What Happens When Madinah Becomes a Digital Twin

As millions of pilgrims prepare to travel to Saudi Arabia for Hajj, Madinah is becoming the site of one of the region's most ambitious digital infrastructure experiments.

Beneath the city sits a live urban twin designed to model crowd movement, predict congestion and coordinate dozens of agencies in real time.

Most Gulf cities now market themselves as "smart", from Dubai's real-time operations dashboards to Riyadh's AI-driven urban developments.

But Madinah is attempting something more difficult: retrofitting a digital operating system onto one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world - while preserving its religious and historical identity.

By 2030, Madinah is expected to receive 30 million annual visitors. Many arrive during compressed religious periods where crowd pressure, heat and transport bottlenecks can escalate rapidly.

At the World Economic Forum's Davos 2026, Abdulrahman Ibrahim, chief data and innovation officer at the Madinah Region Development Authority (MDA), argued that most smart-city initiatives collapse under "digital chaos": fragmented systems layered across agencies that do not cooperate. Madinah's solution, he said, is a "system of systems" designed to treat the city as a single connected organism.

From Stone to Software

At the centre of Madinah's digital infrastructure sits the Manarah Urban Data Platform.

The city has modelled 55 square kilometres, integrated 475 geospatial data layers and scanned more than 300,000 building facades. Saudi authorities also signed a $100 million deal with South Korean company Naver Corp to create high-precision 3D models across Makkah, Madinah and Jeddah.

On the planning side, Madinah has already used digital modelling to redesign and stress-test the 3km corridor linking the Prophet's Mosque and Qeba Mosque before construction work began.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, authorities used the platform to cross-reference business and building registries and enforce district-level quarantine boundaries.

The Real Problem Is Not Technology

Richard Vestner, vice president of market development at Bentley Systems - the infrastructure software company whose digital twin technologies help power parts of Madinah's Manarah platform - says many smart-city projects begin as technology demonstrations rather than solutions to real urban problems.

Cities invest heavily in platforms without long-term coordination between departments, leaving systems fragmented and eventually abandoned. "The challenge is organisational politics and culture," Vestner says.

Madinah partially avoids this problem because its operational purpose is unusually concrete. Managing millions of pilgrims creates a coordination challenge few smart-city projects face. Still, Vestner warns that achieving a genuine "system of systems" remains exceptionally rare.

Zubran Solaiman, director at Bentley Systems and president of the World Geospatial Industry Council, says Madinah's digital twin infrastructure is designed to allow different agencies to maintain ownership over their own datasets while selectively sharing information across the wider platform.

But that integration has limits. "Integration does not mean automation yet," Solaiman says.

The city's agencies may now share data layers, but much of the system still depends on human coordination rather than fully automated decision-making.