The road to a smart Paris Region

Local authorities, for their part, are discovering the many possibilities opened up by these innovations for implementing their development policies. The Smart City as a concept builds on these opportunities: the improved services to residents and users are based on all the possibilities opened up by digital technology. The Smart City concept may potentially be of interest to local authorities at all levels, from the municipalities to the regions, as well as to intermunicipal authorities and counties (départements). The Paris Region has taken up the issue by focusing, until now, mainly on mobility due to its jurisdiction over regional transport and the importance of daily journeys to residents of the Paris region and to the economy, another major area of responsibility of the Region. Hence Ile-de-France Mobilités, the regional transport authority, is working on a comprehensive offering of access to all modes of transport, as it is true that one of the major benefits of digital progress is that it favours the generalisation of intermodal mobility.

The ability of municipalities to gain control over their digital destiny varies considerably depending on their capacity to invest and their attractiveness to promoters of new initiatives. Central districts are the best served, being densely populated by the beneficiaries and devotees of forward-looking projects. The suburbs that are poorly served and have a low fiscal capacity are penalised, and the peri-urban and rural areas even more so. There is a real risk of seeing the precursors in the heart of the metropolis surging ahead, while the local authorities and stakeholders who are less prepared for change are left behind. De facto, the concept of the digital divide can be measured in the field. It correlates with the inhabitants’ disposable income, levels of digital equipment in households and their access to broadband. Another measure is the variable financial capacity of municipalities. These existing and potential inequalities justify the adoption of inclusive approaches, particularly at the regional level, especially when the region is an indivisible territorial unit, as is the case of the Paris Region. A regional approach is required not only to coordinate or set rules and standards, but also to support the efforts made by municipalities and to foster greater connectivity, drive a broader exchange of good practices and improve access to data at all levels, thereby reducing the social and intergenerational digital divide. The regional approach helps to train people in new job skills, to ensure the best conditions for adopting innovations and welcoming innovators, and to oversee the convergence between digital technologies and the imperative need for energy efficiency management. The Region would thus have a dual role to play: it should support the overall consistency of initiatives at the municipal and intermunicipal levels, while, at the same time, developing digital services on a regional scale, beginning with mobility (transport operations, ticketing, optimisation of physical traffic and data streams, information to travellers, etc.), supply chains (notably in relation to e-commerce) and new modes of production and working (collaborative working, teleworking, flex offices, the factories of the future, etc.).

Strategically, the Region should also address two major areas of concern: issues of data availability and the convergence between digital technology and ecological imperatives. Much is at stake when it comes to data access, production, analysis and dissemination, because these issues are at the very heart of all the topics relating to smart territorial entities. In the case of most services introduced by a smart territorial entity initiative, well-managed data availability is an intrinsic part of the digital solution (for example, movement detection for more efficient lighting management), notably in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). Data generated for a particular use can serve multiple other uses, so it is important that all the other services that can exploit such data should be able to benefit from them. The action now expected of public authorities is that they should facilitate the availability of data, starting with public data. Under recent legislation, a specific role is entrusted to the Regions, i.e. to initiate and run a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) that ensures the greatest access by all to publicly available data. But such data can be considerably enriched – compared with its current status, which is often static – by continual inputs of big data supplied by territorial entities. Such data enrichment needs to be further supported by ramping up big data expertise and processing capabilities.