https://www.ronpub.com/ojiot/OJIOT_2021v7i1n04_Fuerst.html Channel of the paper: Jonathan Fürst, Bin Cheng and Benjamin Hebgen: Realizing the Digital Twin Transition for Smart Cities, Open Journal of Internet Of Things (OJIOT), 7 (1), pages 32-42, URN: urn:nbn:de:101:1-2021082919331474662784, 2021 en-us https://www.ronpub.com/ojiot/OJIOT_2021v7i1n04_Fuerst.html http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:101:1-2021082919331474662784 The digital twin transition for cities is expected to improve, among others, living quality, carbon footprint and generate new business opportunities across different organizations. However, as cities consist of many separate entities that are in close and frequent interaction with each other, it is not possible to simply apply digital twin concepts from the engineering and manufacturing domains in a silo-ed fashion for each entity. In this paper, we distill the requirements and challenges to develop digital twins for smart cities based on a typical smart city use case. We follow with a first systematic approach to address them in a data-driven fashion to realize the digital twin transition for cities.