Smart city development and urban technologies : digital twin in cities

This research study considers one such urban technology, namely utilising digital twins in cities. Digital twin city (DTC) technology is investigated to identify the gap in soft infrastructure data inclusion in DTC development. Soft infrastructure data considers the social and economic systems of a city, which leads to the identification of socio-economic security (SES) as the metric of investigation. The study also investigated how GIS mapping of the SES system in the specific context of Hatfield informs a soft infrastructure understanding that contributes to DTC readiness. This research study collected desk-researched secondary data and field-researched primary data in GIS using ArcGIS PRO and the Esri Online Platform using ArcGIS software. To form conclusions, grounded theory qualitative analysis and descriptive statistics analysis of the spatial GIS data schema data sets were performed.