Digital twin empowers urban digitalization: Driving intelligent and sustainable city development

Global urbanization is advancing at an unprecedented pace. While urbanization promotes economic growth and social progress, it also brings urgent challenges, including resource shortage, environmental pollution, traffic congestion, and inefficient urban governance. These challenges have made sustainable development (SD) an urgent and essential objective for contemporary urban development. To achieve this goal, the transformation of cities toward smart and sustainable development has become a global consensus, and this transformation follows a clear logical sequence: digitalization first, intelligent decision-making second, which ultimately makes sustainable development realizable