DataCity: Inventing the city of the future

25 January 2016 - Sustainability - France

VINCI Energies is taking part in DataCity, an open innovation programme on Smart Cities. The programme, launched in November 2015, brings together industrial partners, public authorities and project leaders to meet the challenges of the city of the future.

DataCity is designed to address the challenges of the modern city through the use of data. It involves an unprecedented range of participants. The City of Paris, which is catalysing the programme, and a group of partners comprising VINCI Energies, Setec, SUEZ Consulting, Nexity and Cisco, with support from the department of enterprise in the French Ministry for the Economy and Finance, are taking part in the open acceleration programme together with start-up incubator NUMA.

To start with, two meetings were held in December 2015 to define challenges for designing the city of the future. The full range of Smart Cities stakeholders were invited to join in the discussions focusing on four topics: Energy and Fluids, Environment, Mobility and Buildings and Public Spaces.

Following these meetings, project leaders have until 31 January 2016 to submit their applications. Five projects will be selected for the programme’s first season. Two meetings of the programme partners were scheduled on 13 and 27 January 2016 at NUMA to answer questions concerning the nine challenges in the call for projects, the application process, the selection procedure and the two-week acceleration.

During the acceleration phase in March 2016, the five projects selected and the programme partners will test the solutions under real conditions at NUMA and in the field (Stade de France, Place de la Nation, Paris district town halls, public facilities etc.).

DataCity will be concluded in May with a DemoDay, during which the project leaders and programme partners will present their work and the follow-up to the experiments.