Digital Twin for Active Stakeholder Participation in Land-Use Planning

Abstract

The active participation of stakeholders is a crucial requirement for effective land-use planning (LUP). Involving stakeholders in LUP is a way of redistributing the decision-making power and ensuring social justice in land-management interventions. However, owing to the growing intricacy of sociopolitical and economic relations and the increasing number of competing claims on land, the choice of dynamic land use has become more complex, and the need to find balances between social, economic, and environmental claims and interests has become less urgent. These facts reflect a paradigm shift from top-down, noninteractive, and one-directional policymaking approaches to a more negotiable, bottom-up, deliberative, and responsible one. Geospatial industries claim that digital twin technology is a potential facilitator that improves the degree of stakeholder participation and influences land-use planning. The validity of this claim is, however, unknown. By adopting the integrative literature review, this study identifies where in LUP is stakeholder participation much needed and currently problematic, as well as how digital twin could potentially improve. The review shows that digital twins provide virtual visualisation opportunities for the identification of land-use problems and the assessment of the impacts of the proposed land uses. These offer the opportunity to improve stakeholder influence and collaboration in LUP, especially in the agenda-setting phase, where land-use issues could be identified and placed on the LUP agenda. This relies on the ability and willingness of local planning institutions to adopt digital twins, and stakeholders’ perception and willingness to use digital twins for various land-use goals. Despite the assertion that digital twins could improve the influence of stakeholders in LUP, the focus and the development of digital twins have not accomplished much for those features of the technology that could improve stakeholder influence in LUP. By adopting the principles of the social construction of technology, this study proposes a “technological fix” of digital twins to focus more on improving stakeholder influence on land-use planning.