France's Issy-les-Moulineaux Continues To Lead In Digital Innovations

Photo: Issy-les-Moulineaux mayor Andre Santini talks with citizens on the street.

With thousands of jobs lost almost everyday and almost everywhere in the current global economic turmoil, wouldn't it be Utopia if a city could offer all the jobs its inhabitants can take; and still have plenty more to be filled? More so when the city is one of the most densely populated municipalities in the region, and that too in a country that is as much affected by the global turmoil as any other developed nation.

With almost 70,000 jobs on offer for a population of a little more than 60,000 inhabitants, that is exactly the current economic situation in Issy-les-Moulineaux [Issy], a booming commune in the southwestern suburbs about 4 miles from Paris, France. Using ICT as a tool to successfully move its economy away from an old manufacturing base to a technology savvy intelligent community, Issy has lured some of the most recognized technology companies to not only locate more jobs there than it has inhabitants, but to also turn into the most advanced city in France.

Ever since the mid 1990s, when the Internet was hardly prevalent throughout Europe, Issy has successfully developed and implemented a proactive strategy of innovation to build a local Information Society which is open to all.

The strategy adopted, says Eric Legale, managing director of Issy Média, a public-private company in charge of the communication and the information technologies within the city of Issy-les-Moulineaux, "was to follow the developments of new technologies benefiting the population across the country, without any exception."

It included launching a campaign to lure more communication and technology companies into the area and to make high-tech and innovation the backbone of Issy's economy, thereby accelerating the transformation of the city.

Nothing new about that though. After all isn't that the strategy all Intelligent Communities around the world have been following for the past few years?

"Yet what sets Issy apart from all other Intelligent Communities is the fact that the process of intelligent community development actually began as far back as the late 1980s when [Issy's maverick] mayor Andre Santini decided at the dawn of the digital age to begin to adapt the ICT tools to both municipal IT management and also for economic development," says Lou Zacharilla, co-founder of The Intelligent Community Forum, the New York-based think tank that studies the economic and social development of the 21st Century community.

Under Santini's administration, Issy was the first French city to introduce outdoor electronic information displays and the first to deploy a cable network. In 1993, while smart card was still just SIM cards for mobile phones the world over, schools in Issy introduced a smart card-based system that allowed the students to pay for lunch electronically. And Issy's City Council rebuilt its meeting room as a multimedia center the following year. That year as well, Santini also asked city departments to study the development of the Internet in the US and he created a steering committee to develop Issy's "Local Information Plan."

Issy was also the first community in France to have Wi-Fi; there were Wi-Fi hotspots in all buildings, as well as being the first to have the most well- developed broadband infrastructure,

"All that seems part of the regular practice today in Intelligent Communities, but it was very forward looking back then," say Zacharilla.

To get a feeling of how forward-looking those initiatives were consider these; Netscape, the company that would introduce the first widely-used Web browser, was founded in 1994 and there were only 10,000 Web sites worldwide then, compared with 80.6 million in 2006. The first e-commerce sites were also just coming online.

Issy also did some thing that was hardly expected from a European community, or, at least the French community-that