Multi-modeling digital twins for urban resilience: Emerging concepts from Hamburg, Germany

UN HABITAT World Urban Forum 13, ‘Housing the World: Safe and Resilient Cities and Communities’, Baku, Azerbaijan, 19 May 2026

This talk examines efforts to move urban digital twins beyond single, monolithic city models towards modular, multi-model infrastructures that support collaboration across public, private, academic, and civil-society stakeholders. Drawing on Hamburg’s Connected Urban Twins project as an empirical case, it traces the development of interoperable standards and four interconnected tools: a collaborative model-building environment, a platform for sharing simulation models, a scenario-exploration interface for participatory planning, and an AI-driven analytics tool for public engagement data. It is argued that publicly owned infrastructure for algorithmic collaboration, paired with tools designed for stakeholder engagement, offers a promising way forward for managing the plurality of possible urban futures.

Image © Eva Stowasser.
Image © Eva Stowasser.

More information
https://wuf.unhabitat.org/wuf13