Optimising with algorithms and urban data? The promises, characteristics and real offer of start-ups for the smart city

Discourses about the smart city have been studied, as well as the large firms promoting it and the digital policies actually implemented by local authorities. Although start-ups are regularly presented as playing a central role in the smart city’s economic development, they have until now received scant attention. What do start-ups really contribute to the smart city? How do they build upon the economic and technical opportunities linked to the growing availability of urban data? This paper studies the start-ups’ characteristics, their discourse on the smart city and the real services and products they offer. It mainly draws upon a tailor-made database of start-ups in France and on interviews. First, it gives an overview of the smart city start-ups, revealing that they resemble those in other fields. This sheds light on the modelling logic that underlies their offer for local governments: it is intended to optimize urban management, or even to predict it. Nevertheless, this logic has limitations, as the data continue to appear insufficient. This forces start-ups to reposition themselves: from optimizing the city, their offer has shifted to the development of devices (sensors, data and modelling), with the promise of quantifying and reducing the city to something that can be modelled, and therefore is smart – a goal that seems to recede continually as these devices multiply and become more complex.