Bordeaux

Bordeaux has been running its sewers in real time since before the phrase smart city existed. After runoff floods hit the conurbation in 1981 it adopted dynamic sewer management in 1991 and commissioned the RAMSES telecontrol centre the following year: it watches the network around the clock and regulates flows across 228 retention basins, 165 pumping stations and 49 rain gauges, combining ground readings with national weather radar. A second version in 2007 folded in wastewater pumping and treatment, and from 2013 dynamic management began using the pipes themselves as temporary storage during light rain to cut discharges into the river. Operation passed from a private delegate to a public utility at the start of 2026. The operator reports the system anticipated or managed more than 300 significant rain events in its first two decades — and a 2014 study applied to this same network argued that hydraulic simulation is poor at predicting the commonest flooding, the overflows caused by blockages, roots, grease and cement in service connections. A real-time control centre optimises the network it can model; the small floods sit in the maintenance backlog.

The camera network is comparatively thin and the city says so, which is rarer than the network being thin. Bordeaux put its first eleven cameras into the pedestrian streets in 2002 and had 105 by the end of 2017; by January 2025 it counted 202 cameras across eight districts watched by forty agents around the clock, who also write penalties remotely from the feed for parking, traffic and fly-tipping. At the 2017 expansion the city compared itself openly: one camera per 2,380 residents against one per 320 in Nice. The output is thin in proportion — 2,352 remote fines and 600 judicial requisitions in 2024 — and since 2022 a municipal ethics committee reviews each proposed camera site, a body most comparable networks in this atlas do not have. No independent audit of the network's effect exists; the arrest and requisition counts are the police's own.

The data portal and the heat index are the newer half, and they fail and succeed in opposite ways. The metropolitan DataHub held 562 datasets in August 2026 with 549 carrying an open licence, and every unlicensed one came from a small member commune or is the portal's own housekeeping — a shared metropolitan portal inherits the metadata discipline of its smallest publisher. The urban thermal comfort index grades every two-metre square of the metropole from comfort to discomfort, modelled from a summer 2021 campaign combining aerial thermography, satellite data and morphological databases — and calibrated against how people actually felt, using sensors at eighty measurement points and more than 500 responses to codes posted in the street. The urban agency used it to build a heat-vulnerability map and concluded that 52 per cent of the metropole's population is strongly to very strongly vulnerable during a heatwave; the campaign also found that some tree species stop cooling above thirty degrees and that existing plantings in one avenue no longer delivered a benefit.