The Hague CitiVerse: Inclusive Digital Twin as Enabler for Smart and Sustainable Urban Futures

Urban areas are the critical arena for sustainability transitions. Accounting for over 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions and facing accelerating risks from climate change, cities must integrate environmental, social, spatial, and economic objectives across governance levels and institutional boundaries (UN-Habitat, 2023; UN Environment Programme, 2022). This is not only a policy challenge, but also a technology and governance challenge that requires new digital tools and fundamentally better ways of embedding them in practice.
The Hague illustrates both the urgency and the paradox. The municipality is a frontrunner: the first Dutch city awarded the EU Mission Label for 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, with a formalised Climate City Contract and sustainability ambitions operationalised through the Samenwerkingsagenda Toekomstbestendige Gebiedsontwikkeling (SA TBGO). It has invested in the Digitale Spiegelstad, a digital twin infrastructure offering data integration, scenario modelling, and visualisation capabilities. Through its i-Visie 2025-2035 'Samen Digitaal Vooruit', the municipality has set data-driven governance, digital innovation, and participatory urban development as city-wide priorities, while explicitly acknowledging that translation into programmes and action agendas still needs to follow. This gap between ambition and execution is precisely the practice-based problem addressed in this Professional Doctorate (PD) trajectory.
The objective of this PD trajectory is to develop, test, validate, and transfer a methodological framework for applying the Digitale Spiegelstad as an integrated steering instrument for future-proof, climate-neutral, and inclusive area development in The Hague, generating transferable knowledge for other Dutch and European cities facing comparable governance challenges. The framework is developed and tested through two use cases central to the SA TBGO.