Thea Seidel

Thea Seidel is a student research assistant at the Urban Digitainability Lab and a political science undergraduate at the Munich School for Politics and Public Policy at TUM. Her work focuses on critically assessing smart city strategies, with particular attention to their real-world implementation, policy framing, and measurable impact. At the lab, she authored a literature review on Digital Twins and is currently engaged in qualitative research applying the IOOI logic model, contributing to the evaluation of smart-city projects in German municipalities. Drawing from academic experience at Harvard and UCLA, her approach blends international perspective with a sharp awareness of how digital measures are transferred, reinterpreted, and contested across cities. She is particularly interested in the tension between innovation narratives and governance realities