Combining urban data and new usages in Saint-Etienne

Saint-Etienne Métropole and the city of Saint-Etienne are facing a number of challenges:

• keeping their population,
• welcoming new inhabitants,
• attracting new companies and businesses.

 

In an effort to revitalise the region and change the everyday lives of the city’s inhabitants, the city authorities organised a vast thinktank with numerous companies capable of proposing relevant and innovative solutions, in particular in the realm of the “Smart City”.

Only 30% of the urban data produced in the Saint-Etienne region is known to its local authorities. Few digital tools even exist to coordinate urban development. In this context, the smart city is an integrated solution based on data use to boost the appeal and performance of public services.

In collaboration with the councils of the city of Saint-Etienne and the surrounding metropolitan area, we have set up an innovative project to produce a new generation digital platform for public urban data to serve usages. This comprehensive modular software solution enables:

1. identification of data requirements (via an online system),
2. processing and enrichment of the data collected,
3. storage and provision of the information produced.

The platform is therefore an urban data factory, designed to manufacture new usages.

The platform operates as follows:

• The data available are ingested by the platform either continuously or in batches;
• The reference system is fed with data from the city and its partners;
• All services that support usages can request data from the platform, which responds with information elaborated by appropriate processing.

Project innovation is:

• Technical: the platform is open, scalable, inter-operable, and can be adapted to the specific context of each local authority;
• Social: the project was tested first in a district where urban renovation is a priority;
• Governance: through public/private sector co-construction involving SUEZ group, the city and metropolitan area councils of Saint-Etienne and local partners.

The platform has resulted in the development of new usages and services: an energy consumption monitoring application, a virtual assistant to facilitate communication with the local population, an application to put landlords of vacant ground floor properties in contact with entrepreneurs with activity projects.

The project has also stimulated the local eco-system in terms of data and digital technology. The hackathon organised in March 2018 was a major milestone of this mobilisation and started the development process of innovative digital solutions to improve quality of life in the Tarentaize-Beaubrun-Couriot district.

This eco-system stimulation process continues with the federation of a local community to encourage open innovation, and ultimately to create applications based on urban infrastructures, using the platform.

In terms of the various innovative aspects of the project described above, the project has achieved the following:

• 2016 winner of the “sustainable and solidary city” call for interest by ANRU, the French agency for urban renovation, as part of the PIA investments for the future programme. Among the 20 winners, the “DIGITAL SAINT-ETIENNE” project was the only one that involved all urban public policies at the scale of a city political priority district, via a digital tool;
• labelled Industrial Demonstrator of the Sustainable City for the French government, confirming the highly innovative nature of the project and its role as a showcase of French excellence in the field of sustainable cities.