Paris

Paris&Co is the innovation agency of Paris and the Métropole, and incubates about 500 start-ups a year. It runs five Quartiers d’Innovation (innovation districts): two in Paris, in Paris Rive Gauche and around La Chapelle since 2018, and three more in the Métropole from 2023. Up to 40 pilots a year are tested across them, with the stated option of stopping those that fail. The programme’s published description gives no count of how many went on to wider use.

Organisation in focus

Paris&Co

The innovation agency of Paris and the Métropole, home of the Quartiers d’Innovation.

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In 2025 Paris&Co launched the Défis Parisiens (Paris challenges), five calls asking firms to work on municipal problems such as low-carbon building sites, predictive maintenance of heating and saving water. Paris Innovation Amorçage, a seed-grant scheme run since 2009 with Bpifrance, the state investment bank, has given €61.5m to more than 1,700 start-ups. Station F, a private campus in the 13th arrondissement, says it hosts more than 1,000 start-ups, with Google, LVMH and Meta among the firms on site; the figures are its own.

A firm hoping to sell software to the city meets an empty chair: the city’s organisation chart of 9 September lists the head of the DSIN, its IT and digital department, as vacant.

Much of the city’s infrastructure is run by others. Agemob, a joint body of Paris and neighbouring communes known until 2024 as the SAVM, contracts Vélib’, the shared-bike scheme, to the operator Smovengo. Most public chargers belong to TotalEnergies, which holds the city’s Belib’ concession with 2,252 points, and to Saemes, a car-park company linked to the city. Île-de-France Mobilités, the regional transport authority, organises the metro, trams and buses that RATP and other operators run. The State’s Société des grands projets is building the Grand Paris Express metro.

Digital inclusion runs through social-economy organisations. The Stratégie parisienne d’inclusion numérique (Paris digital-inclusion strategy) has worked with them and with refurbished equipment since 2017, according to the city’s 2025 digital strategy.

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Stratégie numérique responsable de Paris — dossier de presse

The city’s responsible digital strategy and its rules for artificial intelligence (Nov 2025).

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Research also sits inside the administration. Mélody Tonolli, deputy mayor for universities and research, coordinates the city’s scientific council, and the city places CIFRE doctoral students, PhDs funded jointly with an employer, in its own departments. Paris en Selle, a cycling association, tracks the Plan Vélo in an independent observatory. La Quadrature du Net, a digital-rights group, has fought algorithmic video surveillance in court.

Emmanuel Grégoire of the Parti socialiste (Socialist Party) became mayor on 29 March 2026, elected by the Conseil de Paris with 103 votes to succeed Anne Hidalgo. For the first time, Parisians had chosen all 163 councillors on one city-wide vote. His list of Socialists, Les Écologistes (the Greens) and Communists won 50.52% in the second round, against 41.52% for Rachida Dati of the centre-right Les Républicains.

None of the 36 deputy mayors appointed on 30 March has digital technology, data or the smart city in their title; innovation sits with Richard Bouigue, deputy for economic development. Grégoire’s inaugural speech set out children, housing, renovation and policing as priorities, without the French words for digital, data or artificial intelligence.

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Discours d'Emmanuel Grégoire, nouveau maire de Paris (Conseil de Paris, 29 mars 2026)

Mayor pledges bold ecological reforms, new housing strategies, expanded Métropole powers, and revamped municipal policing.

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Paris has no smart-city strategy in force; its 2014–2018 programme of calls for projects was experimental. The working plan is the climate plan, with about 500 actions. The digital strategy is one of restraint: a Stratégie numérique responsable (responsible digital strategy), which a 2021 law requires of every commune of more than 50,000 people. Paris debated its 27 actions in November 2025, about 11 months after the legal deadline.

The strategy puts digital technology at about 1 million tonnes of CO₂ a year, 5% of the city’s carbon footprint. Under its heading on an exemplary administration, it aims to cut digital’s environmental footprint by two-fifths by 2035. The same session voted to set up an AI ethics committee with unions and citizens; the strategy adds executive approval and public notice for every AI use. In April 2026 the city still described the committee as a proposal, and no meeting has been reported.

Many levers sit elsewhere. The region’s transport authority sets fares and routes. In April the Métropole re-elected Patrick Ollier of Les Républicains as its president, and Grégoire wants it to become a body that really decides. Paris also holds the label of the EU’s mission for climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030, while its own plan sets neutrality for 2050.

The sharpest argument is about cameras the city does not run. Policing in Paris belongs to the Préfecture de police, the State’s police headquarters. A 2023 law for the Olympic Games allowed an experiment with algorithmic video surveillance. At Paris 2024 it was used by the Préfecture, by RATP, which runs the metro and buses, by SNCF, the national railway, and by the town of Cannes. The State committed about €886,000, and most of the software came from the French start-up Wintics.

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Expérimentation de traitements algorithmiques d'images légalement collectées au moyen de systèmes de vidéoprotection — Rapport du comité d'évaluation (janvier 2025)

The official evaluation of the State’s Olympic camera experiment: performance uneven.

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In January 2025 the official evaluation committee found its performance uneven: good on intrusions and crowd density, very poor on fires and falls, with very few police interventions following its alerts. No breach of the law was found. The experiment ended in March 2025. After the Conseil constitutionnel (Constitutional Council) struck down a first extension, the law for the 2030 Winter Olympics revived it to the end of 2027. A security law known as Ripost, upheld by the Conseil constitutionnel in August 2026, now runs it to the end of 2030 in public places exposed to serious risk. The city’s own AI rules cover only its own services.

The Budget Participatif (participatory budget) lets residents propose projects and vote on part of the city’s investment spending. In its first ten years votes allocated €769m to 1,345 projects, about €77m a year on average. Turnout in the residents’ vote, open from the age of 7, rose from 92,809 in 2016 to 162,395 in 2025, when the eleventh round chose 104 winning projects.

DansMaRue, the city’s app for reporting street faults, remains in service. It logged 862,264 reports in 2023, against 46,828 in its first year, 2014.

The Plan Vélo 2021–2026 promised 180 km of protected cycle lanes for more than €250m. Cycling on the city’s 2020 counter network grew by 47% between 2020 and 2025, and the cycle network now runs to 1,607 km. Paris en Selle judged about 40% of the plan delivered when the term ended. Growth is uneven: 9 of 55 counter sites fell in 2025, notably on the southern boulevards des Maréchaux. In October 2026 the city presented a plan for 2027–2032, promising €200m for 140 km of new cycle lanes and 420 more junctions made safe.

Vélib’ Métropole, the shared bikes, still runs on a contract that ends in 2032. A 2023 audit for the SAVM found the service short of its contractual targets, with 16% fewer bikes than contracted in early 2022, and projected a deficit of €113m by the contract’s end. Rentals fell 3.2% in 2025, to 47.3 million, after a change in e-bike pricing, while other bike-share services grew by 25.4%.

The Périphérique carpool lane was measured within months. Since 3 March 2025 one lane of the ring road has been kept for vehicles carrying at least two people. From March to June 2025 traffic on it fell 13% on a year earlier, against 1% on the other lanes, and it moved 10 to 20 km/h faster. The lane is still in use.

The limited-traffic zone in the four central arrondissements, the city’s districts, has barred through-traffic since November 2024, but no fines had been issued by September 2026. Airparif, the region’s air-quality monitoring body, measured 18% less traffic inside the zone between 2023 and 2025, against 10–12% further out. It found a small fall in nitrogen dioxide, and says the zone alone does not explain all of the drop in traffic. The Métropole’s low-emission zone survives in law: in May 2026 the Constitutional Council struck down Parliament’s vote to abolish such zones as out of place in the bill.

The Grand Paris Express, a new metro the State is building around the city, has slipped. Line 15 South, 33 km with 16 stations, was due at the end of 2025 and is now expected in autumn 2027. The share of its station equipment linked to the control centre rose from 3% in 2024 to almost all of it by June 2026. The first section of Line 18 is due to open in the first week of December 2026.

Each of the three systems in the headline reaches Paris through someone else’s process. The shared bikes follow a syndicate’s contract and its audits, the new metro lines the State builder’s schedule, and the cameras a law that already runs them to the end of 2030. A participatory-budget ballot can pay for a project on a Paris street, but it has no say over any of the three.