Cities & places
Cities and places: buildings, streets, 3D city models and the twins of whole towns and regions.
mandates
Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity: by 2030 at least 30 per cent of land, inland waters and coastal and marine areas effectively conserved through protected areas and other area-based measures.
digital twins
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The City of Amsterdam's browser 3D viewer of the city, which runs on Netherlands3D, an open-source Unity digital-twin framework begun for 3D Amsterdam and 3D Utrecht and now developed for the whole Netherlands.
Cities & places open sourceopen participation
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The Municipality of Rotterdam's 3D city model and browser viewer, built from its base registers, lidar and aerial photographs, covering buildings, terrain, trees, street furniture and underground cables and pipes; the data is published for anyone to use.
Cities & places open dataAPI
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The City of Zürich publishes its 3D city model, a roof-and-building model derived from the cadastral survey and photogrammetry, plus year-stamped LoD2 models and historical reconstructions, as open geodata with download and web services.
Cities & places open dataAPI
A layered portrait of San Francisco Bay that explains a digital twin as four shared geographic layers: earth and seabed, natural forces, living systems and the built world.
The City of Boston Planning Department's GIS Lab maintains a citywide 3D model of terrain, groundplan and buildings, used for planning and development review and published for download in the public domain.
Cities & places partly open sourceopen data
A 3D model of Singapore built by the National Research Foundation, the Singapore Land Authority and GovTech on Dassault Systèmes' 3DEXPERIENCity platform, for planning analyses and simulations across agencies.
Cities & places closed sourceclosed dataclosed participation
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The City of Helsinki publishes its 3D city models and an energy and climate atlas as open data; the Municipality of Bologna is building a digital twin as civic infrastructure with a public research consortium.
Cities & placesEnergy partly open datapartly open participation
A sustainability simulator of the island of Moorea, French Polynesia, led by the IDEA Consortium from the University of California's Gump South Pacific Research Station; it models links between climate, environment, biodiversity and human activity across the island and its lagoon.
DCS Spatial Services, the New South Wales government's spatial data authority, runs a 3D and 4D visualisation platform and data-sharing portal for the state, used by agencies and councils for planning, asset management and emergency response.
Cities & places partly open dataAPIpartly open participation
Mehmet Kerem Turkcan's city-scale digital twin of New York City's five boroughs, compiled from public municipal records, with real-time rendering, traffic and pedestrian simulation and a CARLA-style Python API.
Cities & placesMovement & logisticsSensory landscape open sourcepartly open dataAPI
tools
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Knowledge graph of urban climate adaptation plans from the Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech; AI agents read city plans and extract actions, hazards, outcomes and costs, each traced to its source sentence.
Cities & placesWeather & climatePeople & society partly open sourcepartly open dataAPI
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Geospatial foundation models from Google DeepMind (AlphaEarth Foundations, released as an embeddings dataset in Google Earth Engine) and from NASA with IBM (Prithvi Geospatial, open source on Hugging Face), for mapping and land-change tasks.
Cities & placesLiving systems partly open sourcepartly open data
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Cloud services from Microsoft (Azure Digital Twins) and Amazon (AWS IoT TwinMaker) for describing the entities and relationships in a place and connecting them to live device data.
Cities & places closed sourceAPI
Bentley Systems' iTwin Platform and its open-source iTwin.js library combine engineering, reality, GIS and IoT data into infrastructure digital twins that developers build applications on.
Cities & places partly open sourceAPI
Hosted web tool from Bmap that turns a drawn bounding box anywhere on Earth into a low-poly 3D model of that place, with terrain, buildings, roads, coastline and trees from open geographic data, viewable in the browser and exportable as GLB.
Cities & places closed sourceopen data
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Open-source JavaScript library from Cesium for 3D globes and maps in the browser; streams 3D Tiles, terrain, imagery and time-dynamic data on a WGS84 globe.
Cities & places open sourceAPIopen participation
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Open-source Python library by Yuta Sato and colleagues that turns buildings, streets, transit feeds, origin–destination matrices, zones and points of interest into graphs for network analysis in NetworkX and for graph neural networks in PyTorch Geometric.
Cities & placesMovement & logistics open sourceAPIopen participation
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A JSON encoding of the OGC CityGML data model for 3D city models, with open tools to convert, validate, view and edit files; version 2.0 is an official OGC standard.
Cities & places open sourceopen participation
Open-source Android app from the non-profit Awana Digital for territory monitoring and mapping, co-designed with Indigenous communities; teams record observations on a map and share them peer to peer.
People & societyCities & places open sourcepartly open participation
World Resources Institute's web tool that maps heat hazard, exposure and cooling opportunity in a city and estimates how much street trees, cool roofs or shade structures would lower air temperature and thermal stress, at neighbourhood and city scale.
Weather & climateCities & places open sourceopen dataAPI
DAFNI is a UK computing platform for national-infrastructure research; SPARC and the CICI Lab at Arizona State University, led by Wenwen Li, do GeoAI and cyberinfrastructure research for environmental and disaster applications.
Cities & places partly open datapartly open participation
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GPU-powered framework for visual exploration of large datasets in the browser, built by composing layers; draws over base maps from MapLibre, Mapbox, Google Maps and ArcGIS.
Cities & places open sourceAPIopen participation
Esri's commercial geographic information system; creates, manages, analyses, maps and shares spatial data, and is the geographic base of many city and infrastructure twin projects.
Cities & places closed source
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Research model from Seoul National University that generates a town-scale 3D scene from a single image, built on Microsoft's TRELLIS; code released with a CVPR 2026 paper.
Cities & places open source
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Python package from the GitHub account milos-agathon that renders 3D terrain and thematic maps from elevation, raster and vector data, with a Rust and WebGPU renderer underneath; makes still images, vector files and frame sequences without a GUI.
Cities & places open sourceAPIopen participation
Tropocen's browser-based GIS for urban heat adaptation, with a 3D model of a city district, PALM-4U microclimate simulation and a planning editor for comparing cooling measures.
Cities & placesWeather & climate closed source
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Free, open-source GIS from the opengeos project that loads, styles and analyses geospatial data in a web browser, as a desktop or phone app, or inside a Jupyter notebook, keeping the data on the user's own machine.
Cities & places open sourceAPIopen participation
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Google's family of geospatial AI models and agents, covering satellite imagery, weather, floods and population, reached through Google Earth, Earth Engine, BigQuery, Maps Platform and Google Cloud.
Cities & placesPeople & societyWeather & climateWaterEnergy partly open sourcepartly open dataAPI
Experimental Gemini-based agent from Google Research that plans a multi-step spatial analysis, calls Earth AI models and geospatial data sources, and returns the result with its plan and sources shown.
Cities & placesPeople & societyWeather & climateEnergy closed sourceAPI
Open-source geospatial analysis tool for large datasets that runs in a browser: load a file, add layers, filter and animate over time, without writing code.
Cities & places open sourceopen participation
Open-source map libraries from the MapLibre organization: GL JS for GPU-accelerated vector-tile maps in a web page, Native for mobile, desktop and embedded apps, plus a style specification, a tile format and the Martin tile server.
Cities & places open sourceAPIopen participation
Hosted mapping and visual positioning service from MultiSet AI that turns one drone flight over a site into a localisation map which drones, phones, headsets and robots then query for their position.
Sensory landscapeCities & places closed sourceAPI
Catalogue from Niantic Spatial of 100 real-world environments captured as simulation-ready USDZ scenes, for training and testing robot policies in Isaac Sim and other OpenUSD simulators.
Sensory landscapeCities & places partly open data
An open specification from Google Cloud's Data Cloud team for keeping curated knowledge as a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter and ordinary links between them, so that people, AI agents and other tools can read the same files without a translation layer.
Cities & places open sourceopen datano APIopen participation
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Open-source data analysis and visualization application from Kitware, used to look at the output of simulations from laptop to supercomputer scale.
Cities & places open source
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Google Research geospatial foundation model that turns aggregated search trends, place busyness, maps, weather and air quality into an embedding vector per postal code or county, for predicting local health, economic and environmental indicators.
People & societyCities & places partly open sourcepartly open data
Urbanly's CityCompass simulates the households, firms and developers of a region on its real parcels, month by month in a browser, to compare housing, zoning and transport scenarios.
Cities & places closed source
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UrbanSim is a microsimulation land-use model from UrbanSim Inc., grown out of research led by Paul Waddell, that forecasts real-estate development, prices and household and firm location for regional transport planning.
Cities & places partly open source
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VU.CITY Limited supplies 3D city models and planning tools for the built environment in UK and Irish cities and New York; CLARA Technologies simulates wind, air quality and temperature street by street from a 3D city model, live in Brussels.
Cities & places closed sourcepartly open dataAPI
World Labs' Atlas is a world model that generates, reconstructs and simulates 3D scenes from text, images and video, in early access with selected partners since September 2026.
Cities & places closed source
articles
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2023 editorial review by Yongze Song and colleagues of how geocomputation and GeoAI are used in mapping, with a taxonomy of mapping applications and of the data types that feed them.
- Conceptualizing Small and Medium-Sized Smart Cities in the Mediterranean Region: An Ontological Approach article draft
A 2019 paper in the International Journal of E-Planning Research by Panagiotopoulou, Kokla and Stratigea of the National Technical University of Athens that extends an existing smart city ontology with concepts and relationships drawn from small and medium-sized Mediterranean cities.
- WildCity: A Real-World City-Scale Testbed for Rendering, Simulation, and Spatial Intelligence article draft
2026 paper by Xiangyu Han, Yiming Li, Chen Feng and colleagues at New York University, May Mobility, NVIDIA and Stanford that introduces a multimodal driving dataset covering six US cities, a 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction baseline for city-scale street scenes, and a closed-loop simulator built from the reconstructions.
books
A practical primer from Crooks, Malleson, Manley and Heppenstall, 2019, on building agent-based models of people in places and linking them to GIS, with worked examples in NetLogo.
Edited volume from Heppenstall, Crooks, See and Batty, 2012, collecting the foundations, methods and applications of agent-based modelling of geographic systems.
Michael Batty's 2005 account of modelling cities with cellular automata, agent-based models and fractals, the bottom-up methods under much of today's urban simulation.
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Edited volume from Pourroostaei Ardakani and Cheshmehzangi, 2024, on digital twin concepts, strategies and case studies for urban planning and sustainability.
Edited volume from Farsi, Daneshkhah, Hosseinian-Far and Jahankhani, 2019, on using digital twins to monitor, diagnose and forecast city infrastructure, with attention to security.
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Paul Cureton and Elliot Hartley's 2025 book on the tools now used to plan, map and design the built environment: urban digital twins, GeoBIM, collaborative geodesign, immersive environments and futures methods.
Michael Batty's 2018 book on why the future of cities can be invented but not predicted, and what that means for anyone who models them.
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Open-access reference edited by Guo, Goodchild and Annoni, 2020, on the vision, technologies and uses of a digital model of the whole planet.
David Gelernter's 1991 book that first described software models of real places and institutions, fed by live data, that anyone could look into; the idea the digital twin of a place grows from.
James C. Scott's 1998 study of why large schemes to reorder nature and society from above have failed, and of the local knowledge their simplified maps leave out.
Michael Batty's 2013 argument that cities are flows and networks rather than fixed artefacts, with the models that follow from treating them that way.
Ben Green's 2019 argument that cities should use technology as a tool for democratic and equitable ends rather than treat it as the goal, with cases of smart-city projects gone wrong and alternatives.
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Jay Forrester's 1969 system-dynamics model of a city as feedback loops among population, housing and industry, the first computer model to simulate a whole city's life cycle.
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Open-access edited volume from Shi, Goodchild, Batty, Kwan and Zhang, 2021, on the data, methods and infrastructure used to sense, model and run cities.
data sources
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Public knowledge base from Andrea Farias and the worker cooperative Motiu, with r3.0, that maps organizations doing bioregional and regenerative work around the world, with a shared vocabulary of themes and tags and a bibliography of sources.
Living systemsCities & places open participation
Satellite observations and Earth-observation processing.
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Benchmark from Google Research of open-ended GIS analysis problems written and cross-checked by geospatial experts, used to test how well an AI agent plans an expert-level spatial analysis.
Cities & places open sourcepartly open data
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Benchmark from Google Research of generated geospatial queries with known answers that require chaining one to four kinds of geospatial tool; used to test an AI agent's multi-step tool use and exact spatial computation.
Cities & places open sourcepartly open data
Global map from One Earth and Nature Data Lab of lands and inland waters important for biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate, with land cover and conservation status, designed to be updated every year; launched September 2026 as a free web viewer.
Living systemsCities & places partly open data
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Esri feature service in ArcGIS Living Atlas that serves iNaturalist's research-grade observations worldwide, refreshed monthly, with hexagon summaries at small scales.
Living systemsCities & places partly open dataAPI
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Wikimedia Enterprise's open Parquet dataset joining about 17 million OpenStreetMap features to Wikidata items, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage articles, built by Michal Migurski.
Cities & places open data
Volunteer-built open map database of the world, covering roads, buildings, land use and places; the base layer most digital twins of places start from.
Cities & placesMovement & logistics open dataopen participation
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UNEP-WCMC's record of the world's protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, the World Database on Protected Areas, updated monthly from government and other submissions and downloadable from the site.
Living systemsCities & places open datapartly open participation
terms
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The aim of predictive models of land, water, law and policy that ordinary people can run, question and argue with, rather than tools reserved for planners, companies and agencies.
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Framework from the ecological design firm Biohabitats for asking, before a data center is designed, whether it belongs in a landscape at all, and how it relates to the watershed, habitat and community around it.
organizations
Connected Places Catapult's online community for people working on connected digital twins in the UK; sign-up is needed for most of it.
Cities & places partly open participation
Public benefit organization, based in San Francisco, that connects the communities of a bioregion with regenerative-economy actors and local governments, using blockchain-based tools, a playbook, a funding hub and a seed-exchange programme.
video channels
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Recordings of the Gemini Call, the Digital Twin Hub's weekly stand-up, with a guest project each week; UK infrastructure and the National Digital Twin programme.
podcasts
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Weekly podcast from the Geomob meetup community with geo founders and practitioners; matched here for twin, 3D, city and climate episodes.
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Weekly geospatial podcast by Daniel O'Donohue with interviews on GIS, remote sensing and earth observation; matched here for twin, 3D, point-cloud, city and climate episodes.
questions
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If zoning or a transport investment changes, where will homes and jobs go, and who gains and loses?
events
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Special issue call from the journal Sustainability in Smart Cities (Bon View Publishing) on AI and smart-city methods for climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience at building, neighbourhood and city scale, digital twins among the listed topics; submissions due 1 June 2027.
stories
Scrolling story and playable water-allocation model of the Colorado River basin by Anselm Hook; readers set the flow, choose the cut rule and retire irrigation, then share the future they built as a link.
Symbol: "city block" by Savannah Vize, Noun Project, CC BY 3.0.