How do you define a smart city?
A smart city can be defined as a city equipped with various technological solutions available to citizens in order to offer new services to users and improve the efficiency of public services.
What is the main objective of a smart city?
The main objective of a smart city is to reduce the costs incurred in providing public services. This can be achieved through several aspects:
What is the main objective of a smart city?
The main objective of a smart city is to reduce the costs incurred in providing public services. This can be achieved through several approaches:
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By reducing the city's operating costs through sensors that optimize equipment maintenance or by replacing certain equipment with more energy-efficient systems;
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By automating certain tasks performed by employees to enable them to increase productivity and devote time to other activities;
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By developing new services for users;
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By simplifying the community's internal processes.
How to build a connected city?
A connected city should not be built on the basis of available technologies, but on the basis of its citizens' needs. First, we must ask ourselves what citizen services the city wants to implement and what cost-reduction objectives it wants to achieve, in order to then find appropriate technological solutions. Once this step is completed, the city can define its Smart City strategy and build, brick by brick, the various solutions that will enable it to become a connected city.
How does a city become smart?
At the heart of the approach: a desire to modernize city management through the use of new technologies
Smart City initiatives carried out by French metropolises are often based on a desire to modernize city administration through the use of technology.
This can be achieved by setting up a low-speed network such as LoRa, accompanied by the installation of various sensors within the city (video surveillance cameras, stations measuring air quality, presence detectors on street lamps, monitoring of the filling of garbage bins, etc.).
Other technologies, based on the use of city data, can also come into play: video-based parking ticketing using artificial intelligence, anticipating infrastructure breakdowns using algorithms, and real-time traffic control using Big Data.
An effort to develop new uses, both internally and for citizens
With the arrival of all these digital tools in the heart of the city, new uses have emerged in smart cities.
Within local authorities, territorial agents have had to adapt to the implementation of new practices, such as the dematerialization of administrative procedures or the decompartmentalization of services with the cross-referencing of several types of data to optimize the management of the city on a global scale.
For citizens, interactions with the city have also changed. Mobile applications for monitoring user relationships allow citizens to directly contact various city departments and make requests remotely.
The development of more concerted and cross-functional approaches, closely involving citizens and businesses in urban governance
With the Smart City, the city becomes multi-stakeholder and its development is no longer limited to local authorities. Citizens are taking a role in shaping neighborhood life through the implementation of citizen consultation platforms, which allow each resident to propose ideas, vote on measures, or budget allocations.
Citizens therefore become key players in the development of their communities, alongside local authorities and city stakeholders.
Private companies also have a role to play in Smart Cities, with the development of public/private partnerships for certain urban development projects and the co-construction of initiatives between local authorities and specialized companies.
The potential of French Smart Cities is high, as many cities are still at the beginning of their digital transformation
A whole range of now-mature innovations are applicable to public space monitoring
The smart city could be broken down into three technological layers, which enable better management of situations and improve the quality of life of users:
1) The first layer consists of infrastructure: water, energy, and telecommunications networks, street furniture, and connected sensors. This first technological level is a prerequisite for any smart city approach and relies on technologies that are now fully mature:
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- The Internet of Things (IoT), with sensor devices and low-speed data collection networks already installed throughout the country (LoRA, Sigfox).
- The use of smartphones and 4G networks, the basic technological layer for citizen use and for mobile workers.
2) A second layer consists of information systems, collected data, and software managing city functions. These enable the analysis of collected information in real time and the implementation of more appropriate actions to address the issues encountered. Numerous proven tools currently exist and deliver results at industrial levels:
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- BIM (Building Information Modeling), enabling intelligent building management, based on the systematic collection of building data. This technology is similar to the current maturity of home automation technologies, enabling remote monitoring of buildings;
- Automation, with the rise of automated management software enabling the real-time implementation of repetitive tasks requiring the analysis of large amounts of data;
- Big Data and the development of Artificial Intelligence, enabling predictive maintenance of equipment and the automatic identification of malfunctions;
3) A final layer consists of end-user solutions, intended for employees, residents, and businesses. These solutions share useful information with all of the city's stakeholders: residents, workers, tourists, and more. Numerous systems already exist for this purpose, such as:
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- Internally: Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), Technical Intervention Management System (TIMS), business supervision, purchasing control, financial administration, human resources management, and more.
- For citizens: citizen reporting applications (Tell my City, Neocity, etc.), citizen applications (My City in My Pocket), online marketplaces, User Relationship Management (URM) applications, and more.
Thus, in 2021, all the technological building blocks of the Smart City are mature and already deployed in real-world conditions. However, industrial applications of these technologies are driven more by private operators (Citelum, Vinci, Suez, etc.) than by local authorities themselves.
The penetration rate of these solutions among local authorities is still low, which is mainly due to a time lag in the adoption of innovations between local authorities and the private sector rather than a mismatch between supply and demand.
This means that the majority of the dynamics and projects for connected cities are still ahead of us and represent a major investment opportunity for the next 10 to 15 years.
Multiple use cases and applications, ranging from security to health and mobility
Health: improving treatments for chronic diseases, public health policies guided by real-time data analysis, and the implementation of digital tools to improve the patient experience.
Safety: traffic optimization, data use by police forces, and emergency response optimization.
Mobility: multimodal applications, intelligent traffic management, and the possibility of offering new means of transportation.
Quality of Life: applications that connect residents, applications for communicating with local authorities, and applications that connect neighbors.
Environment: air quality measurement, energy network optimization, water leak detection, and smart waste collection...
Users increasingly demanding in terms of public service quality and expecting more coordinated governance
The rapid expansion of digital platforms in users' daily lives (such as Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber) has accustomed citizens to certain expectations regarding customer services and digitalized processes: transparency, high standards, high availability, and responsiveness.
Citizens then develop the same expectations regarding local authorities, which are experiencing difficulties developing comparable services (longer delays, administrative complexity, difficulty finding the right contact, etc.).
Local authorities therefore find themselves needing to adapt and evolve the services offered to citizens to meet their expectations, to avoid the risk of offering services that are not adequately addressed.
2020 Overview of the Main Smart Cities in France
Lyon: A Pioneering City of Innovation "in Project Mode"
The Métropole de Lyon, along with all local stakeholders and residents, has launched the "Lyon Smart City" initiative. This approach is intended to encompass all of the city's sectors, leveraging the city's transformation to generate innovation.
The main thrusts of Lyon's strategy:
Air quality: Lyon aims to co-develop innovative and participatory solutions with local partners to address air quality issues.
Smart grids: Greater Lyon is one of the leading smart grid experimentation areas in Europe, enabling it to better preserve energy resources and manage consumption.
Smart water management: The City uses new technologies to improve the preservation of water resources while developing user services. In 2015, Hublo, a global operations monitoring center, was inaugurated as part of the public service delegation contract.
Open data: The capital of Gaul is encouraging open data and building a public data service.
Social: Since 2017, the Metropolis has been conducting forward-looking initiatives on the city's priority neighborhoods and their redesign within the framework of the smart city, with areas of intervention on the topics of digital mediation, inclusion, and the reduction of social divides.
Nice: The City as a Testing Ground
In 2015, the research firm Juniper Research revealed its ranking of smart cities worldwide. Among the top five, three were European cities, including Nice. This spotlight recognizes a strategy launched in the late 2000s with the following objectives:
- The region's economic diversification based on innovation
- The comfort and safety of residents
- Improved consumption of energy resources
With major groups such as IBM, Cisco, and Veolia, and in collaboration with local startups, numerous experiments have been conducted in various fields: renewable energy, security, urban monitoring, smart grids, such as the "Nice Smart Valley" flexibility demonstrator;
The "Nice Smart Valley" flexibility demonstrator:
The Nice Smart Valley demonstrator was installed on the Côte d'Azur in 2017 for a period of three years, coordinated by Enedis. The objective of this demonstrator is the implementation of innovative processes aimed at creating and exploiting flexibilities to meet local distribution network challenges, such as the massive integration of renewable energies and electric vehicle charging stations at lower cost.
Nice Smart Valley is deployed in various areas of the region: urban districts of Nice, the hinterland, the valley, the industrial zone, the Isola 2000 winter sports resort, and more.
In 2020, the program entered its third and final year of existence, the year of full-scale experiments. The objective is to lead to the industrialization of innovative solutions on the electricity grid, in France and Europe, to accommodate decentralized renewable energies and new uses of electricity, such as electric vehicles, which are likely to create constraints on distribution network infrastructure.
The City of Nice has also distinguished itself through several smart initiatives, mobilizing environmental sensors and tools to secure public spaces.
OnDijon: France's first global Smart City, with a true transformation of urban governance
At the end of 2017, the Greater Dijon metropolitan area signed a 12-year contract for the design, construction, operation, and maintenance of a centralized command center (CCP) that will bring together, in a single location, the supervision of around ten urban functions related to security (street lighting, video surveillance, building safety and security, mobility and passenger information, traffic light operation, parking). intelligent, electronic information, vehicle fleet tracking).
To achieve this, the city has asked a consortium (Bouygues Energie et Services, Capgemini, Suez, and Citelum) to modernize all of its infrastructure (renewal, installation of sensors) and to design and deploy a hypervision module to manage all of the city's business lines from a single location and interface.
Angers Smart City: A model placing innovation and user relations at the heart of the city's new management
Like Dijon, the Angers project is subject to a Global Performance Contract, representing an investment of €121 million over 12 years. The performance targets set in the contract should generate cumulative savings of €101 million over the project's amortization period (25 years), with penalties for Engie if the announced performance is not achieved.
As part of the contract, approximately 50,000 sensors will be installed in the Angers metropolitan area, while 30,000 streetlights will be converted to LEDs. 10,000 poles and 5,000 electrical cabinets will also be connected to enable more precise lighting control on specific streetlights or at the neighborhood level. The objective is to reduce public lighting energy consumption by 66% (equivalent to €3 to €4 million per year), building energy consumption by 20%, and water consumption by 30%.
These various Smart projects highlight two distinct models: an approach based on successive experiments in Lyon and Nice, and an approach based on a comprehensive, centralized platform in Dijon and Angers.
Smart City initiatives are distinguished by a necessary combination of infrastructure modernization and closer public/private collaboration
A desire to modernize infrastructure or improve public action efficiency is often the starting point for Smart Cities
Smart City initiatives are often the result of thinking about modernizing city infrastructure, particularly those related to public lighting, for which modernization leads to considerable energy savings (up to 60% savings) and therefore attractive returns on investment for local authorities.
Some projects, initially based on the modernization of public lighting infrastructure, are then developed to integrate other city-related services such as signage, security, parking, housing, etc.
Faced with the challenges of the city's digital transformation, collaborative and co-constructed systems are essential
To successfully carry out these large-scale initiatives, which can bring together up to ten different business areas, involve thousands of employees, and reach all of a city's residents, local authorities have turned to collaboration models with private partners or with residents directly.
The design of a Smart City project can be carried out directly in collaboration with private stakeholders, as was done for the Global Performance Contracts in Angers and Dijon.
City residents, for their part, participate by providing their opinions on the city's actions through citizen consultation platforms or can collaborate within neighborhood associations.
To ensure the success of a Smart City initiative, it is therefore necessary to involve a diverse range of stakeholders: urban planning organizations, stakeholders in the city's networks and infrastructure, experts in new technologies, and city residents.
To collaborate, these different stakeholders need unified, community-led strategies that define a global vision of the project, the objectives to be achieved, and allocate responsibility for the project as a whole. This will then enable the various stakeholders to work together to create interoperable and compatible systems.
At the heart of the Smart City: new functional modules such as the Urban Hypervisor
At the heart of these Smart City initiatives, information systems have been equipped with new modules to centralize the various functions and data flows. These are supervisors, or even urban hypervisors.
These centralized city control stations allow agents to act on infrastructure in real time and have a panoramic view of the entire territory. Article written by consultants from the Tactis digital transformation division
External sources:
Nicolas Potier
Contact Nicolas Potier
Do you have a question about Smart Cities and Smart Territories? Need some clarification regarding a future project? Send an email to Nicolas Potier, Associate Director at Tactis.
