Los Angeles is turning to digital twin technology from Chicago-based Cityzenith to reduce emissions.

The Los Angeles’ Better Buildings Challenge (LABBC), a community of building owners representing 14 million square metres of commercial real estate space committed to going green, has partnered urban digital twin specialist Cityzenith.

The partners will implement the company’s SmartWorld digital twin product in LA’s Bunker Hill area to explore the use of this technology to enable owners of buildings of any size, anywhere, to simulate their optimum financial paths to net zero emissions.

Urban digital twins are virtual replicas of real buildings, infrastructure, networks and so on in cities connected to the data in and around them, and they are used to simulate and improve operational behaviour in cities, including traffic, crowd movement and emissions reduction.

Los Angeles now joins many other major US cities in Cityzenith’s Clean Cities, Clean Future initiative, including New York, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

“We look forward to working with Cityzenith to demonstrate how its urban digital twin technology can support the shift to net zero in this important area of LA, through simulating different potential scenarios and recommending the optimal combination of projects and financial strategies to make the whole thing work,” said LABBC director David Hodgins. “The wider potential for the rest of LA, the state of California, and nationally and globally, is enormous.”

Michael Jansen, CEO of Cityzenith, added: “We are excited to be working in America’s second largest city (population: 4.1 million), a long-time champion of green buildings. We have to decarbonise almost six million buildings in America in the next ten years and didn’t have the technological tools for that until today. A building’s data can be the key to enabling emissions reduction at scale, citywide. SmartWorld, our revolutionary digital twin platform, is an AI-driven, systems-of-systems platform designed to analyse and optimise the myriad of variables in a green building project – electrification, renewables, financial incentives and other dynamic variables – helping buildings to go green for less cost and no risk.”

Cityzenith, joined the World Economic Forum’s Net Zero Carbon Cities programme last year.

“This ground-breaking project in Los Angeles will also demonstrate how net zero buildings are cheaper to operate and attract higher rents and valuations,” said Jansen. “We are looking forward to working with our amazing partner in Los Angeles to see this project through to fruition.”