Smart City Control Centres, Two French Cities’ Experiences

When planning and implementing a smart city strategy, one can encounter many issues, but one that will make it harder to fulfill the vision is the lack of synergy and a global view. When each department works independently, data or already deployed communication systems that could help other departments may go unnoticed, leading to overlapping and loss of time and resources. That's why some cities decide to turn to smart control rooms or platforms, a centralized data management that allows municipalities to have a transversal view of the data and solutions inside their territories, which can lead to greater efficiency and improved services. This is something we've seen a lot in France, which is considered sort of a leader in this type of systems, with projects in Reims Metropole, Paris, Lyon or Nice. We spoke with Angers Loire Metropole and Dijon Metropole to learn about their experiences with implementing a smart city control center. Dijon Metropole created On Dijon, a €105 million initiative with a control center for the remote management of urban items in the region. They renewed public lighting, traffic light crossings, video surveillance, smart parking, security systems for buildings, broadband networks, as well as digital radio networks and connected their renewed infrastructure to their control room. As for Angers Loire, the metropole also deployed a smart control room, a project dubbed Smart Territory, where the data from street lighting, traffic, building monitoring, water, waste, parking and safety from IoT devices and other methods is gathered, viewed and analyzed for better decision making. They even have a digital twin for river overflow and urban heat island predictions. We covered the €179 million project in a previous video. The goal is, how can we have the best of IoT, the digital, to help us to improve the ecological transition? The Smart Territory is, of course, IoT in the different domains I said, hypervisor and the digital twin. All the data are connected to one pilot center and, with a hypervisor. And inside you have the view, the 360 degree view of all that data. A multimodal system. First you have infrastructures and system of hypervision, of all the urban functions first. But in the heart of this system, you have the citizen because this urban function is for citizens, but also to optimize the system. The question of data, the question of problems, give us use cases to manage, a new way to organize the city. In fact,we are creating new jobs, dedicated to smart city. Jobs you don't have usually in cities, like, for example in data, data analyst, data strategist, of course someone to be the chief of staff in the pilot center and everything. So the municipality and the metropolis is winning some skills. New skills. We are winning in the way of, doing public services. A system more transversal, and we are not in silos, traditional silos. We are more transversal. And we have a communication that is very more fluent, more easy. We take some problems that are invisible, like quality of air, like quality of water biodiversity... And it gives us a visibility. Also, we are saving, for example electricity or gas or water in the public buildings because we deployed more than 3000 IoT. We also save energy and water in green spaces, instead of giving water every time we have some IoT telling us when we have to add more water, or if it doesn't need. And I have many example like this. So more we are deploying more we save energy and money. We are identified in Europe, at an international scale, as a city where there is something on innovation. The second is to optimize all the system of the administration, organization, exploitation, and we manage all the contracts globally. And we have a lot of savings with this. And, for example, we have a 60% savings on street lighting, 60% savings. It's around 1 or €2 million savings. And it's very important because these savings give us the possibility to invest. It's a new way to think of public investment. You have the hypervisor with all this data. Now, the question is how to use it better? Because data for data, it means nothing. The question is, what do you do with it? So we are now growing the team of front office and back office and like this we can use better data. And of course, behind it's how we can take better decision. So the question is not just hypervisor and data just for having the photography, it’s how you can analyze and how you can anticipate some decisions or crisis situations, for example. So this is a second step. You have to have a global vision. I think it's not a good solution to do smart city in public lighting, smart city in public building, smart city in green space and etcetera. If you have a global vision of all your territory and all your skills, you are supposed to have the best solution for everything in the same way. Before we were mature, we started to write and to say, we want a smart city project. And everybody was on the project. But if I could change something, maybe it could be better to form your public agents and to be more mature internally, inside the metropolis. At the beginning of the project, we have no money. Zero. And at the end of the project, we have €105 million project. The first, is to have money, but sometimes it's better to have a good project, and you can find money. But in this case, it's easier to have money because you have some, debate, internal debate with financial people, and you have to convince them. Maybe we can have some link more strongly with engineer school, with the people who are students in the territories. A key take away from our conversations is that the more they deploy, the more they save. This statement is in line with what we have seen that with scalability comes the ROI as well as efficiency. On Dijon reported between 20 to 25% improved efficiency across different services thanks to its centralized smart control room. It's a step that cities looking to become smart can take, but following the advice of Angers Loire Metropole, they must start with laying the base. It will also be very important to always keep the well-being and interests of citizens, as well as the return on investment in sight, as we've seen big smart city projects like that of Toronto crumble when the plan isn't clear.