In late 2015, Le Grand Dijon launched a tender concerning the centralised management of public areas throughout its urban area. What was the initial goal?

The enquiry from Le Grand Dijon involved centralising the management of public systems and facilities: public lighting, video surveillance, traffic lights, display panels and smart parking systems. The stated aim was to improve the management of these facilities and this equipment, to group services together, to pool techniques and to reduce costs through centralised management solutions. From a wider perspective, this initiative is part of Le Grand Dijon’s plans to work towards a “Smart City”. This is to be achieved through the use of digital technology, a powerful source of economic and social change in the region, offering new opportunities in terms of equipment: smart traffic lights giving priority to buses, smart street lights optimising energy consumption or municipal displays instantly displaying details of traffic problems and proposing alternative routes to avoid them. The digital transformation of the region first and foremost involves the deployment of suitable infrastructure. The project therefore includes high-speed broadband connections between the 24 districts within Le Grand Dijon’s perimeter.

You and Magali Le Coze (Project Leader) chose to move beyond the purely technical approach, by using technological innovation for the benefit of the area’s residents and its economic development. What was the thinking behind this?

A city is made “smart” by technology but also by community action. We felt that it was important not to limit our solution to only technological innovation but also to give thought to the way citizens and companies can use this to create value and to maximise the quality of life and the sense of well-being in their town. We decided to make citizens a central aspect of the initiative by giving them the opportunity to participate in managing their area. To do so, we proposed introducing an application which would enable each resident or visitor in Le Grand Dijon to interact with the future centralised management system. Reporting a traffic accident, rating a municipal service and obtaining real-time information about nearby events or air quality all become familiar aspects of daily life. And to ensure that technological innovation keeps pace with changing practices and uses, a “schedule of uses” presents usage scenarios for the application and the smart equipment by citizens in several fields, including business and tourism activities, Smart Citizens & governance, mobility, well-being and Open Data. Finally, the citizens have access to all data supplied by the equipment and by the users, this being published on a public Open Data platform: a great way to forge a relationship between the town council and its citizens based on trust and confidence, thanks to greater transparency where information is concerned. The Open Data platform also makes it possible to generate economic value and jobs. To help the region take advantage of this opportunity, the consortium headed by Bouygues Energies & Services joined forces with a key player in the Dijon area’s innovation ecosystem: Les Docks Numériques, a start-up accelerator and open innovation advocate. The goal? To support start-ups as they develop new services or products conceived during local hackathons: events lasting 1 or 2 days involving competing teams and focusing on the reuse of available datasets. The consortium supplies technical expertise and areas for experimentation, and even invests in order to ensure the long-term future of the most promising start-ups, thanks to the use of investment funds (for example: Construction Ventures for Bouygues Construction).

What are the next steps?

In May, we’ll know the results of the tender and in June we hope to see the project get off the ground! Whatever the result, this has already been a positive experience for Bouygues Energies & Services, which has staked a place in the value chain and been able to create a model that can now be deployed in other regions! In the meantime, the life-size Smart City demonstrator (a street including smart equipment and a centralised data control cockpit) set up at the Bouygues Construction headquarters is an excellent means of presenting Bouygues Energies & Services’ know-how in the field of Smart Cities.