Geodesign, Urban Digital Twins, and Futures

Paul Cureton and Elliot Hartley's 2025 book on the tools now used to plan, map and design the built environment: urban digital twins, GeoBIM, collaborative geodesign, immersive environments and futures methods.

Cureton and Hartley survey the systems, processes and technologies changing how the built environment is planned, mapped and designed under pressure from urban growth and climate. The book covers urban digital twins, GeoBIM, collaborative geodesign tools, immersive environments, gamification and methods for thinking about futures, illustrated with more than a hundred international projects and workflows, five case studies and a companion website, with geodesign presented as a way for the people involved in a place to work together on it.

Of the recent books on urban twins this is the one written from the practice of planning and design rather than from computer science, and the one most concerned with how a twin is used in a room with stakeholders. It is also the most current snapshot of the tools in use.