Series · 1 part · August 2026
Building a City Digital Twin
I set out to model a city, and started where most people start — with the whole thing. This series is what the literature, the real data, and my own experiments did to that ambition, and what is left standing that is actually worth building.
The arc, in one breath
Part 1 writes down the mental model I began with — a city as entities on geography, flows between them, and senses that watch both — then records the six corrections the literature and the data forced on it: senses that report at speeds seven orders of magnitude apart, sensors that are a shadow of the state rather than a mirror of it, people who re-optimise rather than drift like particles, single runs that hide their own uncertainty, governance that is the controller of the loop rather than another entity inside it, and an output that should compare futures instead of forecasting one. Every correction pushes the same direction — toward a smaller, scoped twin — and that is the thread the series picks up next.