Bordeaux A Historical Digital City

Everyone knows that Bordeaux is one of the most protected historical sites in the world as per UNESCO. In fact, in Europe, there are not many cities that can challenge the level of protectedness in Bordeaux. Well, you have Paris, of course which is hard to challenge. If a developer were to say that they wanted to repaint a building, they would have to go through a whole array of red tape to get things done.

Anyway, Bordeaux showed the world that although history and culture is tops in their books, they are not oblivious to the digital world as well. It is not impossible to remain historical and culturally-rich with a tinge of technology. In fact, technology like QR Code can help promote the sites even further.

In an unsuspecting show of public administration, the City Council began putting up QR Codes inside and outside of these historical sites in a project they call the Digital City Project.

QR Code is a Japanese-originated technology which has been in use in the anime-country for more than a decade now. The usefulness of QR Codes became only apparent to other nations in recent years and many more countries like Australia, UK, US, France, Netherlands, etc are starting to use them to place offline links to online content.

As with this new Bordeaux Digital City project. The QR Codes places at the historically rich buildings and parking meters will give mobile phone users access to information relating to the sites. Users of smart phones will get 24 hours on-demand access to information about famous streets, buildings, monuments in and around Bordeaux.

Since Google Maps is widely used in France for travelers and history buffs, it only makes sense that they take the whole Digital City project another step further by linking it to Google Maps where users can find parking places, shops, monuments, buildings, tips to traveling in Bordeaux and also news. These are all ideas still ‘under construction’ but in due time, we suspect that Bordeaux will be a very travel-friendly place, despite the obvious language barrier.