Page 15 - Are You Future Ready?

trajectories and outcomes.

CL Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician and author of ‘Alice
in Wonderland’ (pen-name Lewis Carroll), famously once
suggested that the best scale for a map of the world would

be 1:1. A new metaphor has lately slipped into discussions
of computational representation: the digital twin. A digital
twin of a city suggests that our computational models
have captured so much information and meaning from the
real city that we can use it as a proxy complex system for

monitoring, understanding and exploring the impacts of 013
interventions. This takes us a long way from a map as a
2D representation of a city or a GIS as a multi-dimensional

representation. One of my former post-docs is currently
working with the Singapore government and a famous
American university on the highest resolution model of
transport and land-use interaction ever attempted for that
city. It is not so dissimilar to Dodgson’s 1:1 map of the

world. Individual households modelled as autonomous
interacting agents imbued with decision-making logic that
maximises utility subject to costs and so on. The result is

at one time awe-inspiringly complex, beautiful, fascinating
and overwhelming.