The smallest country in the European Union, Malta has a rich history as a mid-Mediterranean trading port. Today, a national ICT strategy sets the goal of making Malta one of the world's top information societies and positions ICT as a means to reduce social inequality and improve quality of life. The country ranks 1st in an EU survey for ICT exports as a percentage of total exports, thanks to local and foreign ICT companies and regulations supporting online gaming and gambling. Malta is fifth in the EU for xDSL penetration among households and 4th among businesses, and expects by 2010 to bring FTTP to 20% of households. Already ranking 1st in e-government for businesses and 2nd for citizens, Malta also invests in broadband and PC subsidies, training to extend digital literacy to the excluded, credits for businesses adopting ICT, and financial incentives to attract students into ICT careers.

Population: 405,000

Website: www.gov.mt

Smart21 2008 | 2009

93% of the residents on this Crown Dependency are satisfied with the quality of life. Through innovative use of clustering and technology, it again is one of the most successful economies in Europe, using technology in support of its robust banking, finance and space-related industries.

Population: 80,058

Website: www.gov.im

Smart21 2007 | 2008

Iceland has one of the highest broadband penetration rates in the world, and the capital city of Reykjavik is likely to be the world's first in which every business and residence enjoys a fiber connection, through a plan by Reykjvik Energy to provide 100k Mbps connectivity and advanced services to all of the city's 65,000 homes by 2009.

Population: 116,000

Website: reykjavik.is

Smart21 2007

Sopron is the urban center in the northeast corner of Hungary, which borders four other nations and transits 60% of the nation’s cross-border trade. The country’s most industrialized region, it has felt the cold winds of recession blow, leaving it with an unemployment rate above 8%. Sopron is strong in manufacturing heavy goods, chemicals, automotive, wood and agricultural products but produces less than 1% of GDP from research & development. The community is on a mission to build a more diverse, knowledge-based economy. Broadband deployment is well advanced and is providing a platform for the creation of a knowledge-based workforce. Collaboration between local government and the University of Sopron have led to creation of the Sopron Innovation Park, which features Cisco’s latest IP infrastructure. An Environmental Knowledge and Competence Center founded in 2004 is expanding the community’s research base in sustainability, while a Regional Innovation Agency conducts a major benchmarking exercise every 2 years to assess progress in R&D, innovation and higher education.

Population: 59,000

Website: portal.sopron.hu/Sopron/portal/english

Smart21 2011

In 2004, Greece's Ministry of Economics named Trikala the nation's first digital city. Three years later, Trikala lit a fiber network linking 40 buildings and formed, with eight neighboring communities, a cooperative named e-Trikala to operate it and introduce a broadband culture of use. By 2008, e-Trikala had installed twelve WiFi nodes and quickly gained 10,000 users, such was the demand for broadband. Access is free to residents and visitors after they register at one of the many e-Trikala offices, where staff can explain the technology and assess user's skill level. To build usage, e-Trikala has launched online services including public policy forums, telehealth and a Web portal connecting customers to Trikala businesses. The wireless network also controls information displays for the bus network, improving service and increasing ridership. In future, e-Trikala will expand the wireless network and begin deployment of FTTH for businesses and household.

Population: 52,000

Website: www.e-trikala.gr/en

Smart21 2009 | 2010 | 2011

Heraklion is one of the fastest-growing cities in Greece, having seen its population swell 10% in the last decade. It has grown geographically as well by absorbing four surrounding communities in 2011 into a new Municipality of Heraklion. But that growth has taken place against a backdrop of severe economic distress. The economic crisis that began in 2008 has forced layoffs of employees and business closings. Heraklion’s economy is dominated by tourism, which has seen declines from economic ills across Europe and social unrest by austerity-battered Greeks. As a result, Crete’s unemployment rate in 2012 was the lowest in Greece – but still topped 20%.

Battling Unemployment

To battle this scourge, Heraklion’s government and Chamber of Commerce have stepped up Intelligent Community developments efforts launched in past years to a new level. Heraklion is home to the University of Crete’s School of Sciences and School of Health, as well as the Technological Educational Institute of Crete. Entrepreneurial graduates from these institutions can find a home in the Science and Technology Park of Crete, which provides incubating facilities and services to high-tech companies and institutions. In 2013, the city, Chamber of Commerce and educational institutions formed a Smart Cities Committee to intensify their collaboration and develop new programs to leverage these assets for growth.

Broadband Availability

Greece has trailed much of the EU in Internet deployment and adoption. But the Heraklion campus of the University of Crete has driven an aggressive education program to spur adoption, while the city has granted four competitive carriers the right to build networks. As a result, broadband is available to almost 100% of residents, and Internet penetration has risen to +50% for households and +74% for businesses. Two free-use Internet cafes serve the digitally excluded population, while six training centers offer free seminars on digital skills and the city’s network of free Wi-Fi hotspots has expanded to nearly 140.

To further drive adoption and support business growth, the city has also focused on applications. Its city portal offers a wide range of e-services to citizens and businesses, from fee payments to a database of all administrative decisions. Heraklion is also driving projects to improve the prospects of Crete’s tourism industry, from vendor education to the development of online applications. Results include a CiTY app that lets users find and rate local accommodation, food, sightseeing, products and points of interest. A Super Taxi application links mobile phones to tablets carried by taxi drivers to give riders an interactive map of all available taxis, the ability to digitally flag a ride and estimate its cost in advance. As the European economy outlook slowly improves, Heraklion has positioned itself to benefit from future opportunity.

Population: 150,000

Website: www.heraklion.gr

Smart21 2012 | 2013 | 2014

The city’s name tells you something about its history. Located on the Ruhr River in the Ruhr Valley, Mülheim took part in the economic success of one of Europe’s great industrial centers, famed for steel manufacture and coal-mining. Its transformation began in 1964 during what the Germans called the coal and steel crisis – an abrupt loss of competitiveness as lower-cost suppliers of those commodities entered an increasingly global market. In that year, Mülheim reluctantly became the Ruhr Valley’s first city free of steel-making when major blast furnaces closed. Two years later, the city’s last coal mine was shuttered. The economic impact was severe.

From Industry to Trade

The city’s response was to return to its its traditional role as a trading center. Europe’s largest indoor shopping center opened there in 1973. Over succeeding decades, brownfield sites were reclaimed to serve as office and light industrial space. A 245,000-square-meter industrial wasteland was transformed in 2000 as the Siemens Technopark, and a start-up center opened in 2005 to support new entrepreneurship. Other major employers came to include the trading company Tengelmann and the technology firm Thyssen.

This progress has accelerated in the last ten years. A midsize city of 170,000, Mülheim is home to two Max Planck Institutes and a new technical college, Ruhr West, set up in 2009. A government-business-academic partnership is building an Innovation Triangle program on this foundation connecting all the links in the educational chain from secondary school through higher education and local employment. Mülheim is establishing a consumer Internet hub to promote e-business start-ups, which will make it one of five digital hubs in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia. The hub will offer business accelerator programs, co-working and incubator space, access to seed funding and to educational programs in business administration, legal and taxation issues.

Realizing Potential

Mülheim is also working to expand opportunities for its less educated population, particularly youth. The U25 House program offers vocational counseling in secondary school and a case management service that helps young people with job search, skills development, access to support programs and entry into apprenticeships. So successful has this School to Work program been that the city’s youth unemployment rate, at 4.5%, is 40% lower than the regional average.

While helping individuals achieve their potential, Mülheim also focuses on small-to-midsize enterprises (SMEs). City government, the chamber of commerce and business associations have launched SME 4.0, a campaign to make SME owners and executives aware of the opportunities available from digital technologies. A project called Engage NRW modeled how gaming technologies could be applied to improve service and production processes. By the end of the project, SMEs had signed €1.5 million in contracts with technology consultants and providers.

Broadband Inventory

To ensure that the city has the broadband infrastructure it needs, Mülheim completed in 2015 a complete inventory of the telecom conduit network owned by multiple organizations that underlies the city. Mapped with GIS, the conduit registry reduces the challenges for new broadband providers and has encouraged the city to consider construction of its own network to accelerate competitive pressure and boost average speeds while reducing prices.

As the city changes, it has been careful to engage organizations and citizens as partners in envisioning the future. One multi-partner initiative is coordinating a program to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, while another is forging a new urban development model that includes everything from business and social services to sustainability and health. Like the leaders of Intelligent Communities everywhere, Mülheim’s leaders know that its people, not technology, make a city great.

Population: 167,344

Website: www.muelheim-ruhr.de

Smart21 2016

Top7 2016

If Europe has an equivalent of Silicon Valley, it lies in a region with Frankfurt as its heart. About 5,000 software firms there – including SAP, Symantec, IHK Darmstadt Infosys and Software AG – employ 25,000 people and generate 1 billion Euros in annual turnover. Frankfurt is home to DE-CIX, Germany's highest capacity Internet hub, which handles 35% of all European Internet traffic. As the largest city in the Hessen region, Frankfurt is also a premier financial center with 300 banks, including Europe's Central Bank, and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, home of the DAX. It functions as Europe's leading air and rail center as well, and provides security clearance for all air cargo entering Europe. Yet the city is rated among the top five in the world for livability, thanks for a mix of developed and wooded land, two winegrowing areas, numerous spas and a national park. Maintaining this balance of livability and growth in an increasingly competitive global market is the challenge to which the leaders of Frankfurt must respond.

Population: 655,000

Websites: www.frankfurt.de, www.hessenagentur.de

Smart21 2012

Issy-les-Moulineaux, a city just across the Seine from Paris, has an employment rate close to 96%. More than 75% of its companies are in information and communications technologies. Issy’s employers today field a workforce that is slightly larger than the city’s population, because so many companies have moved out of central Paris to take advantage of its infrastructure, business-friendly climate, lower local taxes and innovative services.

It was not ever thus.

Prior to World War II, Issy-les-Moulineaux (which translates into English as Issy of the Windmills) was the factory zone of the Paris metro area. It was also home to an army base that, in 1908, saw the historic first 1-kilometer circuit flight of aviator Henri Farman. After the War, Issy resumed its role as the industrial engine of the region – but then watched its economy erode in the de-industrialization of the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the world’s great cities have industrial sub-cities like Issy, and many remain decimated by the collapse of manufacturing employment.

But the fate of Issy-les-Moulineaux was to be different, and to a greater extent than in most places, the difference was made by a single individual. In 1984, the people of Issy elected André Santini as their Mayor. Over the next nearly 40 years, his administration provided leadership that was by turns visionary, daring and enormously persistent.

Envisioning the Future

First came the vision. With its proximity to the French capital and a major Army base, Issy was already home to a small cluster of IT, telecommunications and R&D organizations. Mayor Santini came to believe that they represented the city’s future, and made it his top priority to create a business environment that would attract many more.

What would such a business environment look like? It would include the things that traditional economic development stresses: reasonable tax rates and good infrastructure, transparency and efficiency in government, access to labor and transportation. But long before it became accepted wisdom, Mayor Santini saw that would include an innovative culture comfortable with technology and adept at using it to solve problems.

As the Eighties gave way to the Nineties, the Mayor’s government made a series of investments that signaled its technology priorities. Issy became the first French city to install outdoor electronic information displays and the first to deploy a cable TV network. In 1993, schools introduced a smart card allowing pupils to pay for lunch electronically. The following year, the City Council rebuilt its meeting room for multimedia and began broadcasting Council meetings over the cable system.

In 1994, the Mayor also challenged city departments to create a comprehensive Information Plan based on study of the evolution of the Internet in the United States. The Internet was then in its infancy: 1994 was the year when Netscape, creator of the first commercial Web browser, was founded in California. Under the plan, completed in 1996, a Steering Committee representing municipal departments and elected officials was created to oversee investment in projects and maintain focus on objectives. The Steering Committee’s founding led the city to adopt the Plan Local d’Information (Local Information Plan) with the goal of transforming Issy into a “digital city.”

But policymaking was never a substitute for action. By 1995, Issy had free Internet access – with the fledgling Netscape browser and the new Internet Explorer – in its Media Library. Issy’s first version of an e-government portal was already online in 1996. By 1997, the Council added interactivity to its cable and Internet broadcast of meetings, inviting citizens to ask questions by telephone or email and get an immediate response. Public participation began to climb. Whereas few residents bothered to attend Council meetings in the past, nearly half regularly participate remotely today. In 2002, Issy created a Participative Budget-Making Platform that enables citizens to help in setting local investment priorities. (Its latest generation includes an online game for children 7 to 14 that challenges them to test their knowledge of local finances.)

Service was expanded in 2005 with the IRIS "citizen relationship management" system, through which citizens could make inquiries or lodge complaints online, via telephone, email or mail. By 2010, Issy had extended e-government to the mobile user, with mobile phone payment of parking fees and an array of mobile remote support services for the elderly. Today, the portal (www.issy.com) provides local news, online public procurement, online applications for certificates and permits, access to more than 15,000 documents, air quality and weather updates and a variety of other services.

Betting on Broadband

The Santini administration also dared to place big bets on the future. In 1998, the city made headlines by deciding to outsource its entire IT infrastructure to Euriware, a 10-year-old Paris company. The goal was to create an efficient service organization that could quickly turn ideas from municipal departments into reality. Mayor Santini promoted it as the first essential step in transforming Issy into a "digital city" as per the Local Information Plan.

The following year, the state-owned France Telecom lost its monopoly on telecommunications. The history of liberalization in telecom has been mixed at best. It has succeeded in lowering prices, particularly for long-distance service, but has failed in local markets around the world to loosen the grip of incumbents. Not so in Issy – because, well before the deadline, Mayor Santini's team launched negotiations with alternative carriers, which agreed to enter public-private partnerships with Issy to deploy networks. As a result, on the same day that the monopoly ended, Issy became the first city in France to offer businesses a choice of carriers. Over the next twenty years, as it continued to welcome competitors, Issy gained a total of six alternative broadband networks, passing 100% of businesses, government agencies, institutions and households. Issy also operates a network of 150 free WiFi access points, with speeds up to 20 Mbps, around the city. Today, 95% of Issy’s households have broadband connections, compared with the French average of 85%.

Growing Digital Services Based on Broadband Success

With a robust broadband infrastructure in place, Issy’s government has concentrated on encouraging citizens and businesses to make it an essential part of their life and work. The city’s schools have had PCs for many years now as well as a system of “mobile classes” equipped with PCs and tablets to make learning easier and more accessible. In 2015 however, Issy began deployment of the Environnement National de Travail (Digital School Platform) for all classes in the city.

The Digital School Platform allows teachers to collaborate on teaching methods, share materials and gain access to a variety of useful data from their colleagues throughout the city while also allowing parents to follow their children’s work, activities and any other matters of interest digitally. During 2016, more than 150 teachers (over half of those in the city) attended training sessions on the Digital School Platform. Issy’s 250 classrooms now each have an interactive digital projector and laptop for the teacher, allowing easy access to the Digital School Platform and all online course materials. The city has also offered Microsoft Office 356 Pro licenses to each elementary-school-aged child and each teacher in their schools to guarantee access to digital technologies outside of school and for use in school assignments. As of September 2017, all Issy primary schools have fiber optic Internet access as well.

Outside of the school system, computer training courses are provided to all ages in the Issy Media Library and the Cube, a digital arts center. Courses are also provided purely online for those who cannot easily get to the facilities in person, such as the elderly and disabled. Senior citizens can learn how to use computers and access the Internet in the familiar and comforting environment of Cyber Tearooms as well. A campaign launched in 2006 refurbishes older computers donated by business and government and provides them at affordable prices to low-income families.

An annual Cube Festival involves the public in showcasing the many facets of digital creation through digital arts exhibitions. In 2010, the Festival introduced a multimedia urban adventure game, in which players use new technologies to solve puzzles, moving back and forth between the real and the virtual worlds.

A Living Lab

Issy’s strategy envisions an “innovation triangle,” with businesses as technology facilitators, citizens as the users and the government as the initiator and coordinator of projects. Through partnership agreements with companies like Microsoft and European Union programs like Living Labs, Issy has become a test bed for new technologies. In 2008, the European Network of Living Labs granted Issy the official title of “Medialand Living Lab of Issy-les-Moulineaux.”

As a living lab, the city began testing new mobile and web applications as well as a local platform focused on mobility in 2015. Services currently being tested include an augmented reality history app and a participatory urbanism one as well. The local testers group includes 250 subscribers as of 2017 who regularly participate in pilot activities and provide feedback to the city on which services work for them and what changes can be made to further improve quality and accessibility for the populace.

One of the projects currently under testing in Issy’s Living Lab is So Mobility. The project aims to reduce traffic congestion, as Issy-les-Moulineaux lies next to Paris in the heart of a particularly dense urban metropolis. So Mobility’s priorities include installing traffic sensors to provide drivers with real-time traffic updates, developing new solutions for smart parking and testing new transport modes such as driverless shuttles and carpooling. As part of the project, Issy hosted an integrated mobility test in collaboration with the Colas, Cisco, Indigo and Transdev companies in 2017 to determine congestion and parking patterns produced by the Grand Paris Express autonomous metro project, which is currently in development. Three local startups also began offering efficient carpooling services in Issy in 2017, and the city has begun promoting such methods to many other companies in the area as a result of their success.

Staying the Course

The transformation of Issy from declining industrial district to booming tech corridor has hardly been an overnight success. Over three decades, the community has worked persistently and consistently to promote both digital business and a prosperous digital lifestyle for all of its citizens.

Issy is not a university town and has no higher education in the formal sense. But with encouragement from government, France Telecom R&D conducts training for students in the telecom sector and the community’s many IT companies are active recruiters of students for internships. Studec TV, a Grande Ecole offering continuing education for broadcasting professionals, welcomed its first students to Issy in 2009, and the Paris Bar School, which has trained more than 23,000 lawyers since 1988, moved into new offices in the city in 2011.

For decades, Mayor Santini has insisted that no segment of the population be left behind when it comes to technology. In June 2010, he joined the French Minister of Health to officially open the first rest home in France to combine leading-edge technologies and health services with architectural comfort. With its own video production studio and video-on-demand network, the Lassere Rest Home uses video to help seniors stay in touch with the world and each other. A regular “Laserre Infos” TV program, produced by a senior resident and a youngster from one of the city’s youth associations, keeps residents updated on events in the Rest Home. A series of interviews called “Petals of Life” allow 100-year-old residents to share their experiences and memories with Issy’s inhabitants.

ICF recognized Issy’s vision, daring and persistence in 2009 when it named Mayor Andre Santini its Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year. His vision has guided the city for longer than most of us have lived in the places we currently reside, and it has left Issy of the Windmills well prepared to continue prospering in the decades to come.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Issy-les-Moulineaux.

Want to know more about Issy-les-Moulineaux?
Issy-les-Moulineaux was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum book Brain Gain.

Population: 67,360

Labor Force: 72,000

Website: www.issy.com/en/home

Smart21 2007 | 2009 | 2011 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020

Top7 2005 | 2007 | 2009 | 2011

The City of Besançon was founded 2,000 years ago near what is now the Swiss border. A university town and regional capital, it grew wealthy from the manufacture of clocks and watches, metallurgy, textiles and food-processing – until global competition for timepieces in the 1970s sent the economy into severe decline. The community fought back by leveraging its universities and grands écoles, where 24,000 students are enrolled, and finding new outlets for its people’s skills in precision manufacturing. Strong leadership from the city’s Mayor, and active support from citizen, business and academic groups, enabled Besançon to build a technology park devoted to microtechnology, and to become in 1994 the first French city with a fiber network connecting all government and quasi-government facilities. Every school student beginning in third grade receives a “digital schoolbag,” consisting of laptop and access to an online collaboration platform, free of charge. While broadband is widely available, Besançon has also established free digital centers in every neighborhood to ensure access. Universities and technical schools continue the focus on ICT in order to produce qualified workers for the city’s growing technology cluster. Besançon has also extended its focus outward with a “Seneclic” project, in which residents with disabilities refurbish computers for shipment to schools in Senegal.

Population: 122,000

Website: www.besancon.fr

Smart21 2010