As cities rush to brand themselves as “smart,” city digital twins have emerged as the latest techno-utopian promise: a live, digital replica of the city that can be tested and modified. Yet their rise masks a more complex reality. Tools of urban policy are not simply transferred from one city to another, unchanged. They are constantly redefined and reshaped depending on the actors involved, the issues at stake, and the specific characteristics of each place. More specifically, the propagation of digital twins, like other smart city technologies, requires and instantiates a process of negotiation—or “translation” (Lendvai and Stubbs 2007)—between the logics of private industry and public policy. While the direct impact of these negotiations on local governance has been well studied, their role in shaping and defining commercial offerings themselves remains less explored. Yet the eventual evolution of these business models, services and products—defined in negotiation with local authorities—equally influences urban governance by shaping the kinds of interventions and promises cities ultimately have to engage with.
The case of Dassault Systèmes (3DS)—the 14th largest French company by market capitalization and an emerging player in the smart city sector—illustrates this dynamic. A subsidiary of the Dassault Group, 3DS develops software tools for “product lifecycle management” (PLM). The idea of PLM is that, much as products can be mocked up before hitting the assembly line, they can equally be simulated in various states of construction, usage and disposal. In other words, the aim is to create high-fidelity digital replicas of real-world systems, which can then be monitored and tested within a virtual environment. These replicas are called digital twins. While the ideas of the digital twin and PLM have historically been applied to manufacturing, 3DS has begun marketing these technologies to city governments, presenting digital twins as self-evidently applicable to urban policymaking. However, 36 interviews conducted in 2023–2024 with 3DS employees and their French public-sector clients reveal an unstable market. This article shows that the translation of an industry-facing business model into a public-facing one has proven to be a fragile experiment for 3DS. Faced with the need for an offer adaptable to diverse local contexts, 3DS’ expansion to the public sector has been fraught with negotiations. Through this process, more than digital twins have remade the city, the idea of the “digital twin” itself has been remade, coming to refer less to an infrastructural platform than to a variety of consulting services. Accordingly, the initial promise of urban digital twins—to provide an informational platform appropriable by public decision-makers—has shifted toward calls for outsourcing and subcontracting urban expertise, justified by an assumed inability of local authorities to manage these tools themselves.
A tale of two cities
In 2012, 3DS acquired Archividéo, a geomatics company based in the Brittany region of France that had been creating 3D digital models of the city of Rennes since the 1990s. These digital models had been used primarily for communication purposes, illustrating proposed developments and providing citizens with a visual understanding of prospective changes to the cityscape. Two years later, looking for a laboratory in which their “3DEXPERIENCE” PLM platform could be adapted to urban environments, 3DS and the local authority, Rennes Métropole, signed an agreement in 2014 to “develop an economic model based on the testing ground offered by Rennes Métropole” (Rennes Métropole 2014). An executive at 3DS summed up the rationale of this urban foray concisely: “[It was] fairly logical because a city is a system of systems […] that you can test.”
Shortly after this agreement, however, 3DS’ research and development lab hosted a delegation from Singapore’s National Research Foundation, which was then in the process of preparing the city-state’s “Smart Nation” initiative. During this visit, the Singaporean delegation was introduced to Archividéo’s model of Rennes and, as the story goes, were convinced to initiate a multi-million-euro contract to develop a digital twin of their territory that would later come to be known as Virtual Singapore. Yet the entry of Singapore complicated Rennes’ role as a testing ground for 3DS. Before the project in Rennes could gain momentum, Singapore—somewhat unintentionally—became 3DS’s flagship reference for the development of a commercial offer, with higher financial stakes to boot.
In this way, the partnership with Singapore inextricably shaped the initial formulation of 3DS’s project. In the first promotional materials that were released to market 3DS’s city digital twin offer (using Virtual Singapore as an example), there is a notable emphasis on 3DEXPERIENCE as an operational platform providing a “single data repository to ensure effective collaboration between all city stakeholders” (3DS 2016). This vision corresponded tidily with what 3DS had managed to achieve in the world of industry and manufacturing and aligned with the technocratic and economic principles of the Smart Nation program (Smart Nation & Digital Gov. Office 2018). Singapore, therefore, did not challenge the initial formulation of 3DEXPERIENCE as an access point for a more or less holistic view of the city, conceived as a collection of stocks and flows that could be managed.
To develop a market, however, success in Singapore would have to be replicated elsewhere. Thus, in 2015, 3DS and Rennes Métropole applied for and received a grant from the French government to subsidize the development of an operational digital twin. In its early communications about Virtual Rennes, 3DS framed the project as a transfer of its existing model to a new context. Project descriptions, for example, emphasized that 3DS (2017, p. 55) viewed its software as providing a “holistic and operational view of a set of complex systems encompassing mobility, energy, resource management, built environment and citizen services.” However, efforts to translate the Singapore model to Rennes quickly ran into political obstacles. Employees at Rennes Métropole who were involved in the project felt as though the model 3DS was trying to implement was fundamentally incongruous with the task of administering a European city. One of them explained: “In the world of [3DS], or the world of their customers […] there are processes, products and projects which are not all the same as those of a city. And there are also decision-making methods which are much more centralized and dirigiste, because there are no questions of democracy.”
Thus, the underlying proposition that 3DS had elaborated in Singapore—of urban governance as something that could be approached using tools for product lifecycle management—was rejected in Rennes, forcing 3DS to interrogate the formulation of their offer. To this end, a consulting firm was hired by 3DS to act as a “translator,” helping 3DS progressively refine the scope of the digital twin through a series of workshops and interviews with end-users at Rennes Métropole. Through this process, it was decided that the ultimate applications of Virtual Rennes should focus simply on the visualization and communication of new urban developments, continuing the work of Archividéo and abandoning the idea of an integrated platform for urban systems management. By the end of the project, whether Virtual Rennes truly constituted a digital twin remained controversial—the Métropole maintained that it did not, while 3DS insisted that it did.
(Re)defining a business model
In response to the challenges posed by Rennes, 3DS had to make themselves flexible, adjusting their vision of “twinning” to suit that of Rennes (Jeannot 2019). In this way, the political heterogeneity of cities as clients compromised the creation of a stable and “exportable” product. Nonetheless—in the continued interest of developing an urban client base—3DS went on to produce a series of slick marketing videos, presenting Virtual Rennes as another proof-of-concept for 3DS’s urban offer, a demonstration of the digital twin’s reality and viability. In publicly labeling Virtual Rennes as a “digital twin” and mobilizing these demonstrations as a means to enroll future clients (Callon 2017), 3DS began a subtle process to performatively loosen and make flexible the definition of the term (Doganova et Eyquem-Renault 2009).
In 2018, 3DS launched a response to the Île-de-France regional council’s [1] call for a “smart platform” of their territory. This project was itself inspired by Valérie Pécresse’s visit to Singapore the year prior, where she had been impressed by Virtual Singapore. 3DS submitted a proposal but was not selected. This prompted a self-interrogation, as the company began to take stock of the challenges of expanding their market in Europe. Thus, between 2019 and 2021, 3DS recruited several executives from the Île-de-France regional council as well as notable government contractors, forming a dedicated “Cities and Public Services” team. In this way, 3DS attributed their difficulties in attracting local authorities not to a misalignment of interests but to an insufficient organizational engagement. Paradoxically, the setbacks that 3DS faced directly served to intensify their commitment to the urban market (Sims 2017).
In a stroke of historical coincidence, this reconfiguration coincided with the beginnings of the Covid‑19 pandemic. In this context, the Grand Est Region approached 3DS with a one-off request to model and simulate the evolution of the pandemic in their hospitals. This project, improvised with a quick turn-around, quickly gave way to other pandemic-related simulations on behalf of public authorities. The nature of these projects, however, differed from 3DS’s existing business model—the contracts had principally resulted in the delivery of a simulation (an animated video) as opposed to a comprehensive software license. 3DS found themselves delivering bespoke simulations on request while simultaneously attempting to sell more holistic “twinning” projects and platforms. Regarding the latter approach, 3DS has struggled to secure European clients. From 3DS’s perspective, interactions with local authorities have revealed a lack of funds and skills, long delays, and complex organizational structures. On the municipalities’ side, a prevailing sentiment persists: other uses of public resources seem more relevant. “We don’t need to pay €6.5 million when we already have a calculation formula in Excel,” one official emphasized.
Facing this deadlock and inspired by projects carried out during the pandemic, 3DS has gradually shifted its marketing to promote these more targeted simulations. As one executive from the Cities and Public Services division explained: “[Local authorities] don’t have the skills [to use a digital twin]. Even if we train them, they won’t use it ‘natively,’ naturally. So, what we offer are thematic projects, with different partners each time, on specific topics—tailor-made offerings. And that’s why we say ‘as a service,’ because we operate the tool on behalf of the client.”
The making and selling of urban ventriloquisms
By tracing these “translations” between the worlds of industry and public policy, we see the emergence of a co-constructed gap between the original idea of the “digital twin” and the concrete practices it is now invoked to authorize. What once referred to an operational platform is now used to capture, effectively, a specific type of impact report; 3DS has positioned themselves as a quasi-consultancy. “We realized that [consultants] were making roughly 20% of their revenue solely from local authorities,” explained a 3DS employee. “Because there are new responsibilities assigned to municipalities […] things for which they lack the skills.” With this latest transformation, 3DS has framed themselves more as a producer of expertise than a vendor of tools. At the same time, 3DS continues to market the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as a neutral system capable of representing the city autonomously. As one executive told me explicitly: “We are neither a government contractor nor a consultancy. […] We provide tools and decision-support systems. We don’t say whether [something] is a good or bad idea.”
Here, a tension emerges between 3DS’s active role in providing digital twins as a service and its desire to distance itself from any normative influence. Through the delivery of simulations, 3DS speaks without ever fully acknowledging its role as an agent. While the company presents the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as a “spokesperson” for the city (Akrich et al. 2002), the operation more closely resembles that of ventriloquism: 3DS crafts narratives that appear to emanate from the city but are in fact shaped by its own interests, choices, and epistemological frameworks. The market for digital twins, likewise, only takes shape to the extent that these performances can be sold (Doganova and Eyquem-Renault 2009).
From platformization to platforming
The story of 3DS’s city digital twin illustrates a broader shift in the promises and stakes of the so-called smart city, as there has been a movement away from infrastructural models for public–private governance towards the proliferation of experiential, short-lived, sectoral, and fragmented solutions (Courmont 2018, 2022). However, 3DEXPERIENCE cannot be taken as an example of the “platformization” of urban governance, in which it is thought that proliferating socio-technical assemblages are increasingly coming to directly structure collective action (Bauriedl and Strüver 2020; Poell et al. 2019; Strüver and Bauriedl 2022). Rather, the commercialization, sale, design, and deployment of “urban digital twins” is better understood as an attempt at platforming, through which 3DS seeks to stage, amplify, privilege, and legitimize their own voice as a form of expertise.
In the case of digital twins, the underlying function of the “smart city” becomes especially clear: digital platforms are performative devices that establish, install and naturalize certain narratives all while distancing these from their human origins (Söderström et al. 2014). More specifically, the promotion of platforms like 3DEXPERIENCE—at trade shows and conferences, relying on selective and decontextualized demonstrations of technological prowess—principally serves to reinforce a narrative of contemporary cities as outdated, overwhelmed, and obsolete. This is designed to legitimize a renewed outsourcing of expertise and discretionary power, a precondition to the existence of a market for 3DS.
Nevertheless, as this analysis shows, such “platforming” is always negotiated and never fully accomplished. The ultimate success of these ventriloquist performances depends on their acceptance and reception by municipalities. The fact that techno-political instruments must always be translated into practice in situ means that local authorities retain a degree of power to shape the forms of intervention that are proposed to them. Today, digital twins are not sold as infrastructural technologies (Plantin et al. 2018), but rather as arenas for (re)negotiating the roles of public and industrial actors in shaping the city.
This research was made possible thanks to funding from the Sciences Po Urban School with the support of Nexity.
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