The city of Luxembourg was one of the first to invest in an e-City programme – the technology of which allows citizens to connect with each other quickly via a smart, integrated network. The New Economy speaks to the city’s former Mayor, Paul Helminger, to find out about the effectiveness and cost of HOTCITY, Luxembourg’s e-City programme.

The New Economy: Paul, what was your original vision for the e-City of Luxembourg?

Paul Helminger: Well, quite frankly, my first concern was to improve the efficiency of the city services using the whole gamut of new technologies the information and communications could offer, so it meant really looking inside at the city and streamlining the processes, weeding out things that were done in double, really with the idea to end up with the city being a sort of one-stop service provider for the city. Once we had done that, the second idea was to bring this closer to the citizen via the internet, at home first, and then the third stage was to bring it to where the citizen or the visitor to the city was at any given moment, so in other words introduce this concept of seamless coverage of the city as a hotspot, which became HOTCITY.

[I]t makes the city much more liveable

The New Economy: So why was this ultra-modern connectivity important for the city, its citizens and businesses?

Paul Helminger: The city is quite an extraordinary city, it’s fully 65 percent today, more than that, of its residents do not hold Luxembourg passports. In other words, we are living in a city that is very multilingual, that is very mobile, we double in size during the day with all the commuters coming into work, so we have this need to connect to the citizen, to the visitor, in ways that use the full power and availability of the internet. So it makes the city much more liveable, it gives the citizen an idea of how to move around the city, where things are happening, information about events, live transmissions of events, regardless of whether he is at home, or whether he sits on a cafe terrace. So that is the idea, and I think in the meantime we’ve come very close to realising that.

The New Economy: How much did the initiative cost and how did you get support for it?

Paul Helminger: Well, let me say that the investment in the platform and in the network which we really insisted should be in the hands of the city, it has cost us a couple of million over the years.

The New Economy: And where did the support for the network come from?

Paul Helminger: I think it started with our services themselves, who suddenly were able, if they were at their workplace somewhere in the city, to on-the-spot reach out to the files which they’d left at the office, so they realised that their own work had become much more efficient, and of course we saw that on the cost-side. And then for the citizens themselves, the idea that they would be able to sort of buy their bus tickets, find out exactly when the next bus would come, where there would be an empty parking space, all these things of course make the life of being the citizen, the resident, or the visitor to the city much easier and make therefore the city much more attractive. So the response I think was really very good.

[T]he basic idea was the make sure that we had an open platform

The New Economy: What role did the private sector play in the e-City program?

Paul Helminger: We had been looking before we launched this at the sort of other cities which had happened around the world, and we found that cities that had really gone to private operators and entrusted a private operator with building similar systems, and we found cities that had wanted to do it all of their own. We kind of came to the conclusion after this sort of benchmarking that once thing was important, that we would set up a network and a platform that would be open, and the one way to guarantee that was to have the city as the owner of both the platform and the network, but then to make sure that that platform was open so that all service providers, whether they be in telecommunications or internet services, would be able to use that platform. Now we have one strategic partner, because we obviously needed sort of a kickstart, but the basic idea was the make sure that we had an open platform, an open system where all telecom and all service providers could join, and that also has proved to be a big success.

The New Economy: So finally, you said you looked at how other cities were doing it. Cities today looking around thinking they want to develop their own e-City network, what advice would you give to them?

Paul Helminger: Well I think it is exactly that, that they should make sure that their system is an open system, because that is what encourages providers, people that have ideas about new applications, new services to offer, to come to you and ask to be part of the ecosystem that is today HOTCITY.

The New Economy: Paul, thank you.

Paul Helminger: Thank you.