Understanding urban social capital landscapes as an informant of digital twin use-cases in South Africa

Abstract

In the coming decades, Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban growth is expected to be the highest globally (Dodman, D et al. 2017). These small to medium sized cities in Africa will experience rapid growth, more so than in urban centres, making it difficult to meet the requirements of infrastructure and services that can reduce urban risks (Dodman, D et al. 2017). These risks can happen across a spectrum, of varying scale, from everyday small events such as infectious diseases to larger less frequent risks such as earthquakes and storms, constant poverty, climate change and the problems that urban growth brings upon (Dodman, D et al 2017). Urban populations face genuine risks to their health, safety, and overall well-being due to the various challenges they encounter. In order to combat urban risk, urban resilience is required, because urban resilience is the adaptive capacity of a city or urban system to recover from shocks and various stressors such as urban risks (Harrison et al 2014). Urban resilience is not limited to technical and social aspects. Instead, social capital provides the flexibility that is able to support urban resilience and recovery effectively from those risks (Dobson (2017).Understanding the social capital landscape of an urban community offers a valuable means of comprehending the interdependencies and self-sufficiency of that community. This could lead to identifying appropriate and contextual urban strategies to enhance community well-being. Emerging digital technologies could be effective tools to facilitate urban strategies for communities. One such technology is digital twins for cities. Digital twins for cities is the digitization of a city's physical elements, systems, and operations to observe and analyse its historical and current performance and actions (Davey et al 2023). These data driven responsive feedback tools can assist in bridging the gap between implementation and reality. However, most digital twins focus on the physical and technical (technology centric view) dimensions of the city (Ravid & Gutman 2022) such as the technical functionality of its infrastructure, data modelling, planning and management, as well as enhancing those related services (Nochta et al 2020). Nevertheless, this approach does not necessarily take into consideration what people do on the ground, how people navigate their built environment. As such, this approach may miss out on the social capital needs of urban communities and hinder the effectiveness of digital twins technologies in servicing real needs of people. This paper explores how the understanding of social capital could inform relevant digital twins use-cases in South Africa. As such, by analysing the social aspects of a specific urban area, city makers can identify and leverage the opportunities, strengths, and needs of communities to articulate how digital technologies could be deployed to improve the effectiveness of urban interventions and help identify social issues in the city. This paper focuses on a middle-income case study of Hatfield, City of Tshwane, South Africa. Using a mixed-methods approach, this paper maps social capital metrics within a community, and analyses the mapping through a theoretical framework of grounded theory. This mapped information forms the data that can be used to build a viable digital twins city that takes into consideration the social aspect of communities.