Despite the enormous role that cities play in the lives of over 50 percent of the planet’s population, the digital interface between community members and city hall is often weak, insufficiently capturing the voice of the people, offering limited ways to engage with services, and making it hard to access the data and information needed for meaningful civic participation.
Now, an emerging global concept called the citiverse promises to change all this by synchronizing the physical and digital worlds through the use of cutting-edge technologies. Its goal is to improve citizen engagement, enhance community services, and deliver a dynamic, immersive environment for urban innovation.
What Is The Citiverse?
The concept of the citiverse arises from several converging technologies and trends. Perhaps most defining has been the smart city movement: the use of technology and data to drive positive urban outcomes in areas such as transportation, energy use, city planning, administrative services, and sustainability.
Successful smart city initiatives have revealed measurable value in deploying capabilities such as data analytics, the internet-of-things, digitalization, smartphone apps, and artificial intelligence.
In addition to providing the basis for new solutions, these technologies and improved data access have also enabled constituents to better understand and participate in their cities.
Building on these foundational technologies and smart city advances, the recent emergence of immersive technologies such as digital twins and the metaverse offers the promise of completely new ways to experience and drive the future of the urban world.
Against this backdrop, the citiverse can be understood as an interactive digital space that mirrors and augments the physical city, opening the door to new forms of participation, planning, and urban innovation.
The Citiverse Gets Serious
Cristina Bueti, based in Geneva, Switzerland, is the counsellor on smart sustainable cities, citiverse & virtual worlds at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations. As her title suggests, she is responsible for leading activities related to the citiverse concept on behalf of the global body. That the United Nations has made this a priority is a big deal.
It’s still early for the initiative which began only a few years ago when Bueti and her organization began receiving queries from cities seeking to understand the possible implications of the metaverse—a shared virtual space for all manner of interaction—and what it could mean in an urban context. This interest inspired ITU research and led to the opportunity for them to design and provide guidance for a new digital frontier for cities. Since then, Bueti notes that the citiverse concept has grown far beyond its metaverse-inspired roots.
Today, the citiverse is not a single technology, but a combination of capabilities such as virtual reality technologies, digital twins, and AI, that together have the potential to provide a digital platform for citizen and city collaboration, improved services, innovation, experimentation, planning, and much more.
The ITU remains technology agnostic. They won’t be recommending specific vendors, but rather providing guidance on categories and capabilities of technologies.
Bueti points to Seoul, South Korea, for one flavor of the citiverse. In this capital city, constituents can visit a virtual city hall anytime from anywhere. Here they can consult with officials, file complaints, access e-books, and pay taxes.
To inspire innovation and imagine the possibilities of the citiverse, the ITU has partnered with Digital Dubai and the United National International Computing Center (UNICC) to launch the UN Citiverse Challenge. Sameer Chauhan, UNICC CEO said “There is enormous potential in harnessing AI and virtual worlds to tackle the world’s most complex challenges. However, we need the enthusiasm, creativity, and ideas of innovators worldwide.”
Despite the deep technological context of the citiverse, Bueti says it’s a priority that it must be people-centric and accessible to all. To paraphrase her words, the last thing the ITU wants to create is yet another digital divide.
The European Citiverse Initiative
In 2024, under the European Union’s Digital Decade Programme 2030, a European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (a legal framework enabling Member States to set up and implement multi-country projects) was established to support EU member states to build a shared citiverse. The purpose of this initiative is to create a common ecosystem for local digital twins and enable cities across Europe to collaborate on AI-driven digital twin and smart city technologies.
Based in Valencia, Spain, this European initiative defines a citiverse as a digital space for citizens, communities, and city officials, where, through the use of immersive technologies on smartphones and other devices, they can participate in decision-making and town halls, explore planned urban projects, and test solutions such as traffic reduction efforts.
So far, 14 countries have signed-on including France, Ireland, Netherlands, and Spain, and many more are expected to join soon. They hope to have over 100 cities engaged by 2026.
Broadly, this European citiverse initiative creates the context for regional data and service interoperability and standards. Consistent with the Union’s vision for greater harmony across technological domains, these efforts aspire to reduce digital fragmentation and encourage the acquisition and sharing of common components. Early deliverables will include a governance structure, implementation guidance, and a digital toolkit to assist cities in getting started.
ITU’s Cristina Bueti says that this European initiative is fully aligned with the vision of their program and recognizes that the EU wants an approach that meets the needs of their citizens. Already there is cooperation between the ITU and the EU on many aspects that include standards development, policy formulation, and shared learnings. Examples of early European citiverse initiatives can be found in the x-CITE project.
The World’s First Chief Citiverse Officer
Rotterdam, the second-largest city in the Netherlands has a long history of innovation related to areas that include maritime technology (it’s the largest port in Europe in terms of volume), clean energy, and most recently for smart city initiatives.
City leaders view the citiverse as a natural extension of their already impressive digital efforts and in 2024 announced Rotterdam’s citiverse initiative. Roland van der Heijden, previously responsible for their digital city program, was appointed the lead.
Most recently, his title was upgraded to Chief Citiverse Officer, possibly the first such role in the world, reflecting the strategic priority of the work. City leaders also see the role as a way to influence the larger citiverse movement as it unfolds around the world, continuing Rotterdam’s long history of being leaders in urban innovation.
Van der Heijden says the citiverse is an opportunity to integrate services and deliver a cohesive digital experience for the public rather than the piecemeal approach that is experienced in his city and so many around the world. For vendors too, including startups, the ability to plug into and serve community members can become more seamless and amplify opportunities for innovation.
The Rotterdam citiverse initiative is less tied to the central notion of an immersive virtual world such as a single metaverse, but rather an open urban platform with an app store that includes diverse solutions, empowering anyone to create and manage their own digital communities of interest using their tool of choice.
For example, an individual could create a digital twin of their own neighborhood and invite interested parties to help redesign some element of the area. Results from that effort could then be used to make a case to their city leadership for changes to be included in future urban planning initiatives.
According to Van der Heijden, the Rotterdam citiverse will enable citizen empowerment, enabling the community to be in more control of their environment, both in the physical and digital worlds.
Right now, Heijden and his team are working on refining the vision and strategic plan. In 2026 they’ll conduct extensive experimentation and knowledge building, and by 2027 he hopes that the program will be fully established and operational.
The Future Of The Citiverse
The challenges facing the deployment of a citiverse are not trivial. Bueti is particularly sober in her assessment of the costs involved. She recognizes that substantial investment will be required.
Unlike in the EU initiative where cities can receive funding from Brussels, non-EU cities around the world won’t typically have that same type of financial support. With limited funding, Bueti encourages cities to start small and make progress.
In fact, even before building anything, there’s much work ahead to establish the governance structure and legal considerations for successful citiverse implementations.
Another notable hurdle ahead for all cities is to get educated and to educate others on the topic. Both city staff and the public will need to understand what the citiverse can do, its long-term benefits, and the associated costs.
In the ITU, EU, and Rotterdam, the metrics to evaluate progress and milestone successes are still being formulated. After all, it’s still early and every entity involved in citiverse development is in a learning mode.
Finally, with all city initiatives, there’s one central metric that really matters: Does the solution improve the quality of life for its residents?
With the citiverse we’ll just have to wait and see as it evolves from concept to reality.
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