Digital twins affects urban design

On Smart Cities World we read last week about the way that urban digital twinning and city modelling technology is having a transformative effect on how cities are designed, monitored, and managed. The website is referring to a recent report by tech market advisory firm ABI Research, which states that “digital twins will form the ‘end game’ of the smart cities journey to optimized design and the ultra-efficient operation of entire cities”. According to ABI, the technology optimizes performance of cities across verticals such as energy management, mobility, and sustainability. Currently, Rotterdam, Boston, New York, and Singapore are among the cities that have deployed digital twins, but according to ABI, this deployment will rise to more than 500 by 2025.
Read the full article on Smart Cities World

Consumer plastic waste represents a serious problem that is damaging the environment and many species on the planet. The website Interesting Engineering is paying attention to a Dutch contribution to solving this problem: PlasticRoad. The PlasticRoad concept consists of a prefabricated, modular and hollow road structure based on recycled plastics. The PlasticRoad furthermore has a hollow space that can be used to (temporarily) store water, thus preventing flooding during extreme precipitation. Other advantages of the concept are that constructing these roads take days instead of months, and they can last three times as long.

Read the full article on Interesting Engineering here,  and check out this video to see how the Plastic Road is installed.