Creating Cities of the Future with Digital Twin Technology
I NTRODUCTION
Our world faces mounting challenges in
ensuring safe and efficient energy and water
services to cities around the world. From
maintaining and upgrading aging energy and
water infrastructure to adopting emerging
technologies to improve the human
condition, new technology is entering the
stage to imagine new possibilities for solving
public health, safety and environmental
issues across the globe. Adopting emerging
technologies such as augmented reality,
machine learning, digital twin platforms and
spatial intelligence in new ways may help to
meet the zero emissions goals that are
shaping tomorrow’s cities and utilities of the
future.
Figure 1: Time Magazine Cover, January 1967
The same year as the Pennsylvania disaster,
Arie Haagen-Smit, a Caltech biochemist, set
about to discover the root cause of Los
Angeles’s smog. By 1960, he had
conclusively identified car emissions as the
culprit, founded California’s pioneering
Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board (the
predecessor to the California Air Resources
Board (CARB)) and initiated research to
mitigate the pollutants in automobile
exhaust. In less than a decade, Haagen-
Smit’s investigations resulted in the
adoption of key pollution mitigation
strategies, standards and policies. 1
T HE B ATTLE A GAINST A IR P OLLUTION
In 1967, the cover story of the January
edition of Time Magazine was “Ecology:
Menace in the Skies.” The article examined a
tragic 1948 industrial pollution disaster in
Pennsylvania. A lethal build-up of toxic
exhaust from a zinc plant and steel mill in the
borough of Donora (southeast of Pittsburg)
became trapped by a cold front that parked
itself over the region for five days, killing 20
people. For the first time, the public realized
that air pollution could kill.
The Pennsylvania smog deaths and Haagen-
Smit’s research contributed to the passage
by Congress of a federal law to control air
pollution at the national level. Dubbed the
Clean Air Act of 1963, it was heralded as the
most comprehensive air quality legislation in
the world at that time. The purpose of the
1
Caltech. April 25 2013. https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/fifty-years-clearing-skies-39248
IIC Journal of Innovation
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