adjustments accordingly. There is now a new section (7. Limitations and Future Research) that directly answers your request. This is on page 18, line 663. 

 

Comment 2: "Also section 6 Towards a Methdological Framework could be further developed, perhaps including a conceptual diagram."

Response 2: Thanks for your comment. We considered this throughly, yet we came to the conclusion that adding extra diagrams at the end of this already lengthy article would weaken the focus findings of the literature review. This line of research is indeed very important to us and we are working on extending the content of section 6 to a full-fledged methodological framework. We have also highlighted this in the newly added section 7. 

 

Comment 3: "The quality of the images could be improved by changing the text filler from dark grey to black to make the text more readable."

Response 3: Thanks for your comment. We have updated the graphics and increased the contrast to ensure the texts are darker in the light background and are more readable. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The review paper presented by the authors fills in a significant gap for a better understanding of the current situation of the Smart Cities scientific situation. The topic fits perfectly well on the journal profile.

The authors provide a consistent, and updated methodology, for analysing current developments on the Smart Cities community plus a well grounded perspective on future research topics.

All references are relevant and comprehensive supporting the conclusions of this paper.

Therefore this review paper is ready for publication.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, we deeply appreciate your insightful comments.  
We have updated the review with all the extra publications in December 2024, and now it is updated until the end of 2024. This changed all of the figures and some of the text which is also highlighted red across the review.
Thanks again for your time and considerations. Best Regards. Shervin Azadi (on behalf of all authors)

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The aim of this article is to assess the degree of compliance with the expectations of UAPs in the field of urban planning. For this evaluation, it performs a systematic review of refereed publications, from 2018 to 2024.

The article is well constructed, allows, in general terms, to follow the procedure which is well explained. It obtains consistent results and the conclusions are drawn from the results generated.

I think it is an interesting study for the field of knowledge in which it is located.

I think it would be more complete if the selection of the 3 categories on which the study is based were better explained, as well as the exclusion of other categories that appear in the selection of articles.

Moreover, it would be interesting to know the temporal evolution of the contributions, as a whole, and for each selected category in particular.

As a consequence, I believe that the limitations section, in addition to a single source of articles, should be improved by extending the subsequent studies that, according to the authors, should follow this first systematic review.

In conclusion, I consider it to be an interesting article, well constructed and easy to follow the process followed, but it requires a better explanation of the criteria for selecting or not selecting the different categories. It would also provide an interesting comparative framework to know the temporal evolution of the contributions for each category, from the perspective of identifying the academic interest in the selected time period.

Author Response

Intro:

Dear Reviewer, we deeply appreciate your insightful comments. We have made several minor changes across the text to address your valid concerns. These changes are all highlighted as red in the text for ease of access. In the response to each comment we further elaborate on the exact location of the relevant changed text. 
We have also updated the review with all the extra publications in December 2024, and now it is updated until the end of 2024. This changed all of the figures and some of the text which is also highlighted red across the review.
Thanks again for your time and considerations. Best Regards. Shervin Azadi (on behalf of all authors)

 

comment 1: "I think it would be more complete if the selection of the 3 categories on which the study is based were better explained, as well as the exclusion of other categories that appear in the selection of articles."
Response 1: Thanks for your comment. We fully agree and have made adjustments accordingly. There is now a new subsection (2.6. Data Extraction and Synthesis) that directly answers your request. This is on page 4, line 139. Here we elaborate that the three socio-technical categories are identified through rounds of coding the material that we extracted from the articles. We also elaborate on how we assessed the contribution of the implementation articles according to these main categories, namely Interdisciplinary Integration, Consensual Contextualization, Procedural Operationalization.

 

Comment 2: "Moreover, it would be interesting to know the temporal evolution of the contributions, as a whole, and for each selected category in particular.."

Response 2: Thanks for your comment. We considered this throughly as it is a great idea. Nevertheless we came to the conclusion that it might not add much information content as the majority of the implementation articles are in the last two years, so there has not been enough time to have a thorough longitudinal analysis of the contributions yet. The insightfulness of your comment, nevertheless, inspired us to consider doing this in future updates of this review.

 

Comment 3: "As a consequence, I believe that the limitations section, in addition to a single source of articles, should be improved by extending the subsequent studies that, according to the authors, should follow this first systematic review.."

Response 3: Thanks for your comment. We agree and made the following changes accordingly: (1) there is a now a completely new section (7. Limitations and Future Research, page 18, line 663) which highlights the limitations of this study. This is also in addition to the methodological limitations that were outlined in section 2.5. (2) we have updated the review to include the articles that have been published  until the end of 2024. Accordingly, all the figures and results that have been impacted by the new articles have been updated. Lastly, we considered including another database thoroughly, but we decided to stick to Scopus for this review for now. The main reason being that the review already includes a diverse set of articles from different urban fields addressing different scopes of UDTing.

comment 4: "from the perspective of identifying the academic interest in the selected time period."

response 4: "Thanks for your comment. We completely agree. The newly added section (7. Limitations and Future Research, page 18, line 663) elaborates on this point to highlight the interesting areas and avenues in future research."