BY Lily Celeste Texas

PUBLISHED 11:41 AM CT Aug. 29, 2025

SAN ANTONIO — At the University of Texas at San Antonio’s School of Architecture and Planning, experts are building a new kind of city.

“Like a video game” is how Dr. Esteban Lopez Ochoa describes his and partner Dr. Farzad Hashemi’s “digital twin,” which is an exact digital replica of San Antonio built with AI.

The pair are collecting data using imaging technology to feed into the computer model. Once the city is complete, it will be interactive and able to run simulations. With mock heatwaves, floods or other simulated events, the researchers are helping city officials decide what kind of infrastructure to invest in.

“Digital twins are a way to capture the physical space into a sandbox that is safe to play with,” Lopez Ochoa said.

What they’re building now is an extension of research on “heat islands” they did on the city’s west side. A lack of trees mostly contributes to the neighborhood feeling far hotter than other areas of the city, they said. Through their research, they pinpointed houses that needed cooling roofs and found that a combination of strategies sometimes made a 12-degree temperature difference.

“Strategies must be proposed for a building itself, but also for the neighborhood on a larger scale.,” Hashemi said. “So we are looking at both through the digital twin.”

One of the goals of the digital twin is to save tax dollars and time by only implementing infrastructure that has proven to work in the AI city.

Geoffrey Urbach, who helps oversee emerging technology for San Antonio, says that’s unique.

“What would a million dollars of planting new trees, what kind of impacts would that bring forth? Well, now we have a model that actually shows us,” Urbach said.

It could soon be a tool in other places, too. Eventually, researchers plan to create models of Houston and other Texas cities.