Metacities Excellence Hub: Exploiting Digital Twins and Metaverse Technologies in South-Eastern Europe

Digital Twins (DT) of future cities/regions provide an accurate and reliable reference that seamlessly integrate the physical, digital and human worlds and allow stakeholders to assess the impact of changes before investments and implementations are made. METACITIES aim to develop an Open Digital Twin framework (ODTF) that will facilitate the co-development of complementary future city domains along with their corresponding Digital Twins. METACITIES is an Excellence Hub that spans a large geographical area, that of Southeastern Europe, represented by three clusters in Cyprus, Greece, and Bulgaria. Each cluster consists of partners involved in the Quadruple Helix (i.e., scientific, industrial, social, public) with the aim to collaboratively design common digital Research and Innovation strategies, policies, and joint pilots, orchestrated towards the benefit of the citizens, the stakeholders, the local ecosystems and the growth of the whole southeast European region. In this paper, the methodology the objectives and conceptual architecture of the hub are presented.