Maebashi City's Participatory Town Development Digital Twin "MAEP" Launches

Maebashi Design Commission (Headquarters: 2-1-6 Honmachi, Maebashi City, Gunma Prefecture, Representative Director: Keiichi Uruuga, URL: https://www.maebashidc.jp), QON Inc. (Headquarters: Freund Mita 2F, 2-14-5 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Representative Director: Takashi Takeda, URL: https://www.q-on.com), and Forum8 Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: 2-15-1 Konan, Minato-ku, Tokyo, President: Yuji Ito, URL: https://www.forum8.co.jp) will jointly implement the "MAEP" participatory town development digital twin project, where dialogue continuously updates the vision of the future city.

This project aims to realize the social implementation of a new digital twin (※) that fosters co-creation of a future city through citizen participation, by collecting and analyzing dialogue from diverse stakeholders such as citizens, businesses, and visitors in Maebashi City, and visualizing the results on a 3D city model.

It has been developed as a PLATEAU 3D city model use case and has also been adopted for the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism's "Fiscal Year 2026 Support Project for Building Urban Space Information Digital Infrastructure."

In this project, the three organizations, each with their own expertise, will collaborate to promote the realization of a circular town development platform that continuously reflects citizens' voices in the future city model.

Maebashi Design Commission will be responsible for dialogue with citizens, community building, and designing questions related to town development through the operation of the participatory platform "MAEP (Maebashi ENGAWA Platform)." QON will leverage its expertise in online community management to analyze dialogue and behavioral logs, visualize values, and structure data for use with generative AI. Forum8 will focus on building the future city simulation environment "MAEBASHI2099," visualization, and developing an immersive interactive system by utilizing the PLATEAU 3D city model and VR/digital twin technologies.

Project Overview and Demonstration Experiment

In traditional town development, future visions were typically drawn by the administration or a small number of experts, with citizens providing opinions through methods like public comments. However, a limitation of such approaches was that only a very limited number of people could participate. In this project, the future of the city will be shaped based on the opinions and discussions of tens of thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands, of citizens as participation grows. The advent of AI has made it possible to incorporate the opinions and discussions of such a large number of citizens into town development.

This will be cross-referenced with the future city vision depicted on Maebashi City's 3D city model, linking and visualizing "which citizens' voices are the basis for" the changes from the current city to the future vision. Citizens can repeatedly engage in discussions while confirming how their opinions are reflected in the city's appearance.

Furthermore, by analyzing and reflecting new opinions and discussions from citizens, a mechanism will be established for the continuous updating of the future city vision. This aims to evolve citizen participation from mere opinion gathering into a "process of jointly drawing the future city."

Additionally, in this project, a demonstration experiment will be conducted at the "1st Maebashi International Art Festival," scheduled to be held from September 19 to December 20, 2026, where the digital twin interactive system will be exhibited for participation by citizens and visitors. Opinions and ideas about the future city will be collected, and the future city model reflecting these dialogues will be used to deepen discussions while participants experience it in a 3D space, feeding back into the city model. This will verify the effectiveness of the participatory digital twin.

Future Outlook

This project aims to evolve citizen participation from a "mechanism for collecting opinions" to a "mechanism for co-creating the future city." Using Maebashi City as a model case, we will establish a new participatory town development method where citizens' voices are reflected in the city's future vision, while also considering deployment to municipalities and regions nationwide, contributing to sustainable urban development and the revitalization of local communities.

※Digital Twin: Technology that reproduces phenomena in physical space in cyber space.