| Summary: | City digital twins (CDTs) are attracting considerable attention as a tool for the management of cities
facing many kinds of crises. CDTs are three-dimensional, animated digital models of cities which
display the big data generated by urban sensors in near-real-time. Most of the academic literature on
CDTs consists of technical discussions of their design or implementation. This paper instead proposes
a different context for understanding CDTs. It adopts an intersectional feminist and techno-cultural
analysis of the visual form of power enacted by CDTs, as exemplary of a much wider turn in
contemporary visual culture towards visualising the world digitally in three dimensions. Many critical
accounts of this visual and volumetric regime are attentive to the forms of corporealised human life
that emerge in relation to the picturing of various volumes. This paper examines how CDTs visibly coconstitute a number of digitally-mediated forms of human life, including its user and its human
inhabitants. The paper argues that, while both the technological affordances and the cultural
imaginary of CDTs perform the kind of powerful white masculinity that sees space as transparent and
actionable, discussions of CDTs also persistently generate an excessive form of human life which is
understood as untwinn-able. The paper argues that masculinist anxieties around this excess erupt in
another form of digitally-animated volumetric city facing disaster: the disaster movie. The paper thus
makes an argument about the specific form of white masculinity co-constituted with CDTs, and
insists on the necessity of critical techno-cultural analyses of urban management technologies.
|
|---|