Heat that does not ease off even in the evening and air that is hard to breathe are everyday life in more and more European cities. Instead of guessing what will help, the UrbanAIR project team is building digital copies of cities on which greenery, new zoning plans or investments can be tested before anyone breaks ground. We explain how it works and why technology alone is not enough — and at the end you can check whether you could cool your own city.
European cities increasingly feel the effects of heat and poor air quality. The trouble is that every decision — planting trees, changing a zoning plan or making a major infrastructure investment — costs money and is hard to reverse later. The EU-funded UrbanAIR project offers something like the sandbox mode of a video game: a platform of digital twins, that is, virtual counterparts of cities on which municipalities and industry can test ideas before putting them into practice.
It is about bringing together two worlds that rarely get along: global climate data and local decisions made in city hall.
Every digital twin in UrbanAIR rests on three pillars:
Project coordinator Femke Vossepoel, a professor at Delft University of Technology, admits that such a combination is quite a challenge. “That makes the project not only challenging but also unique,” she says in a news item.
The biggest advantage? City decision-makers can first simulate an intervention and only then decide whether it is worth going ahead. On a virtual model it is possible to test what urban greening, zoning changes or infrastructure investments would achieve — without risking real-world resources.
This is, by the way, a good lesson in design thinking that is useful in any field of study: before you build something, test it where a mistake costs nothing.
The project does not stay in the laboratory. The cities taking part in UrbanAIR are divided into two groups with different tasks.
Antwerp and Barcelona are “Action Cities”. There, technologies are tested and refined in live urban environments. Bristol, Paris and Rotterdam act as “Learning Cities” – they help transfer lessons across diverse urban contexts.
Thanks to this split, solutions are tried in practice, not just in theory.
Interesting conclusions came from a workshop the team organised in June 2026 at the 13th European Urban Resilience Forum, together with the EU Covenant of Mayors. Participants concluded that digital tools risk becoming “tool graveyards” if they are not designed around real city needs. In other words: technology cannot be a solution that is still looking for its problem.
The recipe is simple, though often ignored. A city should first establish what it really needs to solve – for example which areas are heat hotspots or which groups of residents are especially vulnerable – and only then choose a tool.
The workshop also showed that simply buying technology settles nothing. Successful adoption requires:
To avoid repeating that mistake, UrbanAIR holds regular User Committee Meetings. City representatives, project partners and technical experts work together there, test ideas and co-create tools. The tools are meant to be useful, trustworthy, understandable and viable – four qualities that are easy to forget when the technology itself is the centre of attention.
The team invites cities, local authorities, researchers, technology providers and resilience practitioners to take part. According to the project’s authors, such an exchange helps cities better prepare for heat, air pollution and other climate risks.
The story of UrbanAIR shows that very different skills meet in the fight against urban heat: atmospheric modelling, data analysis, the study of human behaviour, spatial planning and the plain ability to talk to city officials. None of them is enough on its own. If you study one of these fields, it is worth looking over the fence at your neighbours – because it is exactly where specialisms meet that tools are created which someone actually uses instead of leaving them on a shelf.
UrbanAIR builds digital twins of cities that combine global atmospheric models with local decisions and make it possible to test greenery, zoning plans or investments without risk. The project is also a reminder that good data is not enough: planning cities in a time of climate crisis also requires collaboration and shared learning. At stake are cooler, healthier European cities with cleaner air.
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