Digital Twinning Conceptions, Requirements and Barriers. A perspective from the Eastern Dutch context

Iván Cárdenas-León

No 6rm34_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) are increasingly promoted as the next generation of Planning Support Systems, yet most implementations remain shaped more by technological promise than by practitioner need. This study examines how municipal, provincial, and consultant-level planners and city managers in the Eastern Netherlands understand, use, and evaluate digital decision-support. Drawing on six semi-structured expert interviews analyzed through a hybrid deductive-inductive thematic coding process (combining manual coding with LLM-assisted extraction), we find that current spatial planning and decision-making are hampered by weak cross-sector coordination, politics taking priority over evidence, and fragmented data, despite a well-established national open-data framework. Practitioners hold divergent conceptions of what a "digital twin" is. Across all conceptions, respondents converge on a core set of technical and institutional requirements: centralized, queryable data; scenario simulation; web-based deployment to bypass IT governance barriers; plain-language accessibility for non-GIS audiences; and co-development of tools. Comparison with a 1980 diagnosis of planning-support fragmentation reveals near-identical structural findings that have persisted over four decades, with national open-data infrastructure as the main point of progress. Situating our findings within the Rainbow Model for access and implementation, we argue that the primary barriers to UDT adoption in Dutch spatial planning are not technical but rather institutional and governance-related: fragmented data stewardship, IT locks, chronic ICT underinvestment, and the absence of long-term maintenance structures. We present three main practical design principles and suggest that research should focus on a unified technological stack rather than scatter progress, and on building stronger governance practices.

Date: 2026-10-19
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:6rm34_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/6rm34_v1

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