Counter-Twinning in Gothenburg
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Recent trends in urban planning have shown a growing interest in smart urbanism which consists in the adoption of digital tools such as urban digital twins to inform the planning of urban developments.
Counter-Twinning in Gothenburg uses the city as a site to investigate the development of such technologies and their impact on the provision of meaningful avenues for civic engagement for its residents. This is done in an effort to locally contextualize recommendations made by Rob Kitchin in his essay The Right to the Smart City in which he calls for a reimagining, remaking, and reframing, of the smart city as genuinely citizen-centered. Through interviews, participant observation, and the creation of urban digital twinning prototypes, this project investigates the means provided for civic participation in ongoing urban digital twins being developed. Special attention is given to Gazaplatsen, an encampment in support of the liberation of Palestine as a site for prototyping new approaches to digital twinning and the KultVis, an initiative dedicated to the visualization of cultural values around the Gothenburg Film Studios, as case studies.
The outcome of this exploration is the development of ”counter-twinning,” a method inspired by counter-cartography that seeks to foreground marginalized perspectives and resist the commodification of urban life. This work culminates in the production of three counter-twinning prototypes and an open repository, or wiki, offering a foundation for reimagining digital twins as public assets for collective liberation.
