Shaping the Saint-Etienne of the future

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”.

SUEZ proposed the DIGITAL SAINT-ETIENNE project to the city of Saint-Etienne and Saint-Etienne Métropole, which consists of designing, developing and operating a new generation of digital platform for public urban data. The goal of this new platform is to make it easier for the city’s inhabitants to use public services every day and to improve their quality of life in the city.

This platform is an open, scalable and reproducible urban management system that analyses, produces, stores and supplies urban data on quality of life, mobility, public services and infrastructures to users on demand.

By making this public data available, the digital platform will enable the city to use control tools to optimize its operations and improve the multi-functional dimension of its services. It will also enable the city’s population:

• to optimize its energy bills and travel in the city centre (real-time information on the traffic and free parking spaces),
• to become players in the transformation of the city by creating a circular and collaborative economy in each district, and then city-wide.

The final version of the platform was delivered in December 2018. It is now tested in one district of Saint-Etienne, which is close to the city centre and considered a priority for urban renovation, and then in two central sectors of the city in which large-scale infrastructures, including the third tramline, will shortly be opening.

In March 2018, SUEZ, the city of Saint-Etienne and Saint-Etienne Métropole organised the Saint-Etienne Smart Cities Hackathon to test this version and find potential feeder applications. This event was the first step in the adoption of the platform and its possible uses by the city and its inhabitants. Around 100 participants (developers, designers, data analysts or simple citizens) came together to develop their ideas on a series of selected topics: transport and mobility, urban security and the collaborative economy.

The DIGITAL SAINT-ETIENNE project is innovative both in terms of its approach and the solution it offers:

• usages that are relevant to the region’s needs have been identified and developed,
• digital services and applications are designed without any restrictions on access to information. The platform only produces contextualised data in response to the requests it receives and then delivers the information, irrespective of the infrastructure that produces the raw data. It does this by using machine learning and artificial intelligence procedures.
  

In recognition of its innovative aspects, the project:

• received the 2016 trophy for Sustainable and Inclusive initiatives from the French State agency for urban renovation, within the framework of the State-sponsored “Investments in the Future” programme. Of the 20 prize-winners, DIGITAL SAINT-ETIENNE is the only project that uses a digital tool to question every aspect of urban policy on the scale of a high-priority neighbourhood of the city.
• has received the Industrial Demonstrator of the Sustainable City label from the French State, highlighting the innovative dimension of the project, and its role as a showcase of French excellence in sustainable cities.

“New solutions must be found to address the problems of insecurity, such as scalable, neighbourhood-wide information systems that collect, manage and process data... The goal is to make neighbourhoods attractive again, so that people want to work and/or live there”, explains Gaël Perdrieau, President of Saint‐Etienne Métropole and Mayor of Saint‐Etienne.