A secondary goal of this project was to explore existing urban digital twinning developments in Gothenburg.
I conducted interviews and online research to better understand who is making digital twins in Gothenburg, why they are doing it, and how they are doing it.
This led me to pay specific attention to the Virtual Gothenburg, Gothenburg’s “main twin” as well as the KultVis, a twin under development I had the chance to participate in envisioning. And then along the way I found interesting things about the role of Visual Arena in the development of the Virtual Gothenburg Lab.
Below are a handful of digital twinning efforts from Gothenburg (and two from France and the Netherlands) that have greatly informed the development of the Virtual Gazaplatsen Lab.
| Project name | Overview | Possibilities for civic engagement | Developers |
|---|---|---|---|
Virtual Gothenburg | The City of Gothenburg is have launched a digital twin: Virtual Gothenburg. This digital city will make it easier to visualise and simulate various urban development projects. | City of Gothenburg Digital Twin Cities Centre | |
KultVis | The project is about visualizing cultural values in urban transformation and knowledge about sharing of these values by several parties. Today, there are many digital tools for displaying different types of data, but cultural values are often lacking and need to be given attention in the digital landscape. | Digital Twin Cities Centre | |
CoExist 2 | In the future autonomous vehicles will have to interact with their surroundings in a separate way than manually driven vehicles. By using the digital twin, we can explore the interaction between Humans (avatars), Machines (vehicles) and Infrastructure. | Virtual Gothenburg Lab | |
Social sustainability in urban development | In this pilot, we explored together how an easily accessible technical interface to the city’s digital twin can empower both residents and officials and support the joint work for a socially sustainable city. | Virtual Gothenburg Lab | |
UNEJ | Workshops facilitated using the video game Luanti (free equivalent of Minecraft, formerly Minetest) to invite students from 8 middle schools and 2 high schools in the design and modeling of urban development proposals related to their territory. | ||
Future Frictions | In Future Frictions, you explore a neighborhood, interact with neighbors and, at some point, encounter three different speculative technologies such a surveillance drone, an AI cat and a set of sensing pigeons. You will need to make controversial decisions regarding the use of this technology and the data it collects. | ||
Virtual Gazaplatsen Lab | The Virtual Gazaplatsen Lab is an attempt at exploring how COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHY can inform the way urban digital twins can be used to challenge normative, market-driven, and often anti-democratic approaches to urban digital twinning in Gothenburg. | GUSP |