Dr Emma McRae (IAG Award for Dissertation Excellence) Citation

The IAG Award for Dissertation Excellence is made at Honours, Masters, or PhD level, and acknowledges the disciplinary contribution that the candidate has made to geography. 

Awardee: Dr Emma McRae

For dissertation entitled: Envisioning the city: Looking for participation and collaboration in urban digital twin visualisations

The dissertation focuses on exploring new kinds of visuality that are constructed by Digital Twins — ‘real time’ models of cities being constructed to supposedly make cities run better, and to enable more inclusive forms of participation in planning. Throughout the dissertation, Emma questions this ‘promise of participation at the heart of the idea of the digital twin’ by exploring the specific kind of visuality that digital twins enact, who they are for, and the effects they produce. There is in-depth fieldwork conducted with a diverse range of stakeholders in the digital twin space in Victoria, with findings producing cutting-edge geographical debates on visuality, urban futures and digital geography, to argue that the new kinds of visuality being devised through digital twins are actually deceptively complicated and may actually serve to negate participation in a variety of different ways.  

An examiner of the dissertation writes: “Envisioning the city is an exceptional doctoral dissertation in my view. It provides a rich, theoretically informed and empirically grounded study of the scopic regime and visuality of an urban digital twin – Digital Twin Victoria. There is a huge command of a very wide range of interdisciplinary literature from across Geography, Planning, Media Studies, Visual Studies, and Science and Technology Studies that are crafted into a coherent and highly original set of arguments that logically relate and build on each other to produce a compelling account of the visual aspects of urban digital twins and why they matter to understanding the logics, workings and weaknesses of these systems. It is quite rare, in my experience, to read a thesis that demonstrates a detailed understanding of a wide range of high-level theory from across disciplines, and can effectively bring those into a meaningful conversation, and elaborate on them to provide a novel framing and analysis… Overall, the thesis is an original, rigorous and compelling piece of work ...” .