Digital Twins for Small Towns and Rural Regions: Data Integration, Simulation and Visualisation Across Three Use Cases in Lower Austria
Smart city and digital twin concepts hold considerable potential for improving local governance and planning, yet practical implementations have almost exclusively focused on large metropolitan areas. Small towns and rural regions face a distinct set of challenges -- limited data availability, constrained budgets and lower digital capacity -- that make a direct transfer of urban approaches infeasible. This article presents results from the ongoing project "Smart Cities and Digital Twins in Lower Austria", which adapts digital twin concepts for small-town and rural contexts following a design science research approach. Based on stakeholder workshops with municipalities in Lower Austria, three use cases were identified and implemented as prototype digital twins: traffic flow planning (emphasising data integration), population growth (emphasising simulation) and shared spaces (emphasising visualisation). We describe the design and implementation of each prototype and report on a technical evaluation of their feasibility. Our findings highlight both the potential and the specific limitations of digital twins in resource-constrained settings and offer practical guidance for municipalities, policymakers and researchers working in non-urban contexts.