ORBIS: Digital twin technologies: a major opportunity
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A digital twin of an urban region is an electronic model comprising several classes of analytic, simulation and visualisation technologies that use, and indeed generate, numeric, descriptive and 3D data to test-drive policies and design criteria. In the fields of urban policy and design, digital twins can be used to simulate how, optimally, to achieve a wide range of social, economic, mobility, energy, water-use and other climate-related environmental outcomes. The potential for transforming the guesswork involved in policymaking is significant.
Rapidly advancing computational power built around advanced reduced instruction set computing machines (ARM for short), pioneered 39 years ago in the UK, and emerging powerful AI systems, such as ChatGPT or Adobe Firefly, greatly expand our ability to imagine the future and account for the massive complexities that exist in any place on earth where human beings congregate and establish permanent settlements – the cities and urban regions we all know so well. The architecture profession is generally familiar with many of these technologies, such as building information modelling (BIM) systems, geographic information systems (GIS) and other modelling software, but emerging technologies, including advances in the field of system dynamics,* 3D visualisation and animation systems and synthetic data from curated AI applications, offer the potential for architects to take on far broader and more impactful roles than ever before.**
These profound opportunities for the architecture profession arise from a confluence of economic, legislative, environmental and technological forces, which are making our urban regions ever more challenging for sustained livability to be the norm for everyone, especially given the catastrophic effects of climate change happening globally.
The Adam Smith problem
For over 250 years, commerce and industry have marched to the beat of Adam Smith’s seminal work The Wealth of Nations, which viewed the earth’s resources as infinite and held the marketplace, and those people whose interest in profits for personal gain superseded all other considerations, to be the drivers of competition and, according to his definition, innovation. By the end of the Second World War, Smith’s model of human behaviour and commerce was dominant and, by 2020, had become supercharged to form a philosophy of planetary ownership by corporate entities who, to this day, exert enormous influence over national and global politics in their headlong extraction of profits by whatever means possible.
It now looks like our species and thousands of others will be paying a very heavy price for the folly of our belief that the Earth’s resources were infinite, despite the finite size of the planet, and that economic ‘externalities’ created by commerce and industry would have no discernable impact on lives, the price of goods or the planet. There are few urban regions which have not been shaped by these pernicious forces. Despite monumental efforts by scientists, professionals and policymakers everywhere for better living conditions and better-performing built environments, the best-laid plans for greater livability and healthier environments, social equity and economic diversity continue to be based on the hope that private sector development will come up with the answers.
For decades these ‘answers’ have been geared towards the extraction of profits to the exclusion of almost all other considerations. Hope faces powerful incentives to keep doing more of the things which we know are destroying our world. We have a choice to make, as a species and as a profession – continue the march to oblivion based on the concept of planetary ownership or shift everything about our society and what we do to the point where planetary stewardship guides our actions (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Planetary ownership or planetary stewardship?
Given politicians’ inaction over the past several decades, it might appear that all is lost and we will all be drawn into an extinction vortex from which escape is impossible. Although such an eventuality is possible, it is by no means inevitable if we apply our collective know-how and technologies to adapt to climate realities and, at the same time, slow the climate change flywheel which we have helped to spool up over the past couple of centuries of intensifying industrial development. It is in the urban regions, where hundreds of millions of people live, that we have the best chance of making a difference and changing the forces that currently pose such grave threats to life on Earth.
Today, the global construction sector lags behind all other sectors in innovation and productivity.
Compared to most other industrial and service sectors, whose productivity and performance have increased by roughly 1,500% over the past 70 years, the construction sector barely breaks a 1% improvement.*** This presents the architecture profession with a massive opportunity to leverage digital twin technologies to move from being drafting services for developers to premier league players operating at more strategic, policymaking levels, where profound decisions are regularly made which shape the performance and livability of every urban area on the planet.
Simulating the future by understanding urban DNA
If we were designing a jet engine for manufacture, we would build a digital twin comprising 100% of its parts. We would then simulate its performance against design goals, such as fuel efficiency, number of hours between maintenance, material degradation, integrity following bird strikes and so on. When the achievement of those criteria had been optimised according to the priorities given to each one, the resulting jet engine’s digital twin would alter its form and shape to enable those complex sets of goals to be optimally achieved. From that optimised digital twin, the manufacturing process starts. As soon as the engine is in service, its performance is monitored by on-board instruments and, whenever a problem arises, a product maintenance digital twin is also present to determine what improvements or repairs need to be made to keep the engine safely in service.
This does not happen in urban regions. As a society, we leave the design, location and performance of human habitats (the built environments which give form to and enable – or disable – a dizzying array of human endeavours) to the whims of real estate speculation, land-banking or to prescriptive ‘urban planning’ codes, many of which are devoid of any evidence basis and are often decades out of sync with present and future human needs. The results to date do not give much encouragement that doing more of the same will ensure better outcomes.
While some components of digital twin technologies are indeed used at the front end of the project design (including all construction documentation and engineering calculations), they tend to operate like a single bookend to a very full but open-ended shelf of books. What gets built is rarely, if ever, subjected to ongoing performance analytics to determine whether what was thought to be (and indeed simulated as) a good solution actually worked when it came into contact with people and the realities of their lives or the work they do. It is now very apparent that new financial incentives are needed to ensure that the story of an urban region is bookended from design to in use evaluation and management. Many other fields already do this – medicine, consumer electronic products, aerospace, the automotive industry. Built environments remain by and large experimental prototypes that never go into production (paraphrasing Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer). AI, data, generative design systems, system dynamics models and curated AI all can play powerful roles in shifting the status quo to a better way of ensuring greater performance, better durability and better human outcomes from what is built.
Digital twin technologies enable architects to account for all the genomic complexities of an urban region’s DNA that represent how and why an urban region works in the way that it does. This offers significant opportunities for architects to participate in shaping the structure and form of urban regions of any size and location, driven by urban genomic goals rather than hope, whimsy or artistic style-du-jour. There is no shortage of urgency for this endeavour. This reshaping of urban forms needs to be done on both a large scale and an individual building or urban site scale, including retrofitting what has already been built. The performance parameters for urban physical infrastructure are definable and we already know a great deal about them (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: An illustrative example of an urban region’s DNA components
What if the form of redeveloped urban regions was driven by these parameters rather than purely by profit extraction and code compliance, as so many ‘developments’ are today?****
The technologies underpinning digital twins are capable of identifying a variety of performance-defined urban ‘sandbox’ locations. Within these, developers, owners, architects and allied professionals can put their know-how and creativity to good use, knowing that what they built would have a higher probability of enabling performance goals, like walkability, high air quality, mobility choices and diverse local commerce, to be met rather than simply hoping that they’d turn out OK in the end.
The future before us
AI, generative design systems, data science and the field of system dynamics make it entirely possible for architects to take leadership roles in urban policy deliberations rather than being left out of the picture until a developer has been given permission to build something within prescribed zoning rules. Such leadership roles are attainable if architects engage in the creation of digital models of cities that go well beyond BIM systems and reach into the human, social, economic, mobility and environmental dynamics that drive sustainable livability, better health outcomes, economic opportunity and prosperity.
In the field of medicine, such diagnostic technologies, involving AI and digital twins of the human body and its complex systems, are used daily to detect diseases, conduct surgical procedures, apply gene therapies and benchmark progress towards recovered health. In the field of built environments, the application of similar digital twin technologies opens up a breathtaking spectrum of possibilities for improving the lives of billions of our fellow human beings and the planet we depend on for life.
*Jay Forrester, Urban Dynamics, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1969 and World Dynamics, Wright-Allen Press, Cambridge MA, 1971 (for more information on Forrester, see https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-tomatter/professor-emeritus-jay-w-forrester-digital-computing-and-system-dynamics-pioneer-dies-98).
**We have already seen the stellar results achieved by architects engaged in developing (coding and programming) and applying early forms of these technologies from the 1970s to the present day (such as Applied Research of Cambridge and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, among many others). One such example is David Rutten, an Austrian architect who devised and coded Grasshopper – one of the most powerful parametric and generative design environments available today.
***Reinventing Construction: A Route to Higher Productivity, McKinsey Global Institute, February 2017 (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/reinventing-construction-through-aproductivity-revolution).
****Judyta Cichocka, ‘Generative design optimization in urban planning: Walkability-optimized city concept’, Architectus, vol. 1, no. 41, 2015.
Phil Allsopp, D.Arch, M.S. (Public Health), RIBA, CSBA
CEO
Phil leads the company’s vision and, with its multi-disciplinary leadership team, deploys dynamic 3D visualization and simulation software for the unmet needs of urban professionals and policymakers in public and private sectors globally. Phil also leads ORBIS Dynamics’ Urban Observatory services, configured to inspire and enable collaborative discovery for better, more livable urban futures. Phil’s continuing professional work and research has been focused on the application of complex and adaptive systems for improving the livability and prosperity of cities, addressing ballooning ecological, social, and economic crises arising from urban growth and intensifying climate challenges. He is Senior Scientist with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Laboratory and a frequent keynote speaker including for the World Health Association’s Healthy Cities initiative, Smart City programs, and on the ways and means for reshaping urban infrastructures for improving wellbeing and reducing the social and economic burden of chronic disease.
After completing his professional education in Architecture at Kingston University, London and becoming a licensed architect, he conducted post graduate research at the University of Wales in environmental physics and energy conservation. Phil went on to serve with Britain’s National Health Service in Oxford as a senior researcher on a team developing computational design, simulation, and analytic systems for built environments and digital mapping applications. For his work, Phil received a Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Award which took him to Columbia University in New York where he earned an M.S. in the public health field for his research into the spatial DNA of health facilities and its influence on patients, staff, operational performance, and costs. He emigrated to the United States as a US Public Health Service Fellow working with the Office of the Surgeon General in Washington DC. He was responsible for conducting regulatory, technology, and economic assessments of emerging diagnostic technologies and their system wide impacts on human health and public and private health care programs.
His career experience includes the use and development of non-linear simulation and digital twin software systems for a wide range of health care, financial, insurance, transportation, built environment, national security, and law-enforcement clients. Phil has held practice directorships and officer roles with Electronic Data Systems, A.T. Kearney, and SAIC; as Chief Analytics Officer of a major U.S. health insurance company; and as CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation based at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, AZ. Phil has also worked extensively on the application of computational design systems to urban policy simulation and the design, manufacture and precision assembly of mass timber and bio-based materials for high performance housing. Locally Phil’s work with the Gila River Indian Community deals with tribal challenges of inadequate housing and its direct impact on chronic disease, crime prevention and disconnected youth.
Phil has also served as a Commissioner for the City of Scottsdale’s General Plan and in May 2023 was elected to serve on the Royal Institute of British Architects Council representing The Americas Region. He also chairs the RIBA Expert Advisory Group on AI, Computational Design and Data, Phil and his wife, Lauren, live in Scottsdale, Arizona.