Advancing Urban Digital Twins: Integrating Geospatial Data and Innovative Geospatial Methods for Smart Cities

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue, titled "Advancing Urban Digital Twins: Integrating Geospatial Data and Innovative Geospatial methods for Smart Cities", is dedicated to delving into the latest advancements in urban digital twins with a specific focus on geospatial data integration and innovative geospatial methods for serving smart city development.

Urban Digital twins are a transformative paradigm in the context of urban and city planning, enabling real-time interaction with urban environments and supporting data-driven decision-making. The concept of twinning physical reality provides significant potential for advancing urban planning strategies and methodologies that embrace innovation, resilience, and sustainability of cities. Urban Digital Twins underpin smart city developments by providing a continuously learning digital replica of real-world assets and comprehensive platforms for managing and monitoring urban environments.

In today's ever-changing landscape of urban planning and city development, the integration of heterogeneous, multimodal, and multifaceted data is crucial for performing urban analytics and geospatial simulations at many urban scales. Data integration raises many challenges, which are further amplified in the context of urban digital twins. Furthermore, the emergence of advanced geospatial methods for data acquisition, object detection, semantic segmentation, interactive visualisation, etc., coupled with advanced machine learning and deep learning methods, presents both substantial potential and associated challenges to their integration in the context of smart cities.

This Special Issue delves into the exploration of innovative approaches and methodologies that leverage advancements in geospatial science, technology, and geoinformatics to effectively address the challenges confronting the development of urban digital twins within the context of smart cities. We aim through this issue to build comprehensive learning and explore transformative perspectives to foster research and advance the field of smart cities. Development from the scientific community stakeholders and national projects is encouraged to build a common knowledge on how UDTs can foster the development of smart cities.

This Special Issue focuses on, but is not limited to, the following themes:

1. Urban Digital Twins for smart cities: We aim to explore how urban digital twins are underpinning smart city applications and how these two urban paradigms are enhancing urban strategies and fostering the sustainability and resilience of cities.
2. Data integration approaches: this theme delves into the new achievements in addressing data integration issues, whose complexity amplifies in the context of urban digital twins. We invite papers that propose practical frameworks and methods for dealing with data integration in the context of smart cities.
3. Standardization and data Interoperability: this theme focuses on the recent advancements and developments with regard to 3D/4D standards dedicated to urban digital twins and smart city contexts. Contributions from researchers and leading standardization institutions are encouraged to provide a comprehensive knowledge on data interoperability best practices.
4. Geospatial innovation in UDT/smart cities: This theme delves into the utilization of emerging technologies, e.g., Internet of Things (IoT), Building Information Modeling (BIM), City Information Modeling (CIM), Digital Twins, geospatial and remote sensing, generative AI, and Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) for comprehensive urban planning and monitoring strategies of urban environments.
5. Innovations and Prospects in Urban Planning for Smart Cities: within this theme, we seek contributions that explore new urban planning approaches and decision-making processes to smart cities development. We aim to gather insights from urban practices at many scales to highlight achievements, identify gaps, and define research agendas to foster inclusive and sustainable development of cities within the context of urban digital twins and smart cities.
6. Smart city applications: Papers under this theme will address advancements in smart city applications that address a large range of applications, including but not limited to smart infrastructure, smart mobility, urban thermal comfort, resources optimization, etc.

Prof. Dr. Rafika Hajji
Prof. Dr. Roland Billen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.