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Besançon, Franche-Comte, France -- Slip your credit card into an on-the-street parking meter in New York or London, and you may unknowingly have something in common with a patient undergoing neurosurgery and an astronaut on the international space station. The connecting link is the fact that the precision machinery that makes all three scenarios possible very likely came from one of the high-tech workshops clustered around Besançon in the Jura Mountains of Franche-Comte.
Once the capital of France’s watch and clock industry, Besançon is a particularly picturesque mid-sized city with an urban population of around 115,000, and a distinguished history. It is also a rich terrain for the small to medium enterprises that are developing tomorrow’s cutting edge, high precision mechanical instruments and nano technology.

 

The city hosts ENSMM (école nationale supérieur de mécanique et des microtechniques), France’s only advanced institute dedicated solely to nano and microtechnology, and its yearly trade fair, Micronora, is the most important gathering of its kind in Europe, with more than 900 companies displaying their latest hardware. Besançon’s university has 20,000 students and its Center for Applied Linguistics, which takes in 3,000 students a year and teaches 25 different languages, is the premier institution in France to teach French to foreigners. It ranks as one of the most advanced language schools in the world.

Low key, and attracting relatively little attention outside its specialized industries, Besançon has the dynamism and all the ingredients needed to develop into a quieter French version of California’s Silicon Valley in its formative early days. With global climate change emerging as a leading threat, the city is determined to cash in on the surge in interest in developing urban strategies to reduce greenhouse gases.

In many respects, Besançon is already an innovator in that regard. It is the first city with a population of more than 100,000 in France to receive the European Energy Award (known in France as Cit’ergie), indicating that it has achieved more than half its projected targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Cité-Energie, which links roughly 1,000 local authorities and individuals in 30 European countries, has its administrative headquarters in Besançon. The goal is to create horizontal channels of communications between European mid-sized cities at the level where Europe’s carbon emissions are a daily reality.

Besançon’s history dates back to Roman times (Julius Caesar refers to the city as Vesontio. The V eventually became a B). It was later attached to the Holy Roman Empire, where it ranked as the fifth most important capital. Because of its strategic location, Louis XIV incorporated the city definitively as part of France. Its most visible landmark today is a massive citadel overlooking the city. The fortress was entirely reconstructed by Vauban, who considered the city an essential component of France’s eastern defenses. Besançon’s other link to the distant past is its university. The University of Franche-Comté, founded in Dole in 1423, and in Besançon in 1621, is one of Europe’s earliest centers for higher education.

Besançon’s economy today was shaped both by events following the French Revolution and the labor turmoil of the 60s and 70s. In the period immediately following the French Revolution, Besançon briefly lost its status as the regional capital of Franche-Comté. For a while, it went into a brief decline. But then, in what was to prove to be a lucky stroke, Besançon granted political asylum to a Swiss clock maker, Laurent Mégevand, who had been expelled from Geneva because of his revolutionary sympathies. Mégevand led 80 fellow Swiss clock makers, who shared his revolutionary sympathies, to Besançon, where he established a factory, financed in part through his contacts with the leaders changing the course of French history in Paris. They included de Condorcet and Mirabeau.

In developing his business, Mégevand subcontracted different phases of clock making to small workshops around Besançon, an innovation that was ahead of its time, but which set the pattern for Besançon’s industry today. Mégevand eventually went bankrupt, but by then so many Swiss clock makers had moved to Besançon that the industry was able to survive on its own. By 1875, Besançon had 400 workshops producing watches. The most important one was founded by Emmanuel Lipman, who had presented Napoleon Bonaparte with a watch made in Besançon in 1807. The company formed by Lipman’s descendents manufactured a popular stop watch in 1896, and shortened the company’s name to Lip. Lip marketed its first electronic watch in 1952, and its watches were worn by Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Charles DeGaulle.

Besançon’s prestige and prosperity seemed unassailable, but in the 1970s, both technology and the global market changed dramatically. The introduction of quartz watches stole the market away from Lip and other manufacturers. A major source of Besançon’s prestige suddenly appeared outdated and ultimately doomed. The situation was exacerbated by the passions aroused by the demonstrations that had seized Paris and other French cities in May 1968.

With its market collapsing, Lip had intended to fire 480 of its 1,300 workers, but soon discovered that that was easier said than done. The struggle over the factory became an opening salvo in the struggle for adaptation by the French labor movement.

Some managers were briefly held hostage, ostensibly to get a clearer picture of the company’s intentions. The government responded by ordering the CRS riot police to launch a military assault, breaking down factory doors and freeing the hostages. Eventually Lip’s employees, who had hidden the company’s inventory of watches as well as the plans for making them, took over the factory and tried to run the business on their own. Liberation described the ensuing struggle as “the social conflict of the 1970s.” A sympathetic entrepreneur, Claude Neuschwander, eventually stepped in with financing and hopes of reviving the factory, but Giscard d’Estaing, who was then president and his prime minister, Jacques Chirac, concluded that Besançon’s rebellious workers needed to be taught a lesson. Renault, which had been nationalized, cancelled its contracts with Lip and a payment promised by the Ministry of Industry, was withheld. Lip was effectively blackballed, and eventually it folded. Today, the brand name has been resurrected and used to sell more than a million watches a year--many of them manufactured in China. The French part of the company only has around 40 employees. A few smaller companies that had specialized in watches managed to hold on by changing their strategy and relying partly on repairing watches as well as manufacturing them. Maty, which originally based its business on watches, expanded into jewelry and became one of France’s major manufacturers of wedding rings. It succeeded by carving out an important part of the mail-order market, and still maintains a showroom in the center of Besançon.

After the battle for Lip, the collapse of the textile industry which had employed around 5,000 workers, and the complications brought on by the 1973 oil crisis, Besançon seemed on the verge of a micro depression. Instead, it was saved by small and medium-sized precision industries which began taking advantage of the city’s pool of highly skilled talent. Besançon soon learned that watches are not the only instruments requiring precision engineering. The city’s pool of skilled talent at working on time measurement remained an important asset, only now it focused on more distant horizons. A CNRS lab in Besançon recently succeeded in setting a new world record by creating the shortest stable time-measuring frequency signal ever produced in a laboratory. The frequency length is roughly equivalent to the ratio between a quarter of the diameter of a human hair and the distance between the earth and the moon. It is the kind of extreme precision that is likely to prove invaluable as a navigation tool for future space programs.

The loss of both the textile industry and the watch making industry in the early 1970s nevertheless had a traumatic impact on the city. Some of the after effects were subtle. The shock had disrupted Besançon at the very moment that other mid-sized cities across France were finally beginning to modernize. Besançon began to feel itself marginalized not so much in technology, but in the kind of culture that makes a city attractive, and in the vitality and self-confidence that pushes it towards the future.

“The city drew in on itself,” says Bernard Falga, deputy director general for services (Directeur General Adjoint des Services) for the city administration. “It didn’t take advantage of many aspects of the modernization that other mid-sized French cities were experiencing.”

The exception was the environment. Already battered by the onslaught of wrenching economic changes transforming the rest of Europe, Besançon showed an early awareness of the implications for both the environment and its quality of life. After the shock of the 1973 oil crisis, Besançon banned cars from the city center, creating France’s first urban pedestrian zone. At the time the idea seemed nothing less than revolutionary. “It was incredible,” says Cité-Energie’s Gerard Magnin, “People were coming here from all over the world to see how it was working.” The Doubs River curves gently around Besançon’s city center, forming an ox bow, which is an even more convincing argument for eliminating automobiles. In place of cars, Besançon developed a sophisticated public transformation system. 80% of the buses, part of a network known as Ginko, operate on natural gas, and today they are complimented with a Velocity automated bicycle rental system.

“We didn’t have the Global Positioning System back then, “ says Jean Louis Fousseret, Besançon’s dynamic new mayor, “ so we used a device that measured the rotation of the buses’ wheels and radioed the information back.”

Christophe Dollet, who runs the Besançon office of L’Est Républicain, notes that the city planners were determined to protect Besançon’s green spaces and adopted an ambitious policy creating a green belt around Besançon’s outskirts.

As it turned out, nothing connected to the environment is simple. According to Dollet, roughly 80% of the employment in the area is located right around Besançon, and 60% of the people who work in Besançon have to commute to reach the city.

The effort to preserve the green belt, the city forced many of the workers needed to support the economy into moving to smaller communities that were twenty to fifty kilometers away. “That meant that families needed to have two cars,” says Dollet. Worse, the strategy meant that people not in the city had to make a major excursion to buy daily necessities. As a result, three major commercial shopping centers sprang up outside the city, and began draining business away from Besançon’s picturesque but inaccessible center of town. The city’s efforts to do the right thing were killing it.

Besançon’s new administration led by Jean Louis Fousseret, has set out to change that. The city had leading architects survey the area, and is now investing in new “´éco-quartiers”-- environmentally friendly neighborhoods that will be served by public transportation centrally heated and properly insulated. “We need to enable people to live here, and not force them to live 50 kilometers away,” says Fousseret. The emphasis is on establishing a practical equilibrium that will keep the city alive while still protecting the environment. The city is determined to continue protecting green spaces where it counts the most.

Making Besançon a place where people actually want to live is a key element in Fousseret’s plan to make the city more dynamic. A recent effort was a three-day festival, Sonorama, which brought in nearly 300 music groups and staged surprise sound happenings in unexpected places. The cost was more than one million euros, with roughly half the money coming from public funds and the rest from local sponsors, including the city’s casino. Not everyone was pleased with the results. A number of the sound experiences left people puzzled as to what it was all about, and some that were hidden away in passages off the main street were difficult to find. But Fousseret defends the experiment, explaining that it is important to have the town talked about, and even more important to stage events that get people out on the street talking to each other.

Laurent Devèze, who directs Bezançon’s Regional School of Fine Arts lists the quality of life and affordability as critical advantages. “The fact that we aren’t Paris is an enormous advantage.” he says.” A young artist can’t find a place to live in London or Paris. It costs too much. You are not going to get cutting edge talent in places that are so expensive that you have to be part of the establishment to live there.”

About half the School of Fine Art’s 200 students are from Franche-Comte. The remaining student body is divided between the rest of France and foreign countries, including China. The school, rated as one of the top ten in France, receives five applications for every opening.

Jean Pierre Sergent, an artist who moved back to Besançon after spending several years showing in galleries in New York, also relishes the practicality of the city. Sergent, who has been exploring the relationship between the shamanism of ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations and modern society, sees a relationship between his work and the climate change crisis. “In all these pre-industrial peoples,” he says,” there is a relationship with the universe that is sacred. They honor the rivers, the trees and the animals. We no longer have that, and as a result, we are ready to consume anything and to become anything no matter what it is. We can't go back in time, but we can have respect for our selves and for others. You can't stop the industrial machine from one day to the next, but in a world in which there are artists, there is more balance.” Sergent, who began his career at Besançon’s School of Fine Arts, thinks the city is still missing out on a potential windfall by not providing more direct support to established local artists working in contemporary art. “They could be bringing in several hundred thousand euros a year, “ he says.

Although the city may be a bit behind the curve on contemporary art, it does spend two million euros a year on its fine art school, and that is in spite of cutbacks in funding from Paris. There are plans to make studio space available at low cost to artists, and Besançon has recently run an exchange with art groups in Shanghai. “The goal,” Bernard Falga explains,” is to connect with trends outside the region. “ Bruno Smith, who handles communications for Parkeon, a major developer of pay-for-parking systems around the world, says that the fact that workers like being in Besançon and that there is relatively little turnover is a feature that his corporation finds attractive. “I don’t know if the company picked Besançon because it liked its approach to the environment,” he says, “but Parkeon has been an innovator in using solar power to run our equipment, and Besançon seems to fit our company model.”

Fousseret is especially determined these days to attract the new industries that will generate the kind of energy efficiency and alternative solutions to respond to climate change. His environmental concerns extend beyond reducing greenhouse gases, though. The water pouring through Besançon’s system is so pure that locals claim it tastes better than bottled water. Fousserret keeps a decanter and several glasses on his desk to ensure that visitors get to taste it.

On a more serious note, Fousseret emphasizes that as far as his administration is concerned, the environment depends on three pillars: social action, environmental protection and economic development. By simply informing and sensitizing its own employees to conservation options, Besançon’s administration has reduced its own electricity costs by 13%. The city is also choosing 240 volunteer model families to demonstrate how altering lifestyles can further save energy.

A number of projects are likely to have a direct impact. Roughly half the terrain of Franche-Comté is covered with forests, so wood is a local energy source. The trick is to burn it at a high enough temperature to reduce the pollutants, and then to filter what remains. Besançon’s energy strategy calls for installing ten modern automated wood-fired boilers to replace current boilers that work on natural gas. It has already installed a 7.5-megawatt wood-fired boiler, which is one of the largest now operating in France. By centralizing heating, the city can guarantee that the process used is much cleaner than thousands of independent houses each equipped with their own heating system that may or may not be operating efficiently.

The wood system, used by Besançon is fed either by small wooden plaquettes, which are a byproduct of the forest industries, or by wooden granules that come from the sawmills. The fuel is fed into burners by a specially developed system, which uses trucks equipped with giant hoses that use air pressure to push the wood plaquettes into reconverted bins that had previously been used for coal. The system works much the way wheat and other grains are moved. The use of wood makes much of the city’s heating renewable. Some questions were raised after it was found that a town incinerator had very likely emitted traces of dioxin, which was suspected of slightly increasing the rate of breast cancer. But that appears to have been the result of an earlier technology. The incinerator has since been upgraded, and equipped with filters.

That said, the French government as well as local authorities are carefully monitoring the environment. “Any time you burn anything there is going to be some kind of emission,” says Eric Alauzet, who heads Besançon’s green party, and is also part of the team monitoring the outputs from the incinerator. A long-term goal is to double the amount of recycling and to reduce the amount incinerated. “The less energy consumed,” says Alauzet, “the less pollution.”

Paul Marie Guenchard, the director for Franche-Comté of ADEME ( Agence de l’Environment et de la Maitrise de l’Energie--the French government agency in charge of the environment and energy) says that the government is paying special attention to projects like the centralized heating using wood and potential problems such as dioxin fall out. “We want to be sure that we get this right,” says Guenchard. “We don’t want to go down the wrong path and find that we have even worse problems later on.”

On the renewable side, Besançon installed 345 square meters of solar photovoltaic cells on the roof of a technical center in 2004. The electricity is fed into the EDF grid, and the idea is to provide the equivalent energy necessary to run the city’s fleet of 30 electric vehicles. In local sports centers, solar power is also used for heating water.

Guenchard notes that Besançon had to buy most of its equipment from outside France, simply because France doesn’t manufacture it. While Besançon has an energy award for reaching 50% of its targets, Lausanne in Switzerland is considered a “Gold” city, meaning that it has reached 75% of its targets. Besançon’s twin city, Freibourg, in Germany, is also more advanced in terms of energy conservation. Guenchard credits the federal systems in both Switzerland and Germany, which give more autonomy to local governments, and encourages much more dynamism at a local level.

Gerard Magnin, who previously had Guenchard’s job, before leaving to set up Cité-Energie, is more direct. “In France,” he says,”the omnipresence of the state, which takes care of everything in place of the individual, ends up by castrating initiative.”

While Switzerland, Germany and Austria have focused on local solutions, France has plowed its resources into massive projects like nuclear power which are better suited to highly centralized government administrations, in which decisions tend to come from the top down. Besançon is an exception because it has had to be.

Gérard Magnin notes that despite the European Union’s expressed desire for unity, many of the members of the European Union tend to get nervous when city-to-city contacts bypass national governments, yet when it comes to saving energy local officials may know more about practical solutions than officials who are isolated in the capital. Magnin says that he became interested in Cité-Energie after he started asking himself why other cities like Lausanne, Basle and Freibourg were able to find solutions that seemed to elude Besançon.

“We have the same technological conditions, and roughly the same quality of life,” says Guenchard. “I kept asking myself why does it work over there and not here. The idea was to open cities to other cities. To give everyone a field of vision that was larger.” Cité-Energie grew out of a European Union project to write a monograph studying the energy situation in a typical city in each of the original 12 countries in the EU. Magnin picked Besançon for France. An initial EU grant of €100,000, enabled the creation of an association for exchanging information on a person-to-person basis among the participating cities. The advantage of the rating system, which picked up a number of practices followed in Swiss cities, Magnin says, is that it allows cities to see clearly how they are progressing in comparison to other cities.

Guenchard, whose sister, Paulette, was one of the original founders of the association, feels that the energy awards are primarily valuable as a management tool. It forces managers to set down their goals clearly according to the same standards used by other cities, and then it helps them keep track of whether they are really making progress. Actually meeting the criteria, he feels, can be problematic. For instance city lighting is an important expense for any city, and a major consumer of energy, yet trying to improve a system within a short time span for a city like Besançon could require up to fifty people working on the problem full time. “Most city’s don’t have the money to pay for that,” he says. That said, Besançon has already announced that it plans to put up Christmas decorations this year using light emitting diodes, which should reduce electricity consumption significantly.

When it comes to developing a comprehensive energy strategy, however, Guenchard points out that dealing with the environment in Franche-Comté, where the entire region’s dispersed population is only 1.3 million people presents a different set of problems from those faced by a densely populated city.

“You aren’t going to run an expensive tramline out to an area where there aren’t enough people to make it sustainable,” he says. The bottom line is that different situations can require radically different solutions. A major problem in France, Guenchard feels, is a tendency to apply the same strategies for all areas despite the fact that the real demands on the ground may be totally different. That explains why both Guenchard and Magnin feel that local autonomy is so important. For the moment, Besançon looks like an excellent laboratory to prove their ideas.