Lessons from a Large Scale Demonstrator of the Smart and Sustainable City

Abstract

Concentrating a large part of the planet’s population and economic activity, cities consume around 70% of the energy in the world and generate around 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for global warming and climate change. If the greenhouse emissions are to be reduced, our cities must be transformed into more sustainable, ecologically and socially responsible entities. This transformation requires huge investments in the construction of new urban infrastructure, and adaptation of the already existing infrastructure towards meeting sustainability requirements. Affected by funding shortages, cities have been turning their attention to the Smart City concept with its promise of optimal management and sustainability, to be achieved at the optimal costs. A significant barrier, though, is lack of experience in the field. Cities must first learn through large-scale experimentation and pilot projects covering various sides of the smart city concept, such as an urban information system, smart monitoring, data analytics, optimal management of infrastructures, and citizens’ involvement in city governance. To help meeting these goals, a Smart City initiative was launched in 2011 by a consortium of public and private urban actors, seeking to provide a large-scale demonstrator to analyse, explore and visualize how the Smart City concept could be implemented. This chapter presents the demonstrator, which is run at the Campus of the University of Lille (northern France). The campus stands for a small town of 25,000 residents. After a discussion of the Smart City concept, the paper moves to describing its implementation at the University of Lille Campus and presenting the project’s early results.