This tool from Sidewalk Labs lets planners draw upon vast quantities of data to create agent-based models, simulating who gains and loses when changes are made.
Comparing it to a far-more-accurate version of Sim City, Oscar Perry Abello covers Doppelgänger, an agent-based modeling tool from Google's Sidewalk Labs. Doppelgänger provides "real-world planners a simulation based not on some 1990-era coder's best approximation of people, but instead one based on the terabytes upon terabytes of real-world data available in today's digital world."
According to Sidewalk Labs modeling lead David Ory, "Doppelgänger enables planners to create a set of virtual households that accurately reflects real neighborhoods, cities, regions, or states, along any dimension relevant to the problem at hand. [It] can create households that have accurate numbers of children, seniors, teachers, persons with disabilities, electric-vehicle owners, swing-shift workers, and so on."
With its capacity for future projections, the tool may help planners visualize which sections of a city benefit (or lose out) from a given change.
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