Governing the smart city: How Lyon Metropolis managed to steer a heterogeneousensemble of public and private actors towards sustainable climate-energy policies

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In 2012, Electricité de France (EDF) launched one of the biggest smart meter experiment in the Greater Lyon Metropolis. The innovation project constructed a consortium named Smart Electric Lyon (SEL). SEL was established as a pilot project in France to scale out new smart meter device in the city level. SEL hybrids the funding from national government, EDF and dozens of private enterprises that latterly acknowledged as 'smart city' for Lyon Metropolis. In the meantime, Lyon Metropolis is reshaping their institutional governance to catch up with smart city program promoted by its private partners. The metropolis itself have experienced its territory as fertile ground for private investment on smart city innovation project. As for SEL, Lyon Metropolis seems to harness its presence as part of the city campaign to leverage the new city branding of attractiveness as 'smart and sustainable'. Thus, such reconfiguration disclosed the opportunity to investigate unprecedented effect of smart city in different cities particularly the governance model. An in-depth interview with dozens of Lyon Metropolis actors and SEL initiators constituted as the mains sources of this work. The findings illustrate that Lyon govern a central role to steer private smart city program in favor of territorial attractiveness branding. It confesses the growing investment on smart city have driven the city to promote the label of "smart" and "sustainable" to congregate international benchmark indicators.