Growing urbanisation, sustainable development, digital challenge, users’ involvement, economic and cultural attractiveness, governance are part of the main stakes cities have to tackle. To face this plural urban reality, it has become necessary to find adapted means to conceive cities and territorial development. A better consideration of the uses, the creation of real consultation methods have priority.
Thus, the new processes to imagine have to respond to a main stake: to restructure urban places to live and to invent a creative, sustainable and citizen–centred city.
As a laboratory for urban innovation, SmartCity invites people from creative and digital economy, users, academics, local authorities, architects and urban planners to create unreleased ways of apprehending and transforming the city. It aims at developing process of open innovation in real urban environment.
The methodology is based on a sensitive analysis of uses and territories stakes ; this is acquired thanks to site specific experimentations, intending to test new urban uses, prototypes, technologies and operating process of users collaboration.
In France, a full-scale experimentation is led in the south of Paris since 2007, in partnership with the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris. This exceptional area is turned into a unique observatory for urban, social and tecnologic innovation.
SmartCity initiates an innovative way of supporting local development:
◊ To invent new means for consultation and conception of the city
◊ To enhance local ressources, identities and memory of a territory
◊ To experiment new products and services on digital city
◊ To study new urban uses
◊ To mobilize users, local stakeholders around the territorial project
Source: Smart City EU
