Does Canada Need a National Digital Twin?

Following the definition set out in the United Kingdom by Digital Built Britain, we understand a digital twin to be “...a realistic digital representation of assets, processes or systems in the built or natural environment…that adds social and economic value by augmenting the decision-making process.” Further, this digital representation has the capacity to exchange real time information with its physical twin and to use that information to learn, predict, or enact a possible response to a given stimuli or scenario. Like our international colleagues, our point of departure has been the built environment and the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Owner / Operator (AECO)O industry. Over the past decade,  intra-urban relationships among individual dwellings, neighborhoods, and cities has been acknowledged in Canada through “Smart City” initiatives. However, the relationships among smart cities and the infrastructures that connect them at a regional—or national—scale remains understudied.

Our work on a national digital twin is prefaced with the disquieting observation that Canada is facing three simultaneous and potentially cataclysmic crises. These are generalized broadly as: climate, cultural polarization, and infrastructure. Each crisis is overwhelmingly complex, amorphous, dynamic—involving multiple political jurisdictions, diverse communities, and massive geographic scales. With wildfires and rising sea levels, xenophobia and populism, chronic problems with access to potable water for Indigenous communities and a health care system completely oversubscribed—it is difficult to determine how we should move forward. Further, while each of the three crises named is most often attributed to a set of discrete phenomena, we argue that the three crises are deeply entangled—comprising what Bishoy Zaki has characterized as an inter-crisis. This inter-crises is exacerbating our capacity to bring about effective change. It follows that, if we hope to address or contain these crises, there is an urgent need to understand this entanglement and to make visible how each crisis draws upon, repels, hides behind, and manifests itself through, not only the entities of which it is comprised, but the other crises named.

Electrical grids, communications networks, transportation systems, pipelines—these multi-scale intra and inter urban infrastructures tie us and our cities together, inextricably, as a society. And yet, they function in the background, almost invisible—until they fail.3  Further, these infrastructures link our metropolitan nodes across vast and vaguely defined “rural” regions characterized by Statistics Canada as “... the area that remains after the delineation of population centres using current census population data.” Marginalized in the conversation about smart technologies, the digital future of these regions—including most indigenous communities—remains uncertain. We argue that an inclusive digital twin must include and represent all Canadians.

Does Canada need a digital twin? Yes, urgently.