Issuu

Giovanni MulĂ¨ Designing Cities

Research Report | University of Westminster - April 2020

G IO VAN N I M U L E ’ | Des ign in g Cities

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAG.

Abstract

Introduction

1. Urban Plannning Literature Review

The Birth of Town Planning & Garden Cities

The Change Toward Today

Designing Smart Cities

Data Driven Smart Cities

2. Research Method

Vu.City

The Company & London’s Policy

Use & Impressions of Vu.City

Findings from the Questionnaire

3. Discussions & Limitations

Policy Recommendation

Conclusion

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G IO VAN N I M U L E â€™ | Des ign in g Cities

ABSTRACT

Exponential growth of human population worldwide, virus outbreaks and intense urbanisation are just few of the future challenges that urban planners and designers have to deal with, today. Cities are highly complex systems and in the past, testing and experimenting urban scenarios would have been almost impossible or incredibly expensive and risky. With the use of technology however, we can design smarter cities and fully visualise and predict scenarios that will simplify and improve the decision making process of every stakeholder involved. In the short and medium term future, the use of Digital Twins is predicted to growt, but there is ambiguity regarding definitions and uses, due to technical knowledge and cultural barriers. This research report will reflect on the latest 3D city modeling tool on the market and how digital city models, with the aid of big data and IoT, can help us shape better cities and communities. Finally, â€œare digital twins, the future of plantech?â€? While attempting to answer the research question, we will unveil some of the main challenges arising for AEC professionals and experts, discussing and recommending policies for the future of plantech.

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

DIGITAL TWINS, THE FUTURE OF PLANTECH ?

“Cities are the quintessential manifestation of complexity, and they also represent humanity’s greatest achievement.” [1]

GIOVANNI MULE’ Final Year Designing Cities | University of Westminster

INTRODUCTION

This aims to analyse the role of computer generated, scaled 3D models of cities and their impacts within smart city design context, as tools for urban planning complexity resolution. The literature review will focus on a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of urban planning and design, with comments on the applications of technology and data. It will also scrutinise the latest academic and industry related knowledge of both the advantages and challenges of 3D city-visualisation and “gamification” tools in smart cities applications contexts. This research paper will then analyse the use of ‘Vu.city’, as a case study and software, which is at the forefront of PlanTech in London. It also amplifies the visualisation experience of urban Landscapes Visual Impact Assessments (LVIA) allowing for smoother planning permission processes, in England’s most influential cities and especially London. Finally, a crosslinking between literature, case study and research findings will be drawn, critically discussing the latter, to draft policy recommendations for more efficient and proactive use of these technologies in practice.

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

URBAN PLANNING LITERATURE REVIEW

R E A L I S AT I O N O F T H E D I G I TA L T W I N W I L L R E Q U I R E C U LT U R A L C H A N G E

new environment.

digital technologies.30

Thinking about a city, the multitude of elements : houses, streets, people, offices, shops, cars, public transports, hospitals and schools to mention some, already suggests the enormous complexity which city residents daily interacts with. Even more complex is the practice of Urban Planning and Design as it must encompass the numerous and highly intricate physical and non-tangible structures underlying every urban system, and their primary users hence the very city residents. Almost like an operating system, the urban elements are self-contained yet rigorously interconnected, allowing the seamless functioning and delivery of every service and facility function that a city distributes and operates. In this continuously alive and interactive synopsis, the role of Urban Planners and Designer in the decision making process of a town or city development phase must take into consideration every single one of these urban elements and dynamics. With the ability to confidently “time-travel and teleport” between scenarios to fully assess and decide what is best and most sustainable for the users. This process is arguably visual yet stretches within stakeholder’s opinions, feelings, memories and interests in the non-visual field too (Batty, M.

2006) ( Miller, J.H.; Page, S.E. 2007).

THE BIRTH OF TOWN PLANNING AND GARDEN CITIES

During the 19th century, the UK publicly debated what would be the consequences of the uncontrolled and unplanned urbanisation that started to sprawl up at an alarming rate in the suburbs of large cities like London. While awareness started to be generated in the public opinion, a new lively thinking in regards to town and city environments also started to take shape (Parliament 2020).

FIGURE 5

Opposite left The three major advancements that have enabled the digital twin

Arguably, every urban planner and architect should give credit to the influential work of Ebenezer Howard, who under the “garden city” movement, designed new principles of town layout, and was the acknowledged forerunner , being the first Planning-policy change-maker. In fact after his ambitious and successful new garden city development at Letchworth in 1903, with ► Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G IO VAN N I M U L E ’ | Des ign in g Cities

tree-lined spacious avenues, embodying town and countryside features, in 1914 it housed 9,000 inhabitants and lead the way to the Hampstead Garden Suburb Act (Duany 2014). This almost revolutionari Act, largely drafted by the Parliament Chief Architect Raymond Unwin, included housing distances by which, for example there should be at least 50 feet between houses facing opposite sides of the road, moreover that houses should be limited to eight per acre. Letchworth and Hampstead, with the active lobbying of the Garden City Association were the groundbreakers of what later was the first Housing and Town Planning Act in 1909, which suggested the garden city principles for construction, popular within Victorian developers, and was remarkable in finally making the unhealthy back-to-back housing illegal (Parliament 2020). However, in the past, planning was a discipline that many advertised as the mere act of deciding land uses, and were only concerned to regulate what was possible to build and not build in a specific urban environment (Deyan Sudjic, 2016). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Centre for Advanced Urbanism attempts to describe the times we are now living in as an "era of urban growth whereby the rules have changed and paradigms of urbanism desperately need calibration to meet today's global challenges.” In this unprecedented scenario the world needs Urban Planners more than ever, especially those able to realise the importance of data as “an ingredient in connecting the dots within a city”(Adewole 2018).

THE CHANGE TOWARD TODAY

It is common to read in the latest research papers from various industries that the United Nations predicts that the world population is going to increase to a staggering 9.3 billion inhabitants by 2050 and more than half of them, accounting for 6.3 billion, are going to dwell in urban areas. What is also worth mentioning here is that the high density of current mega-cities is not enough to accommodate the demand; the principal stakeholders know that well, and therefore over the last decade we have seen the extension of metropolitan areas increase significantly (Gartland, 2012). This pre-urbanisation of new land use has been a playground for companies and governments to research and develop smart city solutions. From a socio-technical perspective Carvalho analysed the difference between the “highly-protected, from scratch experiments” (the above mentioned) and “piecemeal retrofitting initiatives''. Stating that the first one manifests too much distance from current and ”real socio technical regimes” while the latter are mostly edging towards making incremental innovation breakthroughs harder to achieve (Carval-

ho, Luis. 2015).

Urban planning faces in fact vastly grater challenges in city and rural contexts compared to the past. Due to major global shifts and threats, with the likes of climate change and virus outbreaks, the world we are living in today requires interdisciplinarity, and more than ever expertise from several different industries , while technology can be the ‘networks’ the cities could be the ‘facilitator’ for global change .

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I O VAN N I M U L E ’ | Des ign in g Cities

Urban planning is now continuously confronted with unpredictable complexity and for this reason; information technology and data have been used to simplify the process of decision-making, improving efficiency rates and effectiveness. DESIGNING SMART CITIES

During the mid-1970s, arguably regarded as the age of the Third Industrial Revolution, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) allowed globalisation and capital hyper-mobility, with at the core of this new growth trend, brand new functions for global cities. (Graham and Marvin, 1996, ; Castells, 1998 ;

Sassen, 2007).

Infact ICT plays more than a supporting role in the globalisation acceleration process, it places cities in a fundamental economic player position, casting new lights on the way we plan, use, control and perceive the physical space in cities. (Firmino, Duarte

and Moreira, 2008).

The enormous use of ICT applications have also developed two major challenges for policy makers and urban planners: 1. The traditional consideration of “the place” defined as “unitary, integrated and material” is now being challenged by a new concept of space, revolving around the relations between spaces and flows, within and through them (Castells, 1998; Graham and Healey, 1999, p.626).

This new concept now looks at places through the inter-spatial relation lenses, and understands it mainly as a social construct, that ultimately generates various meaningful definitions, depending upon particular socio-economic contexts, areas, and other variables (Healey, 2004).

2. Global competition is the second challenge, which pinpoints the capacity of a city to technologically stand-out of the pack. More than 20 years ago, the Spanish sociologist Castells, pointed out the enormous risk for the industrial economy, if the latter did not follow up the digital capacity by which cities and whole countries link up already on a global scale in the informational economy (Castells,

1998).

Some countries like Taiwan have already started this digitalisation process within their economic and urban structure. In fact, their infrastructure investments are mainly oriented toward the improvement of city residents' quality of life, and increasing the city's global competitiveness; driven by sustainable development best practices (Wu 2018) theoretically tackling both the former challenges. DATA DRIVEN SMART CITIES

According to IBM, humans (and their devices) have generated more data in the last two years than in the entire information technology history, and that for this year 2020, predicted 75 billion devices will be connected through the Internet of Things (IoT). Big Dataand IoT are also two key components of smart cities design applications (making up the city information model or CIM), along with Digital Twins (3D digital model of a physical building or city), which this research paper will now concentrate the most on. Before jumping into 3D modelling for smart city design, it is worth mentioning that the idea of computational-based technologies applied to simplify urban planning complexity challenges, goes back to the 1960s and 1970s when mainframe computers for example were applied for a transport study in the Chicago Area (Klosterman 1999). Lately the topic of Smart Cities has been widely explored and researched, thus the definitions are multiple, often related to sustainability, economic development and strategic planning. The context that this research refers the most to, is the context of geomatics, where the smart city represents the integration of the above-mentioned Internet of Things, cloud computing technologies (allowing the processing of big data) and the 3D spatial framework of a city (or digital city) (Jamei 2017, Ratten V. 2017). ► Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I O VAN N I M U L E â€™ | Des ign in g Cities

While the IoT systems are concerned with the real-time sensing, capturing and measuring of moving object data, cloud computing operates as a brain that processes, analyses and recognises patterns in these datasets. This will ultimately be manifested visually on dashboards and the 3D digital city itself, to visualise and monitor the vast amount of data generated and the interaction between them. It would be easy to get lost in the technicalities with the function of the urban planner is slowly vanishing, however to the contrary, in an integrated framework of smart cities the role of the planner is instead monumental for a successful smart city strategy application (Dembski et. 2020, Arup 2019). The 3D digital models of a full city or a village enables highly precise digital representations of the space, which helps clients and stakeholders to understand how a proposed development will merge with the existing cityscape. It is a compelling tool, that enables developers, designers and planners to visualise the entire overview of a planning and design process, and finally test the impacts of several potential scenarios.

The speed of local planning decision-making process is now improved and the design quality enhanced, thanks to the real-time changes in communication between stakeholders (Jamei et. 2017). The benefits of visualisation in urban planning and urban design are numerous and depending upon the rationalisation of case-specific purposes, however they can be summarised into three key ones: (Hudson-Smith 1998)

1. Facilitation of the comprehension of potential consequences for each design scheme presented, through multiple perspective 2. Support for the understanding of various layers of the informations gathered throughmeasurements and observations about both the plan and the design 3. Enables a functional common platform for stakeholders to communicate and mediate For decades the visualisation norm has been dominated by 2D frameworks such as maps and plans, however they do not represent other necessary information composing the full

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I O VAN N I M U L E â€™ | Des ign in g Cities

idea of space. 2D layers representations are also often complex to read and manipulate for non-AEC professionals which ultimately creates communication barriers between stakeholders, undermining the effectiveness continuum of a development (Jamei et 2017, Hudson-Smith 1998).

Another added aspect worth mentioning is the transition between 2D visualisations to 3D models, is the ability of the designer or developer to inject the idea of time in the proposal, and with it the impossibility to predict the future fully (Popper 1957; J. Hillier 2013).

However, in most cases related to civic engagement and 3D visualisation, we can account for the latter as a key function in encouraging and supporting the individual informative processes (Wissen Hayek 2011). RESEARCH METHOD

The research method is centred around the combination of literature review, articles and interviews of Vu.City , the current market leader in 3D visualisation in the UK, and its application in the context of the London urban development industry, and finally datasets from questionnaires targeted industry professionals.

The focus will be devoted to the use case from the Borough of Southwark, which refers to the softwareâ€™s major user in a real scenario, such as Old Kent Road redevelopment. However, due to the unavailability of their leaders and stakeholders to delight us in person or digitally with more detailed information, a profile will be drawn using online articles from industry-related websites. The questionnaire for private architectural and urban planning/design professionals, with a neutral setting, will provide useful disclosure points for cross-linked discussions. The outcome of the questionnaire was quite expected, however interesting hints on the future of digital tools for urbanism has been suggested, though only possible to explore in depth in another research. These two sets of information, quantitative data from the questionnaires, and qualitative usage data of the software, will be organically discussed with links to the above literature. The outcome of this interlinked discussion will be a set of policy recommendations for lawmakers and politicians at different levels of influence, in order to prepare our cities and all their stakeholders to fully embrace technology.

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I O VAN N I M U L E ’ | Des ign in g Cities

“Strategic planning is hot” and Vu.city is making planning sexy again, with their high definition 3D city visualisation platform. [2]

VU.CITY

Vu.City is a multi functional software that allows architects, planners, developers and planning authorities to better visualise their development proposals, therefore speeding up and improving the new planning-application-decision-making-process. Users of the former can also access a variety of open data points at any moment and map them in a high resolution accurate 3D model of a specified city. In a smart city context, we can call this process “Digital Twinning” (Vu.City 2018, Arup 2019). The virtual city modelling tool ‘Vu.City’ was selected for this research as it represents a state-of-the-art 3D visualisation software, and it has generated much positive publicity for the company and even winning awards. It is funded by the Geospatial Commission within the Audience of the Future programme by UK Research and Innovation through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. Representing an important investment landmark for the whole country and with tangible realisation of its competitive innovation potential (NLA 2020).

THE COMPANY AND LONDON’S POLICY

Due to the unavailability of the company’s leadership, I will try to combine available information through articles and interviews to map a current insightful perspective in regards to the uses of Vu.City and the impressions of their users, as well as current contextualised policy in London. The CEO of Vu.City Jamie Holmes states that the software stands in the field of Plantech, which defines who works in this sector, people who want to help city makers create better places. -“However, the industry has been slow to respond but is now recognising to embrace change” and he continues: “I believe we are on the verge of something really exciting”- (Signable 2020) Holmes shares.

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

In fact, Vu.City, covering 16 million square ft of 3D London, is now widely used by almost every London’s city council (25 of the 33 local authorities) and it has become the norm for many in the planning application processes (Placetech 2019).

R E A L I S AT I O N O F T H E D I G I TA L T W I N W I L L R E Q U I R E C U LT U R A L C H A N G E

new environment.

London Borough of Southwark has been one of them, which was one of their first clients. Tom Buttrick, team leader in the Old Kent Road Planning and Regeneration Team, -“...has helped to scope what a digital planning service would really look like, with ambition to add value to public consultations through the use of the tool”-. Infact, that is the case of Old Kent Road, which has been the playground for the developers, the council and the residents to explore what the future reserves for the area (Vu.City 2018). Buttrick continues: -“We’ve been using it for over three years now, primarily for our strategic planning” - "We can use it to understand how that massing fits within the opportunity area.” - "It enables us to understand quite quickly how that massing would sit within its context," he says. "It allows us to feedback quickly to the applicant and advise on any changes that might be needed to their scheme''.

digital technologies.

3D visualisation has also been recognised and endorsed by the GLA and the Mayor; whom during the Mayor’s Question Time with the NLA Quarterly, reports Sadiq Khan’s comment: “Seeing realistic representations of what London would look like in the future is really important” (Vu.city 2018). Theo Blackwell, chief digital officer of the GLA also said: "It’s part of a broader programme of work to make the planning system more data-driven and user-friendly and to really mobilise the strengths of our tech sector". For the GLA the primary motive for the use of PlanTech is public engagement and therefore Londoners’ ability to interact and benefit from them (Planning Resource 2019).

FIGURE 5

Opposite left The three major advancements that have enabled the digital twin

Infact, the draft new London Plan includes policies encouraging the use of digital modelling tools "...as part of the plan-making process to assess growth options and forms and development". Committing the Mayor and the GLA to work with "3D virtual reality digital modelling", for buildings and zoning identification and to "...assess tall building proposals and aid public consultation and engagement" (Planning Resource 2019). ►

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I OVAN N I M U L E ’ | D es ign in g Cities

While the GLA is concerned with the widespread accessibility of such tools for every Londoner, Holmes timely said in an interview that: “The key to unlocking that potential has been in making it available for mass adoption” (Placetech 2019). However, in another interview Holmes also admits that the product has not been without its challenges, with changing behaviour being one of the most difficult to overcome Jason Hawthorne, joint co-founder continues: “Currently if you want to go and look up a planning application that’s happening – and this is probably true of all local authorities in the UK – you kind of have to dive into their website, wade through loads of PDFs and eventually, if you are lucky, you might find a page that shows you an image or diagram of what’s going to be built” (Placetech 2020). USE AND IMPRESSIONS OF VU.CITY

I personally had the pleasure to use the software after the fortunate meeting with Vu.city’s R&D director Paul Oestern-Creasey at “Map London”, an urban planning focused event. After the event where I discovered Your.Vu.City VR experience (London’s free and open to the public 3D model) the team members provided me access to an

extended student version. I experimented and tested this tool through and through after learning the basics via their little free tutorials online. This gave me the right context to now critically address Vu.city’s “sexiest” functions from a student perspective in the following research content. The images are screenshots directly extracted from the software during initial experimentations in building masses for another university module: Planning Policy and Design intervention. • The ability to upload your own 3D model, place it andscale it in the software and of course analyse the surrounding impact exactly as if the building was alreadypresent in the software aka: as if it was already built. • Create your own mesh without any external widget orsoftware, this is truly important for local planning authoritiesthat can now visualise the impact of a building withoutadvanced design skills. • The protected views projections are another main featureof the software which enables the imported or createdmodels to instantly predict if they will stand by a protectedview or not.

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I O VAN N I M U L E ’ | Des ign in g Cities

• Create precise light study of every hour and day of theyear, helping comply with the famous rights of light everyresident should have.• The building heights map helping visualise which buildings in the surroundings (and in the whole city meanwhile) have the same height. • The ability to over impose GIS data , as for example the designated action areas and opportunity areas correspondingly for housing and more. As well as data from research centres like pollution levels and listed buildings. • The ability to simply remove objects and buildings from a site , this literally gives an idea of how an urban area would look like without a building or set of elements like trees. • The ability to choose to highlight the buildings that already received planning permission and the ones under revision with pending applications, enabling access to the future townscape view. • The ability to see the full city landscape therefore not only naturally grasp how a building model sits

on the site and its surroundings but to also suggest with an high level of accuracy what a person standing on a specific altitude will see from their balcony or standing a few meters from their homes. These are just a few of Vu.City’s full set of functionalities which clearly set a new milestone in the urban planning and design innovation industry. Little wonder then that it was chosen by almost all planning authorities in London and that the company already created models for New York, Paris, Manchester , Birmingham, Belfast, Brighton and Oxford just a few years after their initial set up. Accessing such precise models of a city can enable the full potential of smart cities in the scenario where IoT infrastructure is placed strategically, showcasing what can then be called real-time city (Kitchin 2014). One example in the UK is Newcastle , which through a network of sensors can detect several data points in real time like pollution level, weather, traffic and more. The data sets combined with 3D modelling can simplify the understanding and “reading” of this complex and interconnected data (Jamei et. 2017). ► Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I O VAN N I M U L E â€™ | Des ign in g Cities

There is plenty of room for learning to design better cities using Vu.City as I had first hand experience of being able to speed up the design intervention proposed in my coursework, fundamentally making design decisions more quickly and justifying the rationale in record time. Infact to fully assess the initial design intervention planned, would have required me to also design the surrounding areas of the site. Applying hours and hours of research on building heights, design of the buildings comparing and contrasting Google Earth images. Even in the best case scenarios where the preciseness of the surrounding area was accurate enough, it would have required me to also design tall buildings not in proximity of the site, to fully understand the townscape changes. Just to mention some challenges without the software.

FINDINGS FROM THE QUESTIONNAIRE

I asked thirty architects, planners and engineers to answer the questions presented in the questionnaire, purposefully designed to understand what is the perception of AEC experts and consultants in regards to technology and software uses in their profession. Fourteen of them correctly filled the questionnaire, creating the dataset I am going to mention next. It will showcase the most significant and relevant questions and their respective answers, to continue the discussion in pursuit of an answer for the research question and the policy recommendation outcomes. Continues in the next page â–ş

For this reason it becomes clear enough that architects and planners are going to be using these (or similar) tools to save time, money and get more precise results, hence it is pivotal in my opinion to start introducing these technologies in the formative programmes of AEC related university courses.

â–ş 13

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I O VAN N I M U L E ’ | Des ign in g Cities

Q1 - How important are technology and visualisation software in your opinion, in regards to planning application approval process? 50% ranked 10 (as extremely important) for the use of technology and visualisation software in regards to

planning application approval processes. To the question: Please rate from 0 to 10 how important is the use of technology and softwares in each design phase, 85.7% answered 10 (as extremely important).

This graph portrays the issues in which decision making and stakeholders engagement are the most challenging and restricted phases with technology. While visualisation, representing less than half the perceived “challenge” in using software and technology compared to decision making and stakeholders engagement.

This graph portrays that 64.3% responded they never heard the names “CIM” City Information Model and Digital Twins in the built environment. Only 21.4% answered Partly or just heard about and the remaining 14,3% affirmed to know them (or one of the two) very well.

The above graphs portraits the perceived level of technical expertise required in the future in AEC professions. Specifically in the first one with the question we see an incremental answer distribution from an importance level of 6 to a 50% of answers of 10 (as extremely important).

While for the same question but for CIM and/or Digital Twins professionals, the answers are again scattered from the 6th to the 10th grade of importance (though with an outlier answering not important at all) with a different degree of distribution.

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I O VAN N I M U L E ’ | Des ign in g Cities

DISCUSSION AND LIMITATIONS

POLICY RECOMMENDATION

Analysing the topic related literature, the testimonials of the case study Vu.City, the qualitative usage data of the former and the questionnaire data, answering to the research question “Are digital twins the future of urban planning & design?” we could answer positively and confidently.

With the right policies in place for forward looking education and training , well directed investments in physical device infrastructure (Iot devices network), open data policies enabled by governments stimulating open urban innovation, London has the potential to continue to be highly competitive in the global landscape.

The literature provides hints of what seems to be an evolution of the practice from physical experimentation to virtual testing. With the increasing need to resolve complexity in the urban environments, data and accurate digital 3D representation of the cities come to help professionals improve their decision-making process (Kitchin 2014, Jamei 2017, Ratten V. 2017). However, the case study reporting pervades research limitations as the information in regards to the company Vu.city, however realistic and accurate, only represents the front and advertising side of the narrative. Also , my functionality listing and qualitative representation is limited to the degree by which I operate in the industry, therefore missing the critical industry-related component that is more linked to experienced designers or planners in practice.

While the accuracy of 3D models of a city can be the skeleton of what can potentially become a fully integrated smart city, the lifeblood of the latter is data. Every country has different privacy policy in regards to open and public data. London gives access to plenty of data through its website yet not at the level of cities like New York and Singapore. For this reason, the harvesting, monitoring and process of open data, as well its graphic representation and accessibility to the public, must be well regulated and granted with of course all the due diligence that upholds the laws of privacy. Ultimately this will lead the urban innovators and local authorities together with GIS and other datasets to fully understand the geolocal and spatial correlations, dynamics and economics avoiding the potential trap to build visual-only biases in the decision making processes. ►

To conclude, outcome of the questionnaire also presents limitations in the overall non-specific demographics, industry specific relations and size of the sample taken in consideration.

This also requires major changes in the behaviour of every stakeholder included in the urban landscape, from community centers to developers, from universities to planning authorities.

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I O VAN N I M U L E ’ | Des ign in g Cities

Today, the technological innovation is going faster than ever, and urban innovation requires just as much speed to improve processes and complexity in the city. CONCLUSIONS

While Howard had to build a whole city in order to test the new city layouts, which we could define as the first from-scratch smart city experiment, one that successfully introduced innovative and human-centered principles. Today, the technologicalinnovation is going faster than ever, and urban innovation requires just as much speed to improve processes and complexity in the city. Therefore we must take advantage of the current technologies that the market offers like Vu.City, because as we have seen 3D models are the backbone of smart cities. Countries and their cities worldwide are now competing for the latest “disruptive” technologies and especially the private sector will lead the way, while requiring more IT skilled professionals. Urban planners and designers should consider this moment as transitional almost as the invention of hand-drawing to CAD, and finally embrace the future.

►

Yet never forget, it is the physical space, where we live and interact, that will always potentially imply there are major forces, strong hard rooted beliefs and other uncontrollable or monitorable action-reaction patterns and variables that will always live in the mystery of our machines and our minds that cannot be measured. We are the city before the city.

► 16

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G I OVAN N I M U L E ’ | D es ign in g Cities

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to everyone who contributed in the making of this document, from proof readers to expert’s tips. A special thanks to Vu.City’s for providing me an extended version of the software, pivotal for my final year submissions at Designing Cities. Thank you.

CONTACTS

Email: info@giovannimule.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Giovanni Mulè is a final year “Designing Cities” student at University of Westminster in London. He is very passionate about technology and its applications in urban innovation and global development. He has polyedric interests, from communication to design and again technology and business. Running a digital media agency and mentoring aspirant startuppers, leaded him to an exciting and formative entrepreneurial journey. In the future Giovanni aims to combine his design skills and passions with the purpose of driving innovation in the planning industry forward. With a continous hunger for knowledge about the latest disruptive technologies to feed his foresight mind. 17

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G IO VAN N I M U L E ’ | Des ign in g Cities

REFERENCES AND LITERATURE

Albrechts, L.; Balducci, A. (2013): Practicing Strategic Planning: In Search of Critical Features to Explain the Strategic Character of Plans. disP 194, 49(3), pp.16–27. Arup A2 Magazine Issue n°1 - CHINA UNVEILS THE WORLD’S FIRST ECO-CITY - 2006 Arup , Digital Twins: toward a meaningful framework 2019 Adewole, Wole Ademola & Omonaiye, Oluwasegun & Feyisayo, Olatunde & Oyinkansola, Ajadi & Austine, Adibe & Uti, Ogochukwu & Omowunmi, Ogunyimika. (2018). URBAN PLANNING WITHOUT DATA, FOR HOW LONG? TRADITIONAL CITIES VERSUS SMART CITIES. Batty, M. (2006): Hierarchy in Cities and City Systems. In Pumain, D. (ed.), Hierarchy in Natural and Social Science. Dordrecht: Springer, p.143–168. Carvalho, Luis. (2015). Smart cities from scratch? A socio-technical perspective. Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society. 8. 10.1093/cjres/rsu010. M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (2nd ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Duany A. , Roberts P, Talena E. : General Theory of Urbanism, Toward a System of Assessment Based Upon Garden City Principles. 2014 Centre for policy Studies Dembski F , Wossner U. , Letzgus M. , Ruddat M. and Yam C. 2020 – Urban Digital Twins for Smart Cities and Citizens: The case Study of Rerrenberg, Germany – Sustainability , MDPI R.J. Firmino, F. Duarte and T. Moreira, “Pervasive Technologies and Urban Planning in the Augmented City,” Journal of Urban Technology, 15 (2008) 77-93. (Gartland, 2012) L.M. Heat Islands: Understanding and Mitigating Heat in Urban Areas; Routledge: Oxford, UK, 2012.

GOS Future of cities: working paper Foresight, Government Office for Science 2014 S. Graham, and S. Marvin, Telecommunications and the City (New York: Routledge, 1996). S. Graham, and P. Healey, “Relational Concepts of Space and Place: Issues for Planning Theory and Practice,” European Planning Studies, 7 (1999) 623-646. Jamei E. , M. Mortimer, M. Seyedmahmoudian , B. Horan and Stojcevski. (2017) Investigating the Role of Virtual Reality in Planning for Sustainable Smart Cities. MDPI, Sustainability. Hall, Peter. 1988. Cities of Tomorrow : An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Blackwell Hillier, J. (2013): On Relationality and Uncertainty. disP 194, 49(3), pp.32–39 Hudson-Smith, A.; Dodge, M.; Doyle, S. Visual Communication in Urban Planning and Urban Design; Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA): London, UK, 1998 P. Healey, “The Treatment of Space and Place in the New Strategic Spatial Planning in Europe,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28 (2004) 45-67. Kitchin, R. The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal 79, 1–14 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-013-9516-8 Klosterman, R.E. (1999): Guest Editorial. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 26, pp.317– 320 Li, D.R.; Yao, Y.; Shao, Z.F. From digital Earth to smart Earth. Chin. Sci. Bull. 2014, 59, 722–733. Marshall S. (2012): Planning, Design and the complexity of Cities. Springer pp.191-205 Miller, J.H.; Page, S.E. (2007): Complex Adaptive Systems: An introduction in computational models of social life. New Jersey: Princeton University Press

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?

G IO VAN N I M U L E ’ | Des ign in g Cities

NLA , 26 th February 2020, by David Taylor, THE CITY IN YOUR HANDS – YOUR.VU PREVIEW, https://nla.london/news/the-city-in-your-hands-yourvu-preview

Vu.city – Blog Post - Key Takeaways from the first Public Sector Workshop hosted on 3rd October 2018 - https://vu.city/what-difference-does-3d-really-make-though

Parliament 2020 , Living Heritage, The Birth of Town Planning https://www.parliaMent.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/towns/ov erview/townplanning/

Ward K (ed) (2014) Researching the City London: Sage

Placetech, 4 th Jun 2019, by Nicholas Fearn, Vu.city launches 3D city modelling to mass market https://placetech.net/news/vu-city-launches-3d-city-modelling-to-mass-market/ Placetech, 22 nd Jan 2020, by Robyn Wilson https://placetech.net/analysis/the-big-interview-vu-city/ 2020 Planning Resources, 7 th February 2019, by Adam Branson, How councils, developers and communities are making use of 3D modelling : https://www.planningresource.co.uk/article/1525195/councils-developers-communities-ma king-use-3d-modelling Popper, K.R. (1957): Vermutungen und Widerlegungen. Das Wachstum der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis [Conjectures and refutations – The growth in scientific knowledge]. Teilband I, Tübingen. Ratten V., Entrepreneruship, Innovation and Smart Cities –Routledge 2017 Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press S. Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization (USA: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).

Wissen Hayek, U. (2011): Which is the appropriate 3D visualization type for participatory landscape planning workshops? A portfolio of their effectiveness. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 38, pp.921–939 Wu S. M. , Chen T. , Yenchun J. W. and Lytras M. (2018) . Smart Cities in Taiwan: A Perspective on Big Data Applications , Sustainability , MDPI, Pag 169 Yuhuan, Zhang & Lu, Huapu & Luo, Shengxi & Sun, Zhiyuan & Qu, Wencong. (2017). Human-Scale Sustainability Assessment of Urban Intersections Based upon Multi-Source Big Data. Sustainability. 9. 1148. 10.3390/su9071148. Notes:

[1] The quintessential complexity of the city definition borrowed from Marshall, 2012 and the cirty as the greatest achievement of humanity from Arup 2019 [2] “Strategic planning is hot” from Albrechts et 2013 while the Vu.City making planning sexy from NLA 2019 Images:

All the right reserverved to the respective authors.

Shim J.P.; Warkentin, M.; Courtney, J.F.; Power, D.J.; Sharda R.; Carsson C. (2002): Past, present, and future of decision support technology. Decision Support Systems, 33, pp.111–126. Deyan Sudjic (2016) – The language of cities, Penguin Press. Signable, 17th April 2020, Article written by Torry Cook, Article PropTech UK – Investment & 2020 forecast analysis –- https://www.signable.co.uk/proptech-uk-expert-forecast-analysis/ 19

Digital Twins, the future of Plantech?