Saharudin, Hydar, Moya, Beatriz, and Stevens, Hallam (2026) A Digital Twin of the Air: Singapore’s Hybrid AI Wind Map and the Politics of Urban Space. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. (In Press)

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Abstract

The DesCartes Program is a Franco-Singaporean effort advancing hybrid forms of artificial intelligence for critical urban infrastructure. Through ethnographic research, this paper examines the project’s wind map — a digital twin modeling air flows of Singapore’s Marina Bay — within the city-state’s territorial and digital ambitions. The wind map has been imagined as an instrument for urban governance, knowledge-making, and value creation. However, its development has been marked by frictions surrounding data access, securitization, and the sovereignty of urban information. These dynamics both complicate and illuminate Singapore’s aspirations for controllable smart city governance, suggesting that while the DesCartes Program has offered novel forms of urban legibility and management, it may also reproduce entrenched logics of territorialization, security, economics, politics, and technocracy.

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