Issy-les-Moulineaux Leads France in Broadband Technology

With thousands of jobs lost almost every day and everywhere in the current global economic turmoil, wouldn't it be utopia if a city could offer all the jobs its inhabitants wanted and still had plenty more to be filled? That would be even more amazing if the city was a densely populated municipality located in a country 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's exactly the current economic situation in Issy-les-Moulineaux (Issy), a suburb about 4 miles from Paris. Using information and communication technology (ICT) as a tool to successfully move its economy away from an old manufacturing base to a tech-savvy intelligent community, Issy has lured some of the most recognized technology companies. It's turning into the most technologically advanced city in France.

Since the mid-1990s, when the Internet was hardly prevalent across Europe, Issy successfully developed and implemented a proactive strategy of innovation to build a local information society that's open to all.

"[The strategy] was to follow the developments of new technologies benefiting the population across the country, without any exception," said Eric Legale, managing director of Issy Media, a public-private company in charge of communication and IT within Issy-les-Moulineaux.

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

A City Apart

There's nothing new about that strategy. After all, isn't that what all intelligent communities around the world have been doing for the past few years?

"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] 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," said Lou Zacharilla, co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum, the New York-based think tank that studies the economic and social development.

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 cards usually only meant SIM cards for mobile phones, schools in Issy introduced a smart card-based system that let students electronically pay for lunch. And Issy's City Council rebuilt its meeting room as a multimedia center the following year. In 1994, Santini asked city departments to study the development of the Internet in the U.S., and he created a steering committee to develop Issy's Local Information Plan.

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

"All that seems part of the regular practice today in intelligent communities, but it was very forward-looking back then," Zacharilla said.

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

Early Outsourcer

Issy also did something that was hardly expected from a European community, especially a French community that consists of largely a union-oriented labor force: The city outsourced its entire IT infrastructure to Euriware, a 10-year-old Paris company