Smart city: gimmick or collective value creation?
While there is a real “smart city” dynamic at work in the territories, it is clear that this is more often in the form of one-off projects than as part of a global roll-out. While some point to organizational, budgetary or even regulatory obstacles, the Caisse des Dépôts Group, Syntec Numérique and the Advancity and Systematic Paris-Region competitiveness clusters have financed a study initiated and carried out by Citizing and OpenCitiz to answer the question of the usefulness of “smart” projects. Through the socio-economic evaluation of 5 concrete “smart city” projects, this study succeeds in demonstrating quantitatively that “smart city” projects can create collective value.
- An unprecedented approach
Public projects involve a wide range of players, but do not systematically involve commercial transactions. The costs and benefits of these projects are not only financial, but can also be economic, social, societal and environmental in nature. In order to understand all of these impacts, it must be possible to measure and objectify the creation and destruction of the collective value of public investments. Socio-economic assessment is therefore a method of verifying whether projects create more value than they cost the community.
In order to compare costs and benefits in terms of collective value, these must be translated into a common monetary unit. Socio-economic indicators are then calculated on this basis.
While this methodology is widely used in the transport sector, where numerous tutelary values exist, this is the first time it has been applied to smart city projects.
It is also the first time that socio-economic assessment has been applied to smart city projects to guide their development and demonstrate their impacts in terms of inclusion, accessibility, public health and climate change mitigation.
- Five Smart City projects under the microscope
The projects analyzed on the basis of this methodology relate to mobility in Strasbourg, waste management in the Communauté d’Agglomération du Grand Besançon, buildings in the Département du Nord, administration in the Département des Hautes Alpes and lighting in Rillieux-La-Pape.
They concern heterogeneous territories, from rural areas to conurbations, medium-sized towns and départements. They also have different levels of maturity: while some are already several years old, with tried-and-tested technologies and real impacts (ex-post evaluation), others are in their infancy, with impacts that are not yet tangible and are therefore estimated upstream (ex-ante evaluation).
- Investments that create collective value
Although the socio-economic results of these assessments are fragmented, since not all the impacts of each case study could be quantified within the scope of the study, they are rich in lessons to be learned.
Generally speaking, the results obtained suggest that a field is opening up for smart city investments, which are highly creative in terms of collective value, as long as the uses are sufficiently anticipated.