To facilitate the planning of more functional, attractive, and sustainable cities by observing them not as an isolated element, but as a piece that fits into an environment with which it interacts. With this objective, the first digital twin of the Barcelona metropolis will begin to be operational next March, as a planning tool that will help predict the effects of decisions linked to urban and economic growth, testing policies and their effects.
With this interactive tool, called Barcelona Metropolitan Digital Twin, the more than 160 municipalities of the metropolitan region will be able to identify objectives for two decades ahead and simulate future scenarios in five areas, which include urban planning, economy, knowledge, mobility, and housing, areas positioned among the main current challenges of cities. In each of these five areas, up to 25 indicators can be analyzed, totaling 125. In a first phase, the platform will be able to analyze 90 indicators: 35 on urban planning, 15 on economy, and 15 on innovation.
The tool will not only analyze the effects of decisions within each of the areas but also the consequences they will entail in the others, as everything in the city is interconnected: housing and urban planning affect mobility and vice versa, just as knowledge impacts the economy, in a dynamic ecosystem of interdependent elements.
Thus, administrations will find in the digital twin a guide and orientation for debates that can range from where to locate more housing to how a change in the route of a bus line can affect. The platform will address this by generating diagnoses from a virtual model of cities with data that will be continuously expanded and updated.
The city councils of the region and other administrations, such as the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB), will be able to access their digital twin for free, developed by the startup Aretian and financed by the Torras Lombana Foundation, a partner of Barcelona Global. In fact, the project was born from the collaboration of the Torras Foundation with the PPP for cities of IESE, a think tank on issues impacting greater Barcelona, and in which Barcelona Global has participated.
The platform was presented at an event that brought together representatives of public institutions and the private sector. In it, the founder and CEO of Aretian, Ramon Gras, highlighted that a team of four people has worked on the development of the platform over the last year, and that the more than 160 municipalities in seven metropolitan regions total more than 5.5 million inhabitants. For her part, the director of Barcelona Global, Mercè Conesa, described the tool as "a contribution from civil society to help decision-making and improve the impact of public policies."
The digital twin of the metropolis emerges at a time when population concentration in urban areas continues to increase. In this context, the planning of cities will be crucial for their future, especially from a vision that transcends municipalities as watertight compartments and looks at the Barcelona metropolis as an interconnected whole.