Staff Spotlight
Staff in the Spotlight:
Dr Timea Nochta, Lecturer (Assistant Professor)
Hello, I’m Timea. I (re)joined INLOGOV relatively recently, in October 2021. However, the Institute and the University of Birmingham are not new to me as I completed my doctoral studies here under the supervision of Prof. Chris Skelcher between 2014 and 2018. Upon finishing the PhD, I took up a role as Research Associate in the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) at the University of Cambridge, before returning to INLOGOV as Lecturer. I have a multi-disciplinary background rooted in architecture and engineering, and local government, which explains this ‘hopping’ between very different academic disciplines.
Throughout my academic career, my research interest has revolved around the local governance of technological change, especially decarbonisation and digitalisation. I already had interest in urban planning and development before starting the PhD, and in my doctoral research I zoomed into the governance of distributed energy production, and the opportunities that this change represents for decarbonising or energy systems. It was a pleasure to work alongside an EU-funded project that involved cities from across six different European countries, allowing me to investigate how local contextual characteristics influence the ways in which local authorities, including Birmingham City Council and the Municipalities of Frankfurt-am-Main and Budapest, engage with this agenda and work with external stakeholders to facilitate change.
This experience in researching networks and collaboration among local stakeholders stayed with me since my PhD studies. At Cambridge, I joined the ‘Digital Cities for Change’ research group and together with my colleagues we aimed at developing a systemic understanding of ongoing smart city digitalisation processes. In particular, we had a focus on digital innovation in the built environment and the competencies required in local and regional authorities to leverage digitalisation and deliver benefits to communities. It was during this time that, based on the recommendation of the National Infrastructure Commission, built environment professionals both in the public and private sectors became interested in the concept of ‘digital twins’. While much of the research on digital twins takes a technology focus, I was more interested in how diverse sets of stakeholders, including pioneering local authorities such as Cambridge or London, define, develop and implement digital twin applications.
In my current role, I continue researching the local governance of decarbonisation and digitalisation. For example, I am working in collaboration with my INLOGOV colleague Dr Louise Reardon on a project funded by CREDS. In this research we are investigating the governance of decarbonisation in the transport sector and the ways in which local authorities in Birmingham and Cambridge collaborate with stakeholders to facilitate change.
I draw on my research to contribute to teaching at INLOGOV, on public management and governance, collaboration and partnership, and digitalisation and public policy. One of my favourite aspects of the role so far has been supervising Master’s dissertations. I was amazed by the diversity of topics, and the breadth of expertise, that our Public Management and Leadership Degree Apprenticeship/MSc brought to the supervisions. And I was of course glad to see my supervisees completing their dissertation projects with high marks!
Digital twins for Smart Cities – Conceptualisation, Challenges and Practices
by Li Wan, Timea Nochta, Junqing Tang and Jennifer Schooling
This new book draws on our research as part of the Digital Cities for Change programme. Our interest in digital twins for cities comes from prior engagement with research on urban (spatial) modelling and analysis, as well as the use of models as evidence in decision-making for infrastructure planning and management. In simple terms, a digital twin is a realistic digital representation of a physical object, system or process, or combination of these components.
While much of the research on digital twins is focused on fundamental research (for example, algorithms) and technical design to demonstrate functionality, some companies are already offering their ‘customers’ digital twin products that promise to provide a ‘single source of truth’ simulation and management environment at the scale of entire cities or districts. Given our previous research, my co-authors and I immediately picked up this dubious use of the concept to promote data products, and set out to investigate how the ‘city digital twin’ concept fits into a longer history of urban analysis and data-driven decision-making for urban planning and management.
A key research gap that we identified early on was a lack of critical engagement with concept and its implementation in the urban context. Despite some history of the use of the digital twin technology in sectors such as manufacturing or product engineering, simply transferring the technology from these sectors to urban planning and management without reflecting on the specifics of the urban context will be fraught with problems. Addressing this issue head-on, the book aims to provide conceptual clarity and practical guidance for supporting city digital twin conceptualisation, design and implementation, drawing on real-world examples.
The book positions city digital twins as next-generation urban models for spatial planning and infrastructure management, rather than the products of technology transfer from other sectors. In it we argue that the city digital twin cannot be interpreted as a product or generic technology, but rather as a new approach and methodology for leveraging the value of data and digital technology in policy decision-making. Using this framing, we are able to identify the main characteristics, classification options and distinct features of digital twins for cities. On the practical level, we utilise these insights to outline challenges for developing purposeful, trustworthy and functional city digital twins, in line with the state-of-the-art Gemini Principles report on built environment digital twins, published by the Centre for Digital Built Britain.
The analysis highlights the importance of incorporating insights from governance and public policy into the technical design the city digital twin technology, contesting the currently dominant technology-deterministic perspective that sees digital twins as vehicles for the large-scale implementation of automation based on sensory data collection, automated interactions, and AI and machine learning. The book features a series of real-world cases that can be considered practical examples of the implementation of digital twin technology in cities, and which showcase a variety of challenges and purposes for technology development. Examples are brought from diverse contexts including the USA (Boston), the UK (London, Cambridge), Germany (Herrenberg), Belgium (Flander), The Netherlands (Zwolle) and Chine (Xiong’An).
Through comparing the different cases, the importance of participation became apparent. Participation enables the development of an appropriate value proposition and helps to anticipate the potential wider impacts of technology and application design. It provides space and mechanism for trust-building among stakeholders and communities, as well as towards the CDT application. And finally, it facilitates the continued evolution of city digital twins. Participation also shapes those who participate and learn from the process, and thereby one of the key contributions of the city digital twin agenda may be enhanced understanding, organisational or behavioural change beyond the technical performance of algorithms.
The book is currently in production and will become available in early 2023. For further information, contact Dr Timea Nochta or floow the announcements on the publisher’s website (ICE Publishing).