The management of networks and urban issues is increasingly taking place at the scale of large urban areas. As such, recent years have seen an increasing number of large-scale Smart City projects, covering diverse topics such as:
- urban mobility,
- connectivity,
- energy network management,
- environmental preservation,
- data exploitation, etc.
If the Smart City is presented as a comprehensive solution to make cities smarter, more sustainable, and more humane, what lies behind this notion?
What is a Smart City?
The term Smart City, translated as "intelligent city" in French, is a concept that emerged in the early 2010s. It proposes to bring a digital dimension to the term sustainable city: digital technology is seen here as a tool for improving urban life, and not as an end in itself, but it still brings a real technological, organizational, and even human impact to the city.
According to the European Parliament, a smart city is "a city that seeks to address issues of general interest through digital solutions, enabled through a partnership between a multitude of stakeholders."
In this ideal, the metropolis of the future will be a city built with intelligence and common sense, leveraging new digital technologies and data to meet the long-term needs of its residents.
But the Smart City is not limited to technological solutions alone. To make a city smart, people must be put back at the heart of the city, with the involvement of citizens in all aspects of their daily lives: whether through the mobilization of collective intelligence, citizen participation, or open innovation.
How does a Smart City work?
The Smart City of tomorrow is a city whose foundations are based on new information and communication technologies (NICT). Intelligent analysis and the use of data collected from infrastructure sensors will improve the quality of life of city dwellers by making the city more adaptive and therefore more efficient.
However, while these technological solutions facilitate decision-making for administrators, they must be coupled with a more comprehensive city strategy to meet citizens' long-term needs and become truly "smart."
To achieve this, the Smart City will need to develop technologies that will inform and engage its citizens, who will no longer be mere consumers or users, but true stakeholders in the city. Citizen-led projects, funded partly by the city and partly by citizens, will enable residents to be involved in the development of their neighborhood.
It is therefore a matter of rethinking city governance towards a more participatory model, one that takes into account both the needs and ideas of residents and private initiatives. Establishing public/private partnerships will enable cities to provide infrastructure, community facilities, and related services that they might not be able to cover alone.
This ability to ensure cross-departmental governance, enabling collaboration among all city stakeholders, will be a major asset in making cities more prosperous, more attractive, and smarter.
What are the issues and challenges of the Smart City?
Today, according to the 2018 barometerof the Syntec Numérique union on the digital transition of territories, nearly 92% of communities with more than 5,000 inhabitants have already launched at least one "Smart City" project.
This doesn't just concern large cities; small rural communities are embarking on "smart village" projects by equipping certain infrastructures with sensors and leveraging the data collected within a local ecosystem, such as the Smart Paesi project in Corsica, which uses a low-speed network and IoT sensors.
Among citizens, expectations are also high since, according to an Ifop survey conducted in 2015, 78% of French people consider the digital development of the city to be important or even a priority.
Is a Smart City a Sustainable City?
The Smart City: A Cost-Saving Factor
Early experience with metropolitan areas shows that when they invest in Smart City projects, the return on investment is always there: the savings generated, sometimes coupled with a real cash inflow, more than offset the initial investments.
The most relevant example of a Smart City project is smart street lighting, which is currently the largest investment within . It could generate savings of up to 30% in terms of avoided consumption and reduced maintenance costs.
More generally, the Smart City should enable savings of 20 to 40% simply through eco-friendly practices, real-time monitoring of energy consumption, and centralized management of various energy networks (e.g., smart grids), water networks, and transportation networks.
Cost reduction would thus be the primary trigger for a public Smart City investment project for 56% of the communities that have implemented one.
The Smart City: Facilitating the Internal Operations of Local Authorities
In addition to enabling local authorities to reduce their operating costs, the implementation of a Smart City impacts the efficiency of public services by facilitating the daily lives of field workers. Simplifying processes and intelligent infrastructure management allow for the optimization of workers' time, the automation of certain infrastructure management, and thus offers the possibility of implementing new public service projects.
The Smart City: An Opportunity for Private Sector Players
The development of the Smart City also represents a tremendous opportunity for private sector players. By 2020, the global Smart City market is estimated to be worth between 400 and 1.6 trillion US dollars.
Furthermore, businesses will benefit directly or indirectly from all the advantages offered by the Smart City in terms of infrastructure networks and digital solutions in general.
However, an important point for the successful development of Smart City innovations is to provide the companies concerned with an open and official showcase to make them known to the general public and investors in the region.
It is with this objective that Tactis has developed, with the National Federation of Conceding Authorities and Regulated Authorities (FNCCR) and the Villes de Franceassociation, the Smart Observatoire platform: a platform available in open data that aims to facilitate knowledge of innovative initiatives in smart territories.
How to become a smart city?
Territories play a central role in the advent of the Smart City. In order to promote the latter, various actions must be implemented, both in large cities and in rural areas:
- Breaking down barriers between services: Smart City type projects require breaking down barriers between the services of an area (e.g. transport, public lighting, health, etc.) because they often allow these various sectors, usually organised in silos, to work together.
-Experiment to innovate: Territories must encourage or even conduct experiments with innovative solutions themselves (e.g., Maas platforms developed in many cities, experiments with autonomous vehicles), as well as support the development and deployment of those that prove relevant in the long term.
- Supporting marginalized populations: digital mediation systems must be put in place to ensure the dissemination of digital innovations throughout the population, even for the 13 million French people who are still excluded from digital technology (figures from the Digital Society),
- Sharing what can be shared: investment costs for the design and installation of infrastructure Smart City costs can be very high, therefore we believe that communities should encourage the pooling of certain investments and infrastructures (e.g. FTTH networks), as well as the use of regional or national Open Data platforms,
- Protecting personal data: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires the appointment of a data protection officer and makes local authorities responsible for ensuring data security and residents' trust in the digital services offered.
At the national level, the report "Towards a French model of shared smart cities " recommends twenty measures to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs to promote the advent of Smart Cities in France:
- Create an international foundation, "French Cité," for a civic-minded, innovative, technological, and ethical city,
- Create a "French Cité" label,
- Organize a multi-year international call for tenders for "Shared Smart Cities"
- Offer open data through decentralized cooperation,
- Integrate the United Nations Smart Sustainable Cities Initiative,
- Build a new science of cities,
- Support a specialized epistemic community,
- Bringing out a critical education of the smart city,
- Make the French-speaking world the spearhead of French digital culture,
- Create a marketplace for the dissemination of the French model,
- Establish aStudy and Support Fund for the Sector Private (FASEP) “Smart Cities”,
- Promoting the expertise of elected officials for digital policies,
- Putting digital technology at the service of local democracy,
- Sharing collective intelligence spaces with territorial impact,
- Building the city with new ways of thinking,
- Launching a European innovation agency that listens to local needs,
- Designing a local big data strategy,
- Share information systems to serve citizens,
- Test new industrial governance in the face of network convergence,
- Establish Digital Solidarity in the political actions of each city.
The most striking example of this policy is that ofE-Administration. Thus, according to the Public Action 2022plan, all administrative procedures must be dematerialized by 2022. Today, 86% of local authorities are already moving in this direction and investing in the dematerialization of public services.
External sources
Nicolas Potier
Contact Nicolas Potier
Do you have a question about Smart Cities? Need some clarification regarding a future project? Send an email to Nicolas Potier, Associate Director at Tactis.
