Across the European Union, Local Digital Twins are rapidly becoming key enablers of cities and communities’ transition towards a sustainable and smart future. By creating digital replicas of a city or community’s systems and infrastructures, like a detailed digital map, they enable real-time simulations supporting evidence-based decision-making. From urban planning and mobility management to energy optimisation, waste management and infrastructure monitoring, Local Digital Twins help local authorities shape smarter, more resilient environments.
Technopolis Group is pleased to contribute actively to this transformation. Following a successful delivery of the “Local Digital Twins Toolbox Procurement” project, Technopolis Group has recently been entrusted to support the implementation of the “Local Digital Twins for Smart Sustainable Cities” (LDT4SSC) project.
A toolbox to support the development of Local Digital Twins in EU cities and communities
From September 2023 to September 2025, Technopolis Group, together with Deloitte, Capgemini, OASC, Eurocities, ICLEI, ENoLL, Intellera, Serendipity, Kereval, DTU, IMEC, and Digital Vlaanderen, effectively carried out the “Local Digital Twins Toolbox Procurement – Advancing initial stages for the transformation of smart communities” project. The initiative provided support services to cities and communities at an early stage of digitalisation, including those yet to begin, with the aim of advancing their digital capabilities and laying the groundwork for developing a Local Digital Twin.
Within this initiative, Technopolis Group contributed to:
- Enhancing the awareness and readiness of EU communities for their digital transformation through the LORDIMAS tool, an interactive digital maturity assessment that helps cities and communities understand their current level of digitalisation
- Scaling the deployment of enabling digital infrastructure by supporting the operation of a helpdesk facility:
- offering tailored digitalisation roadmaps to over 25 cities across the European Union out of a total of 150 cities supported in the project
- providing procurement guidance for cities and communities preparing to deploy a Local Digital Twin.
Advancing the deployment of Local Digital Twins for smart sustainable cities
Building on this work, Technopolis Group alongside partners OASC, LIST, FIWARE, TalTech, Cerema, ENoLL, Kereval, Libelium and UGhent, is now involved in a new project, Local Digital Twins for Smart Sustainable Cities (LDT4SSC), funded by the Digital Europe Programme.
Technopolis leads the management of the open calls through a cascade funding system and supports the selected pilots. It also contributes to ecosystem-building through the impact assessment framework and supports the uptake of pilot results into reusable assets, reinforcing communication, outreach and stakeholder engagement across the consortium.
The project brings cities and communities together to share and build solutions within a connected European ecosystem of Local Digital Twins made up of interoperable digital tools, data and AI-powered services. This infrastructure will help address challenges, from energy inefficiency and pollution to strained public services and the impact of climate change. With Local Digital Twins, local authorities will be able to make smarter, faster and better-informed decisions such as forecasting traffic, optimising waste collection, planning green spaces.
LDT4SSC aims to lower barriers to digital transformation, such as high costs, fragmented expertise and limited interoperability, by promoting open-source standards, scalable European common data sets, cross-border cooperation and equitable access to smart-city technologies. This will support the development of a European digital infrastructure that is open, ethical and interoperable, fostering sustainable, data-driven innovation across regions.
LDT4SSC will fund three work strands through five calls that will open in the first part of 2026. The first, already open until 15 January 2026, focuses on interconnecting existing Local Digital Twins.
More information is available on the LDT4SSC project website.
