Digital Twin Ecosystems: Data Governance, Commoning, and Ethical Urban Futures

Dear Colleagues,

Digital twin technologies are evolving beyond their technical constructs and representations, gradually becoming integrated into a more expansive network of socio-technical ecosystems. As such, they influence and shape our digital and data governance, our planning and use of urban resources, and our shared vision and understanding of our smart city futures. This Special Issue invites inter- and cross-disciplinary contributions that explore the intersection and integration of data governance; commons theory; organizational and institutional governance/management arrangements; and ethical reflections within digital twin ecosystems supporting urban planning and policy, social–ecological resilience, and the role of citizens and communities in integrating digital twin technologies in everyday urban life to improve the quality of urban services and people’s quality of living.

Focus:

We seek work that critically examines how city and urban digital twins can:

• Anchor and integrate inclusive data governance structures that balance autonomy, privacy, transparency, veridicality, and accountability.
• Enable shared resource management and commons practices informed by human-centric and real-time urban digital twin models and implementations.
• Embed ethical frameworks to guide research, design, deployment, and community engagement in urban digital twins.
• Explore organizational, institutional, and urban policy arrangements and roles that deepen and widen urban digital twin technology integration.

Scope:

The Special Issue aims to:

• Synthesize cutting-edge research on governing urban and regional data within digital twin environments and complex ecosystems.
• Discover and explore new models of urban commons that leverage human-centric, real-time, live, and shared simulations of collective decision-making, urban planning and policy.
• Propose ethical guidelines and design principles ensuring that digital twins foster just, trustworthy, resilient, and participatory urban futures.
• Bridge theory and practice by showcasing transferable and interoperable methodologies, tools, and lessons learned from pilots and prototypes.
• Explore learning and educational standardizations and principles that aim to prepare professionals to integrate digital twin technologies into urban planning, management, and policy.

The Special Issue aims to provide a valuable contribution to existing gaps in the literature. While recent publications and collections have explored digital twins for smart infrastructure and energy optimization, there are only a few that investigate the socio-technical—rather than merely the technical—dimensions of these platforms. Our Special Issue aims to supplement the current professional discourse by:

• Connecting data governance research (e.g., interoperability, privacy, standardization, validation) with applied studies capable of generating practical and actionable guidelines for city planners and practitioners.
• Integrating commons and institutional scholarship with digital twin research to advance models of shared urban capabilities and governance arrangements.
• Prioritizing ethical stewardship over purely performance-driven metrics, by way of refocusing the scientific discourse on marginalized urban voices and participation.

Dr. Kostas Alexandridis
Dr. Soheil Sabri
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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. Urban Science 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 1600 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.

• urban digital twins
• digital twin ecosystems
• data governance
• ethical urban futures
• institutional governance
• interoperability
• veridicality