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Experiencing smart cities

4 minutes of reading
Whether you call it a smart city, a connected city or, even better, a smart region, digitalisation is primarily all about improving and offering new services to citizens and then to the persons behind local policies in order to allow them to run the city more effectively.
Handling street lighting, saving and pooling energy, facilitating mobility, increasing safety…a non-exhaustive list of the expected benefits when a city is connected or, in other words, when it is rendered smart. N.B. regardless of the method used, the objective is always the same: “Connected cities mean bringing services and citizens together; the only purpose of a smart city is to be helpful”, underlined Emmanuel François, chairman of the Smart Building Alliance and Smart Cities (SBA). This assertion was confirmed by Magali Le Coze, smart city development manager at Bouygues Energies & Services: “Sometimes it can be frightening – you don’t know what’s hiding behind it. It is simply a question of improving public services for users, using the smart aspect to improve daily lives by making transport easier, using street lighting to improve safety or providing well-being with the help of environmental sensors. These new technologies are at the service of quality of life and well-being”  

At the service of users

Emmanuel François also sees it as an accompaniment to new lifestyles: “For example, discussion platforms at a neighbourhood or a collective of several villages scale will in the future be used to develop short circuits, make inevitably multimodal transport easier, have real-time information on traffic, air quality and so on.” The concept of the region is in fact encouraged: “I would prefer to use the term ‘smart region’ than ‘smart city’”, said Magali Le Coze. “It is a slightly different vision – our ambition is not to create hyperconnected cities, but to use the resources and specific characteristics of an existing region to create something tailor-made that will feed a platform of uses. We do not increase the number of sensors; we are not interested in technology for technology’s sake, but more, once again, in the interests of users.”  

Bringing networks into contact

Technology is nonetheless necessary: “If we take the city of Dijon as an example, the first thing to do was to put the physical infrastructures into place: fibre optic cable was laid to connect the 24 borough councils to each other – this was a metropolis-scale project -, renovate street lighting using LEDs and dimming systems, install sensors (etc.) and then run all the infrastructures from a single location, from our platform”, explained Magali Le Coze. In very specific terms, digitalising a region means bringing the various networks of a city into contact with each other, so as to have direct visibility over the facilities available. Telecom services are pooled with other requirements for transporting and analysing information. Thus, starting from the infrastructures that have already been rolled out, we can install systems for testing and controlling air pollution or mobility or analysing noise levels in the city. These procedures allow collectivities to take local action plans with the players concerned and to publicise their campaigns amongst administered parties. One major issue that is still the subject of debate is data security and protecting the private lives of citizens. Magali Le Coze sought to assuage this concern: “Everything is supervised by the Cnil and the GPDR, which imposes the protection and anonymisation of data.” With regard to data security, Emmanuel François explained that the SBA was devoting its permanent efforts to the issue: “It is very important, you have to stay on the ball all the time when it comes to this issue.” The service expected will thus materialise: “Creating links between citizens”, he concluded.