Each town has its own characteristics with very different objectives, emphasised Nicolas Monsarrat, Executive Director of Accenture France. A “smart city” is a town/city which uses digital technology to reach these objectives: Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to welcome pilgrims under the best conditions, or Neom [“the new town of the future”] to develop tourism. Dubai, to attract international talents and develop their economy, Helsinki, and in particular the Kalasatama district to make the town a great place to live.”

A new approach to the smart city – a version 3.0 – emerged a few years ago in European cities such as Barcelona, Vienna or Lyon. In compliance with the law, they share their data with the inhabitants while encouraging participatory usage. In this way, each citizen becomes an actor in the “smart city” either by producing data via sensors, or using it to propose urban services which take account of uses and requirements. In involving its citizens, it corrects a shortcoming, often criticised, which considers each problem in urban day-to-day living as a technological problem.

Whatever the sums committed, the way in which the towns/cities seize the concept comes down, it seems, to three different views.A technical-centred view which drives a rich city like Singapore to rely on IA to manage, ever more efficiently, all aspects of the life of its residents, particularly their safety albeit to the detriment of their liberty. A pragmatic view, for most western countries: the digital tools are relevant but only deal with some of the urgent and concrete issues with which they are confronted. Lastly, a humanist, political view at Barcelona and Dijon which does not rule out the first two but considers the “digital revolution” as the time to question the current models and reinvent the urban community with “smart citizens”.

One of the effects of this programme? Its management of coronavirus, applauded in March 2020 by the American scientific authorities, such as Mickael Osterholm director of the centre of research into infectious diseases of the University of Minnesota: only 18 deaths to report, very little dispersion of the infection although the population density is very high and the risk extremely great. Its methods: “contact tracking”, careful monitoring of individuals who have detected positive for the coronavirus and told to stay at home, and being transparent with the population. It is possible to locate patients, in real time on an interactive map which gives their age, sex, nationality and the street where they live. Their name is however not given.
Some of these measures elicit debate in France, but they are contributing to overcoming the challenge facing Singapore. That of remaining attractive and drawing in talent although this city-state is only a small enclave at the southern tip of Malaysia without energy or agricultural resources.

France has 27 smart cities. According to the Gazette des communes, 15 have less than 260,000 inhabitants and two stand out: Dijon, then Angers. Their respective budgets: 105 million Euros for Dijon and 178 for Angers will produce a return on investment in twenty years through savings made. The projects will make it possible to optimise the operation of all the town’s services (transport, safety, lighting, waste management, etc.) with the construction of a hypervisor, a sort of central control station whose design and maintenance has been entrusted by Dijon to a private consortium made up of Bouygues Energie et Services, Citelium (subsidiary of EDF), Suez and Cap Gemini; Angers has entrusted its version to a consortium run by Engie Ineo working with Suez, La Poste and VYV.

Barcelona followed their example in 2010 and, via the site OpendataBCN, proposes each year to the residents that they use its data to help overcome the political, societal or environmental challenges with which it is faced. Paris has done the same since 2011. Since then, opening up data has been made compulsory for all French communes through the Lemaire law for a Digital Republic in 2016. “We have launched our Smart Geneva project after opening up our data to the citizens. In this way, we will be able to build a smart city together.” said Patrick Montier, Smart Geneva project manager. This has become the leitmotiv for those supporting the human-centred smart city: the smart city will not happen without smart citizens.

Without control over its data, whether public or private, the town/city cannot guarantee its sovereignty
Nicknamed “datapolis” by the journalist Francis Pisani, the smart city, during its emergence at the beginning of the 2000’s, did not fail to raise concerns due to its massive collections of data. The growth in data is exponential with the appearance of more and more sensors or video-protection cameras which promise to improve citizens’ lives…as well as the economic health of the companies supplying the data, like IBM or Decaux.

CITIZENS’ DATA AND MAJOR INDUSTRIAL GROUPS
The protection of citizens’ rights, as for private life, is difficult to reconcile with the principle of “virtuous freedom” (for example free WiFi versus data collection), to which municipalities often yield. In France, Grenoble is an exception in banning an actor in smart street furniture from public spaces. LinkNYC terminals, installed in New York by Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, after having won an invitation to tender for a project aiming to reinvent telephone booths, claim, as well they might, that they offer “the greatest and most powerful free WiFi ever offered by a town/city”. In towns as on the Internet, a saying warns “when a product is free, you are the product”.

A full review of this work will take place at the end of June 2020. A welcome support: at the end of 2019, more than 60% of communes had not yet nominated a Data Protection Officer (DPO), according to the Journal du Net despite this being required by the General data protection rules (GDPR).
It happens, however, that certain private actors refuse to share their data with communities in order to serve the public interest. Under this principle, New York forced Uber in 2017 to communicate this data to improve taxi traffic. But the group provided this data to the city anonymised and grouped very schematically under topics…

The group obtained public powers at the end of 2019 “to limit the scope of future work and require that the data collected be managed by a public entity and stored in Canada” stressed Le Monde, proving that citizens can help their representatives defend the public interest.

CITIZEN DATA AND MUNICIPALITIES
Beyond this example, concern over the ability of towns and cities to guarantee the freedom and anonymity of their citizens can be read on social networks, on Twitter for example where the hash tag #smartcity was accessed 180 million times in 2018.

Could they not rather prevent crimes by mobilising social services in “at risk” locations by looking for delinquency problems at source?

DATA AND HACKERS
Lastly, the reliability of the tools themselves is challenged. Acts of cyber-vandalism not only target private groups. “A “massive” cyber-attack at Marseille, its region and metropolis” was revealed by the press on 15 March 2020. There was moreover a data leak, observed by a group of hackers in March 2019, which gave the West a preview of Chinese surveillance, targeting hundreds of millions of individuals. In a city with multiple connected objects, from street furniture to the metro turnstile, the more the entry points increase, the more the risks will increase in line. Building walls around data such as firewalls, encrypting them, multiplying the passwords, none of this guarantees zero risk: this does not exist. 

When sci-fi shines a light on the future: interview with Yannick Rumpala, conference manager in political science at the University of Nice, specialist in ecological transition projects, and Patrick Montier, manager of the Smart Geneva project at the Département du territoire (DT), Republic and Canton of Geneva.


YANNICK RUMPALA, IN HORS DES DÉCOMBRES DU MONDE (2018), YOU PUT FORWARD THE IDEA OF CALLING OUR ERA THE “CYBORGCENE”, INSTEAD OF THE “ANTHROPOCENE”, WHY?

Yannick Rumpala (YR): The surface of the earth is becoming more and more occupied by the technological sphere. Cables, electric wires and waves link visible and invisible networks on the planet: the term cyborg, usually reserved to characters from science fiction who combine the organic and “machinic”, can also be applied to them. This transformation continues to affect individuals.

Patrick Montier (PM): In their initial versions, smart cities caused a lot of concern. I’m thinking of Singapore with its artificial “super-trees” crammed with sensors. There are still people who believe that humans will find solutions to the problems they have caused using technology. This logic will lead to us living in dystopian scenarios, to which some smart cities are already close, towns when humans are augmented, connected to other humans and objects through technology. This is the type of future towards which the GAFAs are pushing cities, when they try to take control with projects such as Quayside in Toronto.

IN A SMART CITY PROJECT, IS THE INDIVIDUAL CONDEMNED TO “CYBORGISE” EVEN MORE?
PM: This is not Geneva’s view in any way, where an ecological emergency was voted in 2019. It is developing a sustainable development plan canton by canton based on three pillars: the environment, society and the economy. “Smart Geneva” is a project and a platform which brings together a community of actors from 45 communes, including bordering French towns (Greater Geneva), to answer the question: what do we do to maintain biodiversity and our moral and civic values?
We think technology can be a useful tool when it makes a real contribution to the reduction in pollution, both light and sound for example. It is for this reason that we will use sensors to limit the use of artificial light, control noise, vibration and development of construction sites. But before this, we must ensure that the equipment is suitable: select street lights which throw light downwards and not upwards for example; this has harmful effects on fauna and flora.

At Nice, for example, the NiceLab, very militant and committed, helps, using “do it yourself” (DIY) equipment and 3D printers, in the manufacture of all sorts of objects much less expensive than those sold. It offers to produce OSs like Windows to make the move to open-source systems like Linux. It is necessary to think in terms of reducing material flows, imports and waste to give priority to local circuits and frugality, while remaining globally connected: “locally productive, globally connected” is the motto of the fab city.

This is a collaborative principle analogous to the Wikipedia on-line encyclopaedia, but in material form.
Once again, reality meets fiction: read Cory Doctrow…

PM: Farms and urban gardens are part of the “Smart Geneva” project and we shall support them with training and include the youngest members. Companies will work with schools to produce shared gardens. This also involves teaching the youngest children about virtuous circles: retrieving vegetable wastes, such as grass cuttings, to make fertiliser or cover the soil to retain humidity instead of placing them into the waste bin to be burnt in incinerators and converted into pollutants. We can thus carry out a series of lo-tech projects simply because the well-being of the people does not necessarily depend on this. And there is no question in this project of adding pollution to pollution!