Digital Twins: The Next Frontier in Urban Planning and Development

This is the way Senior Vice President of Innovation at real estate company Tavistock, Juan Santos, describes the first architectural models of its Lake Nona community. Top designers and city planners had weighed in on their creation. The developer was knocked out by their quality. The only problem? They were, well, physical. As such, changes could only be made at great cost and at least semi-permanently. Cue: the creation of the “digital twin” of this “living lab” Orlando community that replaced them. Santos says, “Our [superpower] is that we’re not afraid to change and we wanted to keep changing.” Design mistakes were easily assessed and ultimately avoided, from the number of palm trees in a sculpture garden being tripled to effectively shade residents on hot Florida days, to a shopping center’s location being shifted to prevent congestion…. Santos says local excellence in the field not only allows Lake Nona to be designed in a forward-thinking way but helps it run effectively. He notes that while Lake Nona’s visual twin still requires some manual processes when it comes to creating simulations, it’s 80% of the way there. (Santos also notes that the idea of a single “digital twin” is often a misnomer—or applied to replicas which don’t have simulation capability. Lake Nona also has an operational “dashboard” twin that displays real-time wifi usage, parking garage utilization, and more to supplement it.) In the future, he sees the tool’s increasing sophistication via AI enabling not only instant simulations but ever more optimization of residents’ lives. “Operators will be able to say, ‘You know, it’s looking like the parking garages are getting full. Do we need more shifts in the restaurants’?…Or if it rains, if you’re a business operator then you figure out, ‘I’m going to have people with umbrellas at the door.’” Dorian Vee, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Imerza, the company that created Lake Nona’s visual twin, describes such evolution of use: “It creates a circular economy where developers can really maximize the twins’ value…The ROI pays off in multiple ways.”