Case Study: Paris Wants to Share its World-Class Digital Success With Other Cities

Build it once and share – that’s the collaborative motto being adopted by Paris, which is eager to share its digital success with the rest of the world.

The City of Lights is calling on other city governments to embrace its modular, open-source Lutece platform, which now powers more than 200 digital services throughout Paris, with the aim of creating a developer community. 

Described as “part operating system, part content management system”, Lutece enables Parisians to register their children at school, reserve a tennis court, or register for social housing from the comfort of their homes, whereas prior, they would have to take a day off to go to City Hall. 

The platform also enables citizens to have a say on how municipal funds are spent through the city’s €100 million participatory budget, and through Dans Ma Rue: "On My Street", a website and app, even report and track the city’s response to issues such as graffiti or broken streetlights.

The result has improved end-to-end communication between users, government and external services, and streamlines both decision making and action. 

In partnership with Bloomberg Associates, which has assisted Paris in building out the Lutece platform, cities around the world are now being encouraged to download Lutece from GitHub and freely relicense, repurpose and customise already existing software to improve their city operations, rather than recreating costly technology solutions piece by piece.