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

The General Incorporated Association Maebashi Design Commission, QON Inc., and FORUM8 Co., Ltd. will jointly implement the participatory town development digital twin project "MAEP," where dialogue continuously updates the vision of the future city.

This project, set in Maebashi City, aims to realize co-creation of a future city through citizen participation by collecting and analyzing dialogue from diverse stakeholders such as citizens, businesses, and visitors, and visualizing the results on a 3D city model. It is developed as a PLATEAU 3D city model use case and has been adopted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism's "Fiscal Year 2026 Support Project for Building Digital Infrastructure for Urban Spatial Information."

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

Maebashi Design Commission will be responsible for operating the participatory platform "MAEP (Maebashi ENGAWA Platform)," facilitating dialogue with citizens, community building, and designing inquiries related to town development. 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 utilize the PLATEAU 3D city model and VR/digital twin technologies to build the future city simulation environment "MAEBASHI2099," and develop visualization and immersive interactive systems.

Project Overview and Demonstration Experiments

In traditional town development, future visions were typically drawn by the administration and a small number of experts, with citizens providing opinions through methods like public comments. However, this approach had limitations, as only a very limited number of people could participate. This project will shape the future of the city based on the opinions and discussions of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of citizens if participation increases. The advent of AI has made it possible to incorporate the opinions and discussions of such a large number of people 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 deepen their discussions while confirming how their opinions are reflected in the appearance of the town.

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, a demonstration experiment involving citizen and visitor participation will be conducted by exhibiting the digital twin interactive system at the "1st Maebashi International Arts Festival," scheduled to be held from September 19 to December 20, 2026. Opinions and ideas about the future town will be collected, and participants will deepen discussions while experiencing the future city model reflecting those dialogues in a 3D space, which will then be fed 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, and with an eye toward deployment in municipalities and regions nationwide, we will contribute to sustainable urban development and the revitalization of local communities.

*Digital Twin: Technology that reproduces phenomena in physical (real) space in cyberspace.

Reference Information

As one means of collecting citizens' "voices" regarding town development in Maebashi, this project has launched the online community "Maebashi Engawa Platform."

▼"Maebashi Engawa Platform" is here

https://www.beach.jp/community/MAEP/

Company Profiles

General Incorporated Association Maebashi Design Commission

Head Office Location: 2-1-6 Honcho, Maebashi City, Gunma Prefecture

Representative Director: Keiichi Uruka

HP: https://www.maebashidc.jp

FORUM8 Co., Ltd.

Head Office Location: 2-15-1 Konan, Minato-ku, Tokyo

President and CEO: Yuji Ito

HP: https://www.forum8.co.jp

QON Inc.

Head Office Location: Freund Mita 2F, 2-14-5 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo

Representative Director: Takashi Takeda

HP: https://www.q-o-n.com