Commoning Practices and Mobility Justice in Data-Driven Societies: Urban Scale Digital Twins and Their Challenges for Architecture and Urban Planning

The paper examines the role of commoning practices in data-driven society, placing particular emphasis on their role in the establishment of new agendas in architectural education. Its main objective is to explore the impact of commoning practices on the relations between citizens in data-driven society and how this issue is addressed in architectural education. The paper pays special attention to urban scale digital twins, which are virtual replicas of cities that are used to simulate environments and develop scenarios in response to policy problems. It investigates the shift from technical to socio-technical perspectives within the field of smart cities. Despite the aspirations of urban scale digital twins to enhance the participation of citizens in the decision-making processes concerning urban planning, the fact that they, often, neglect social non-quantifiable aspects concerning how citizens experience urban environments, on the one hand, and are based on a limited set of variables and processes, on the other hand, calls for an exploration of how architecture and urban planning education can respond to these challenges. The paper aims to shed light on the tension between the real and the ideal at stake during this process of abstracting sets of variables and processes in the case of urban scale digital twins. It examines the critiques of ‘digital universalism’, and reflects upon the role of urban scale digital twins in data-driven decision-making concerning urban policies and urban planning.