(1) Pau Rausell-Köster & (2) Francesco Molinari
(1) Econcult. University of Valencia (ORCID) - Corresponding author: pau.rausell@uv.es
(2) Independent researcher (ORCID)
Abstract:
This article introduces "Virtuopolis", an innovative concept of a digital city designed around the principles of virtue and excellence across the social, cultural, intellectual, and ethical dimensions. Unlike traditional digital twins, Virtuopolis aims to replicate not only the physical aspects of a city but also its cultural, emotional, and symbolic dimensions. The three-layer framework of Virtuopolis comprises "The Things", focusing on digitizing and preserving cultural heritage; "The Flows", capturing dynamic cultural interactions; and "The Experiences", measuring the impact of cultural experiences on personal and social life. By leveraging advanced computational methods and network theory, Virtuopolis provides a platform for urban planning experimentation, fostering collaboration among diverse stakeholders and enhancing the liveability of cities through the integration of cultural and artistic values.
Keywords: Virtuopolis, Digital Twin, Urban Planning, Cultural Policies, Sustainability
Introduction
The term "Virtuopolis" can be etymologically derived from the combination of the Latin word "virtus", which translates to "virtue", and the Greek word "polis", meaning "city". In ancient Greek, the concept of "ἀρετή" (arete) signifies excellence or virtue in various domains, whether moral, social, cultural or intellectual. Adding to this, the word "virtual" derives from the Latin "virtus" but has evolved to mean "being something in essence or effect, though not actually or in fact". The term "virtual" suggests a reality that exists in effect but not in form, aligning with the concept of Virtuopolis as a city that embodies the essence of virtue and excellence in a conceptual or digital form, rather than a tangible one.
By merging the concepts of "virtus" and "polis", and integrating the modern notion of "virtual", we envision Virtuopolis as an ideal city that embodies both essence and effect, grounded in the highest virtues and aspiring for excellence in all dimensions: socially, culturally, intellectually, and ethically. This conceptual city models how communities can be organized around the principles of virtue, fostering an environment where inhabitants reach their full potential and contribute positively to collective well-being.
The European Union's success as a prototype of global governance is deeply rooted in a powerful cultural narrative that convinces its citizens of a shared identity. This narrative binds together the diverse mosaic of 27 nations, 24 official languages, numerous ethnic groups, and a vast array of ecosystems under the Enlightenment values of reason, liberty, equality, tolerance, and progress. This unity, constructed through the works of influential novelists, essayists, and filmmakers, continues to shape Europe's role in the world today, primarily through its soft power. As Europe's political, economic and military influence wanes, its cultural influence remains a vital force, underpinning its peaceful and democratic integration and positioning it as a model for future global governance.
Culture significantly contributes to life satisfaction, offering pleasure, engagement, and meaning (Peterson et al., 2005). Thus, Europe's future hinges on embracing "homo culturalis" over "homo oeconomicus", integrating cultural values into socio-economic domains to foster sustainable development. Policies must prioritize cultural rights to enhance citizens' well-being, supported by rationality, emotional intelligence, and creativity. This shift from economic to cultural dominance requires leveraging talent, empathy, and shared values, making culture a transformative tool for societal change.
While no one proposes engineering feelings and emotions in utopian city designs due to the inherent instability of cultural chemistry, all utopian exercises (Kong, 2014) envision the city's infrastructure, waste management, supplies, and social relations. However, the city's definition, while needing a functional mechanism for economic and social interaction, revolves around its symbolic and cultural core. Cities organically shape themselves around icons and symbols, whether temples, legends, arcaded squares for commerce, or deprived neighbourhoods.
The Virtuopolis concept of cultural and artistic digital city twins offers a promising path for integrating these values into urban development, ensuring Europe's relevance in future geopolitics. Virtuopolis and the New European Bauhaus (NEB) share foundational principles and objectives. Both prioritize integrating art and culture into urban development. Virtuopolis uses digital representations through artistic forms to interpret and inspire reality, while the NEB enriches urban spaces by drawing inspiration from art and culture to create aesthetically pleasing environments. Both initiatives emphasize sustainability, community involvement, and the holistic combination of aesthetic, functional, and sustainable elements.
Virtuopolis acts as a sandbox for experimenting with new urban solutions through creative expressions, aligning with the NEB's goal of building beautiful, sustainable environments that cater to human needs and aspirations.
From the digital twin cities to Virtuopolis
Digitization is transforming our ways of thinking and acting. Presently, houses, settlements, and cities function more efficiently due to their "digital twins". A digital twin, precisely defined, is a virtual replica of a physical process that mirrors its real-time operations. This concept, introduced by Michael Grieves in the early 2000s, initially applied to production engineering but now encompasses various digital simulation models that parallel real-time processes across social, economic, and physical systems.
These simulations enhance design decisions, focusing on resource efficiency, reusability, and environmental impact. A twin digital city, or "smart city twin", creates a virtual counterpart of a city, integrating data from sensors, IoT devices, satellite imagery, and municipal databases. This platform aids city planners and stakeholders in simulating scenarios, optimizing urban planning, and enhancing decision-making. By leveraging real-time data and advanced analytics, twin digital cities address traffic congestion, energy usage, environmental sustainability, and public safety.
Cities are more than mere engineering constructs. They are cultural artifacts, shaped by emotions, meanings, and symbols, making conventional digital twins inaccurate. Virtuopolis is an innovative proposal that aims to replicate the reality of a city while also reflecting its symbolic elements and icons. It seeks to understand the flow of ideas, the relationships between people, and the generation of new meanings and concepts. Additionally, it captures the emotions, cognitive impacts, and aesthetic attributes of urban life. Unlike traditional digital twins, Virtuopolis can interpret, communicate, and inspire through creative and aesthetic means.
Virtuopolis serves multiple purposes, such as policy making, education, entertainment, awareness, and engagement, tailored to different audiences and data sources. It facilitates creative and artistic distortion through augmented reality, metaverses, and sensory immersion. Ultimately, Virtuopolis is a public space for symbolically representing reality, enabling creative experimentation and the exploration of new connections.
The development of Virtuopolis necessitates the enhancement and experimentation with new measurement systems, methodologies, and devices to explore and count on beauty, creativity, empathy, harmony, sense of belonging, or persuasion. This captured data should serve as raw material to formulate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and propose simulations that relate to the symbolic and cultural spheres of cities. Virtuopolis could gather extensive data on citizens' emotions and moods using surveys, facial recognition, EEG, movement detection (EMOKINE - Christensen et al., 2024), or other indirect indicators like wastewater analysis. This data under social control and shared and community rules, would help formulate hypotheses and create simulations o recreations to the symbolic and cultural aspects of cities.
Three layers of Virtuopolis
Scholars describe urban characteristics through "city soul" or atmosphere (Canepa et al., 2019) and "city body" or tangible features (Kourtit et al., 2021). Or Sennet's (2018) juxtaposition between the Ville - representing the physical built environment - and the Cité - the modus vivendi, i.e. the way people live and relate to each other in the city. Virtuopolis transforms this duality into a ternary containing relationships, flows, and emotions in urban culture, encompassing aesthetic landscapes, connectivity, and cultural vibrancy.
The Virtuopolis framework seamlessly integrates three distinct layers, each addressing unique aspects of urban life and cultural engagement (see Table). The first layer, "The Things”, focuses on the digitization and preservation of cultural heritage. This encompasses both tangible assets like historical artifacts and intangible assets such as novels, pictures, films, and advertisements linked to the physical city.
The second layer, "The Flows", shifts the attention to the dynamics of interaction. It highlights the "creative milieu" by using sensors and data to track the movement of ideas and people, thereby identifying cultural novelties and fostering new meanings. This layer encapsulates the cultural vitality that arises from the synergy of creative talents and various forms of interaction.
The final layer, "The Experiences", aims to capture and measure cultural experiences, whether personal, collective, social or professional.
The types of measurements and data vary across these layers. In the first layer, data on art, culture, and heritage stocks are collected. The second layer focuses on flow variables and the generation of new ideas. The third layer examines how interactions between flows, ideas, and stocks ignite cultural experiences.
The cultural Things
The concept of a cultural city, as explored by Rausell-Köster and colleagues in 2022 (Rausell-Köster et al., 2022), can be approached as a geographical space rich in cultural resources. The success of many cities hinges on this dense accumulation of resources, representing a wealth of historical capital gains materialized in urban assets. Heritage cities, in particular, have excelled in identifying and valuing material and symbolic cultural resources. Through stringent regulatory processes, they maintain protection and conservation levels, enhancing their appeal and functionality.
The cultural Things enhance the ability of a City to attract or develop new and higher-order functions, increase internal efficiency (Camagni et al., 2015) and achieve economies of scale through the resignification of its material attributes. This occurs through the generation of new narratives, the construction of new heritage, the valorisation of existing heritage or the creation and/or revitalisation of icons to improve average productivity. But the possibilities to play and make simulations with real heritage assets are quite limited. In this context the European willingness to digitalise built heritage emerges. In 2019, EU Member States recognized the need for a pan-European effort to digitize cultural artifacts, monuments, and sites in 3D. By 2021, the European Commission recommended establishing a unified European data space for cultural heritage, urging Member States to set clear goals for digitization and preservation. By 2030, the goal is to digitally capture all endangered monuments and sites in 3D, along with 50% of the most visited cultural and heritage sites, prioritizing those with limited digitization.
Digital replicas of cultural assets open new realms for experimentation in virtual or extended realities. This technology allows for imaginative scenarios, from making cathedrals disappear to painting buildings orange or dispersing monuments around a city. Extended reality and the Metaverse significantly enhance the ability to recreate, invent, and experiment with heritage, creating new contexts and scenarios.
Moreover, this approach can be applied to research projects aimed at designing lively public spaces. Workshops can gather stakeholder feedback, incorporating it into computational models to place public sculptures or street art, demonstrating human-in-the-loop planning where local expertise informs the model.
That is only part of the story, though. Cities are also rich with narratives and stories from films, books, and video games, which, combined with physical cultural elements, enrich citizens' cultural experiences. Therefore, data reflecting a city's culture should encompass both reality and the fictional narratives embedded in countless artistic and cultural works.
The interface of Flows
An intelligent city embeds cultural engagement within the dynamic activity of urban concentration and dense fabric, highlighting the exchange of ideas, interpersonal communication, and interaction. It creates opportunities for connections that might otherwise be improbable. A smart city acts as a catalyst for cultivating cultural experiences by leveraging the concentration of specialized interests, promoting cross-pollination, and embracing serendipitous encounters.
Agglomeration economies emerge from both economies of scale and network effects when businesses and individuals are situated close to each other. This spatial proximity, as Glaeser (2011) suggests, can be seen as a reduction in overall transportation expenses, including costs associated with the movement of goods, people, and ideas. The key concept here is to create an enabling environment that identifies tangible and intangible assets, helping cities attract creative talent, stimulate cultural engagement, and provoke interactions between artistic and creative citizens.
For Virtuopolis, it is essential to develop sensors and indicators to measure the level and depth of idea exchanges, the flow of dreams, the likelihood of chance encounters, the richness and intensity of landscape stimuli, and the process of generating cultural novelties. Designing these measures requires the collaboration of cognitive scientists, artists, designers, programmers, and other experts.
The place for cultural Experiences
Cities have always been seen as eliciting emotional and cultural experiences, a concept deeply explored in urban phenomenology by Willis and Nold (2022). As we underline some paragraphs before, some scholars suggest that pleasure, engagement, and meaning constitute the three primary components of life satisfaction closely tied to the fulfilment of individuals' cultural rights and the importance of balancing three key areas: personal well-being, professional achievement, and community engagement. Each element supports the others, creating a balanced and fulfilling life.
The success of cities is defined by their ability to meet the symbolic needs of their residents, a capacity that is regaining its original significance. This ability increasingly relies on and is interconnected with the cultural ecosystem. Cities, as spaces for creativity and experimentation, add value by providing ample stimuli for holistic development through creative pursuits, pleasure, and diverse, enriching experiences.
Conventional data collection on facilities and infrastructures that generate physical, aesthetic, cognitive, or relational pleasure, such as parks, museums, cultural centres, cinemas, and bookshops, is straightforward. Virtuopolis should also capture how cultural and creative sectors contribute to employment, job creation, and innovation in cities. However, the crucial aspect lies not only in the functionality and efficiency of the economic apparatus but also in the social fabric's potential and the space it offers for cultivating personal and social relationships—in essence, urban liveability (McArthur & Robin, 2019). This is where we should be able to capture emotions.
Emotions encompass feelings, cognitive processes, bodily arousal, and behaviour. In urban planning, linking the soul of places with users' behaviours and emotions is essential for improving quality of life. Developing a cultural experiences layer in cities proposes a measurable relationship between citizens' emotional states, cognitive capabilities, and urban features. This concept aligns with real-time data gathering in smart cities. Social media sentiment analysis, for example, maps users' well-being to geographic locations.
Citizens can act as data sources, a concept known as "humans as sensors" (Willis & Nold, 2022) This approach can supplement or replace traditional sensor technology with subjective measurements. Emotion data, gathered through biometric devices like GSR (Galvanic Skin Response) and EEG (Electroencephalogram) or conventional surveys, provides insights into urban environments. With advancements in AI and the widespread use of social media, emotion and cognitive data become increasingly valuable, and Virtuopolis can become the repository for this data, generating social value and becoming a commons.
In summary, Virtuopolis collects data on cultural heritage, monitors the flow of creative interactions, and measures the resulting cultural experiences, offering a comprehensive framework for understanding urban cultural dynamics.
Virtuopolis an essential tool for urban and cultural planning in 21st century cities.
The advent of digital twin technology has revolutionized the way we approach urban planning. Initially conceptualized by Michael Grieves in the early 2000s for production engineering, digital twins have expanded to encompass social, economic, and physical systems. These virtual replicas allow city planners to simulate and analyse various scenarios, optimizing urban planning and management while enhancing efficiency and decision-making processes.
Virtuopolis extends the digital twin concept by incorporating cultural and artistic dimensions. It uses digital representations expressed through artistic forms to interpret and inspire reality, rather than merely simulating physical entities. This innovative approach aligns with the New European Bauhaus's goal of creating aesthetically pleasing and sustainable urban environments. Virtuopolis emphasizes the symbolic and cultural core of cities, considering them as spaces for creativity and experimentation. By leveraging the integration of digital and physical realms, Virtuopolis enhances our understanding of urban dynamics and fosters a deeper connection between citizens and their environment. Virtuopolis also plays a significant role in addressing contemporary urban challenges through creative and artistic experimentation.
By leveraging advanced computational methods and network theory, it optimizes citizen interactions with the city's meanings, icons, and culture. Virtuopolis enables the testing of various policies, infrastructure upgrades, and urban development projects in a virtual setting, reducing risks before their physical implementation. This innovative approach fosters collaboration among government bodies, businesses, researchers, and citizens, driving joint efforts to tackle urban issues.
Furthermore, Virtuopolis underscores the significance of capturing emotions and cognitive responses in urban planning. It develops and integrates algorithms that connect physical spaces with the generation of emotions, viewing the city as a cultural artifact shaped by the interplay of emotions, meanings, and symbols. This emotional and cognitive data, gathered through methods such as social media sentiment analysis and biometric devices, provides valuable insights into the urban environment, enhances the liveability of cities and provides tools to tackle major urban challenges.
In conclusion, Virtuopolis stands as an essential tool for urban and cultural planning in 21st-century cities. It bridges the gap between the physical and digital realms, fostering a deeper connection between citizens and their environment. By integrating cultural and artistic values into urban development, Virtuopolis ensures that cities remain vibrant, sustainable, and capable of addressing the evolving needs of their inhabitants. This innovative approach to urban planning not only enhances the functionality of cities but also enriches the cultural and emotional experiences of their residents, ultimately contributing to the creation of more liveable and dynamic urban spaces.
References
Camagni, R., Capello, R., & Caragliu, A. (2015). The Rise of Second-Rank Cities: What Role for Agglomeration Economies? European Planning Studies, 23(6), 1069–1089. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2014.904999
Canepa, E., Scelsi, V., Fassio, A., Avanzino, L., Lagravinese, G., & Chiorri, C. (2019). Atmospheres: Feeling Architecture by Emotions. Ambiances, 5, 0–29. https://doi.org/10.4000/ambiances.2907
Christensen, J. F., Fernández, A., Smith, R. A., Michalareas, G., Yazdi, S. H. N., Farahi, F., Schmidt, E. M., Bahmanian, N., & Roig, G. (2024). EMOKINE: A software package and computational framework for scaling up the creation of highly controlled emotional full-body movement datasets. In Behavior Research Methods (Issue 0123456789). Springer US. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02433-0
Concilio, G., Molinari, F., & Morelli, N. (2017). Empowering citizens with open data by urban Hackathons. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government, CeDEM 2017, 125–134. https://doi.org/10.1109/CeDEM.2017.28
Glaeser, E. (2011). El triunfo de las ciudades: Cómo nuestra gran creación nos hace más ricos, más listos, más sostenibles, más sanos y más felices. https://books.google.es/books/about/El_triunfo_de_las_ciudades.html?id=EEebpwAACAAJ&pgis=1
Kong, L. (2014). From cultural industries to creative industries and back? Towards clarifying theory and rethinking policy. Http://Dx.Doi.Org/10.1080/14649373.2014.977555.
Kourtit, K., Neuts, B., Nijkamp, P., & Wahlström, M. H. (2021). A Structural Equation Model for Place-based City Love: An Application to Swedish Cities. International Regional Science Review, 44(3–4), 432–465. https://doi.org/10.1177/0160017620979638
McArthur, J., & Robin, E. (2019). Victims of their own (definition of) success: Urban discourse and expert knowledge production in the Liveable City. Urban Studies, 56(9), 1711–1728. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018804759
Peterson, C., Park, N., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction: the full life versus the empty life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6(1), 25–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-004-1278-z
Rausell-Köster, P., Ghirardi, S., Sanjuán, J., Molinari, F., & Abril, B. (2022). Cultural experiences in the framework of “cultural cities”: measuring the socioeconomic impact of culture in urban performance. City, Territory and Architecture, 9:38. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1186/s40410-022-00189-8
Sennett, R. (2018). Building and dwelling : ethics for the city. Macmillan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Willis, K. S., & Nold, C. (2022). Sense and the city: An Emotion Data Framework for smart city governance. Journal of Urban Management, 11(2), 142–152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jum.2022.05.009
Comment 1
This is a very complex yet clear text. In this brief review, I will first discuss the text itself and then dedicate some space to the concept of Virtuopolis. Congratulations to the authors for an excellent article, full of relevant references, explaining complex issues, and skillfully merging philosophy with technology. In this regard, it's an outstanding text.
I imagine that one could write an entire book about Virtuopolis, and this article merely serves as a starting point for further discussion. Now, I will move on to discussing the concept itself, as the text piqued my curiosity about the following points.
Is the effort and resources required to manage Virtuopolis, as a twin city of our emotions, too large relative to the results that could be achieved using more traditional research methods? Who is Virtuopolis for? Who will be experimenting within it, and why them instead of someone else? Are current technological methods safe enough to merely gather data and feed Virtuopolis, without accidentally shaping our reality before we test it virtually? Perhaps human beings are more complex than what the virtual world can capture. If that’s not the case, then what is the purpose of human creativity?
Comment 2