Twin4Resilience: Who are Local Digital Twins really for?
Picture a quiet street near your home. One morning you hear that a new supermarket might open on the corner. Will it bring more traffic? Will the bus still stop where it always has? Will the small park survive? Most of us form an opinion based on a hunch. A Local Digital Twin can turn that hunch into something you can actually see.
Local Digital Twins (LDTs) are digital models of real places such as a neighbourhood, a city or a whole region. They bring data together and let people visualise it, test different scenarios and explore the likely impact of a decision before anything is built or changed on the ground. In the Twin4Resilience project we are working to grow the knowledge and share the expertise needed to manage this valuable tool.
One question keeps coming back, though: if a Local Digital Twin is a tool for better decisions, who actually gets to use it?
Powerful digital tools often end up in the hands of a small group of specialists. The planners and data experts learn them, and everyone else hears about the results afterwards. When that happens, a tool meant to serve a community can quietly leave most of that community outside the room. This is exactly the gap that All Digital works to close. Around 40% of EU citizens still do not have basic digital skills, so a Local Digital Twin should not become one more thing that only experts and a small niche can understand. If it does, it widens the very divide it could help to heal.
All Digital is also coordinating the DigiCitezenEdu project that aims to advance Digital Citizenship Education by equipping educators and learners across Europe with the skills and knowledge needed to actively and responsibly participate in today’s digital society. There is a citizenship dimension here too. LDTs feed choices that shape daily life: where a cycle lane goes, how a square is redesigned, how a city prepares for heatwaves or floods. Decisions like these belong to everyone who lives with them, and giving residents a way to understand and question what a model shows is part of what it means to take part in local democracy today.
So how do we make these tools reach real people, including those who would never describe themselves as “digital”?
The most useful starting point is to make the technology concrete. Instead of explaining what a digital twin is in the abstract, show people something they care about. What would the street look like if that supermarket opened? Where would the extra traffic go? How much warmer would the square become on a summer afternoon without its trees? When residents watch the answer change as they adjust the scenario, the tool stops being mysterious and starts feeling like theirs.
Workshops in the heart of the municipality are a practical way to get there. A library, a community centre or a local digital competence centre can host short, hands-on sessions where residents try the twin themselves, guided by someone who speaks plainly and patiently. People test a question that matters to their own street, see the result and ask the next one. Designing these sessions together with residents, rather than presenting a finished product, also surfaces the worries that experts tend to miss.
Twin4Resilience is about more than technology. It is about people, and we should make sure those people include everyone, not only the experts and the digitally confident.