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Since the early 2000s, the Rennes metropolitan area’s local authority (now Rennes Métropole) has launched major reflection on urban data toward applications dedicated to urban management and planning (Bailleul and Gibon, 2013). In 2017 Rennes Métropole launched the project of Metropolitan Public Service for Data (SPMD) and signed a partnership with Dassault Systèmes to experiment a 3D platform entitled 3DEXPERIENCity® Virtual Rennes. These two events are just the tip of the iceberg of the intense activity surrounding the smart city initiative of the Breton metropolitan area. The implementation of this process, which has been supported by the French State, Région Bretagne (the regional council of Brittany) and the European Union, has led to various partnerships with industry, the public sector, associations and academia. 10 years of building of a local smart city policy could therefore be examined through the multiple technological innovation implemented, but also from an organisational viewpoint. In the case of Rennes, several dozen projects have given substance to the process and question at various levels the urban governance (Pinson, 2010) that has led to its emergence over time. This observation alone could lead to the conclusion that there is a kind of improvisation in the implementation of the smart city. We are trying to overcome this intuition by deciphering the process implemented, its organisation and its shared objectives.
In addition, we assume that the values associated with the smart city by the stakeholders involved, the perceptions and controversy linked to the organisational changes, and their consequences on the network of players, may cause tensions and thus explain the complexity of the approach. It is therefore necessary to consider to what extent these legacies and experiences of the past 10 years have been integrated into the smart city process of Rennes Métropole. What is their impact on the formatting and meaning given to a ‘Rennes-style’ smart city approach?
The SmartRennes action-research project led by a multidisciplinary research team in partnership with Rennes Métropole, aims to shed light on these issues. Bringing to light the history of the ‘Rennes-style’ smart city, from data management to a strategic metropolitan project, provides insight into the processes leading to the definition of its objectives and challenges.
The deployed digital devices seem to solidify the differences of opinion and tensions surrounding the visions of the smart city. That’s why the following questions must be asked: who is the driving force and for what purpose? Which governance for a public control of smart city initiatives?
The purpose of this article is then to present the results of a monographic investigation dealing with ‘smart city policy’ design. This local focus enables to show the difficulties encountered in applying the smart city model in a particular context. We will demonstrate the emerging disparity between the initial vision of the smart city, greatly influenced by industrial players, and its political translation in a French context where public players are at the forefront and intend to steer the process. This research aims to complete the work on the differentiated appropriation of the smart city in European cities (Fernandez-Anez et al., 2018; Desdemoustier et al., 2019; Nesti, 2020).
Firstly, the review of literature revisits the construction of smart city’s notion and highlights its complex translation into metropolitan policy. Academic controversy concerning the term and its implementation allow us to advocate for a qualitative approach as a monograph of Rennes smart city inititative. The position of public player is also major issue in academic works (Santinha et al., 2010; Nam et al., 2011; Angelidou, 2014). Thus, given the digital solutions provided by companies, can the public player be the driving force behind the smart city, or just a simple partner?