Accelerating instead of Waiving Planning: Opportunities and Challenges of Digital Building Land Cadastres in Urban Digital Twins

Building land registers have the task of providing potential areas for construction activities and developing them for the demand for residential, commercial and open space. They are therefore an essential basis for the ability of municipalities to plan strategically for future land use and to help implement development objectives. The emergence of artificial intelligence, open and free geodata and new technologies in data collection is creating new possibilities and business models for capturing potential areas. The data integration, evaluation and provision of the collected information, in turn, benefits from the development of Urban Digital Twins (UDT). Model projects show that UDTs potentially strengthen cooperation between authorities, the private sector and stakeholders. Existing software solutions already contain relevant data, which makes it easier to design the information model for a UDT. This article focuses on the adaptation, scaling, and establishment of these solutions in the process management of land management. For this purpose, the current state of development for two common software solutions (ArcGIS Urban©, Urbanistic©) is compared for the requirements of land management. The focus is onthe design of land registers that conforms to the criteria of a new norm on digitals twins for cities and municipalities (DIN SPEC 91607). The results show that methodological approaches are mostly designed as GIS functions and challenging to implement. This learning from our test was further substantiated in discussions with experts, where the seamless integration of benchmarking functions and scenario indicators in UDTis seen as a main requirement for the technical progress and added value for planning. Artificial intelligence is of particular importance in the collection, processing and integration of auxiliary data. The recommendations in the article conclude that new requirements for information management in urban planning have emerged. They require investments in the development of enhanced land management cadastres which benefit from UDT functions. Their introduction in local planning requires that organizations adapt new process management techniques. The accelerated activation of building land, which has recently been introduced through reforms of the building law in Germany (“Bauturbo”), requires a speedier and more comprehensive evaluation of urban development quality criteria if sustainability criteria are still to play a role. Over time, we expect that UDT technologies will help in this context.