With nearly 50% of the world's population now living in urban areas, JCDecaux's elegant street furniture enhances the quality of life for millions of city dwellers

As a young man more than 35 years ago, Jean-Claude Decaux made a living posting bills on buildings around Paris. His modest livelihood came to an abrupt halt after the local government declared this practice illegal. That's when Decaux came up with a better idea one that would allow him to continue posting bills and do it in a way that would contribute to the quality of life and beauty of the city.

Decaux's inspiration came one stormy day when he noticed people getting soaked while waiting for a city bus to come by. Why not offer to build bus shelters for free in exchange for the right to sell advertising on them, Decaux thought. He took his proposal to the Mayor of Lyon and got permission to go ahead. That rainy day marked the start of the world's largest street furniture company with projected revenues in 1999 of $1.4 billion, primarily generated from advertising.

Today the street furniture of JCDecaux S.A. is installed in more than 1,200 cities around the world. In early 1999, it acquired Havas Media Communication- Outdoor Advertising, Europe's largest billboard advertising firm, extending the company's presence into 31 countries and more than 11,000 cities.

Over the years, the company has expanded its street furniture offerings from bus shelters and kiosks to news racks, traffic signage, light posts, litterbins, benches, interactive information panels and automatic public toilets. "When I created the first advertising bus shelter, free of charge to local authorities, I wanted to remedy the problem of dilapidated equipment; to fight against surplus and unsightly advertising, and, by revaluing it, make known the lively role that quality advertising can play," says Decaux, who still manages the privately owned company along with his sons, Jean- Francois and Jean-Charles. "Our main concern has been the cleanliness of cities and the setting up of public services essential to the comfort of city dwellers."

Although the field of private contractors vying for city contracts has become crowded, JCDecaux has distinguished itself by producing street furniture that is as attractive as it is functional. In addition to its own in-house talent, it has commissioned some 30 of the world's best architects and designers to create a wide array of street furniture that is sensitive to the cultural urban nuances of their native countries. Jean-Michel Wilmotte, Philippe Starck, Mario Bellini, Sir Norman Foster, Massimo Vignelli, Martin Szekely, Charles Gwathmey, Robert Stern, Peter Eisenman, Knud Holscher and James Polshek are among the legendary names who have contributed to JCDecaux's furniture line. Porsche's design department, Style Porsche, also used its affinity for the street to come up with striking designs, as did the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, Scotland.

JCDecaux sees its role as designing what French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte calls a city's "interior architecture," deserving of "as much thought as that given to private spaces." It believes that bus shelters, kiosks and other street furniture are too integral to the urban landscape to be built without attention to aesthetics.

Sadly, this philosophy is not always shared by local officials. "Public design is all too often an inharmonious piecing together of cheap solutions," observes Danish architect Knud Holscher, adding that "JCDecaux attaches great importance to the quality of design which it fully adapts to the character of each city."

JCDecaux has even adapted Paris' renowned Morris kiosk into a variety of historic and contemporary styles. Increasingly, it is developing multifunctional kiosks to reduce sidewalk clutter and provide public amenities where they are welcomed most. Through technological innovations developed by the company's extensive R&D arm, many JCDecaux advertising kiosks now integrate newsstands, bottle banks, water fountains, telephone booths, clocks, automatic public toilets, ticket dispensers, interactive information terminals and even automatic vending machines.

The company also is introducing a new generation of "smart furniture" such as information kiosks that have the smallest possible footprint in combination with the largest available LCD to ensure easy legibility. In addition, it has spurred the development of a new device that gives passengers on-line bus information for specific routes. Commuters receive that data either on JCDecaux's patented hand-held Infobus pager or in the bus shelters.

Another company signature is the scrupulous servicing of its facilities, which provides premium value to advertisers who don't want their messages desecrated by vandals and turned into an urban eyesore. More than 3,500 service employees maintain the company's street furniture worldwide. Any broken glass is replaced within 24 hours. Graffiti is scoured clean. In places like Amsterdam where graffiti has become a public art form, JCDecaux has equipped its maintenance workers with motorbikes so they can remove it all the faster.

"This company is defined by a love for good taste and a certain aesthetics and quality," says JCDecaux USA CEO Bernard Parisot, based in New York. "From the architects we work with and the street furniture they create to the way we've designed our letterhead and the way we keep our street furniture clean, Decaux is a business built on those beliefs."

Although JCDecaux is currently in hundreds of European cities, its entry into the American market is relatively recent. Through a bidding process, in 1995 it won a contract from the city of San Francisco to provide kiosks and automatic public toilets, a patented product originally invented to replace the pissoirs of Paris. The company found an unlikely ally in film director Francis Ford Coppola, a native San Franciscan. An admirer of French industrial design, Coppola had asked to see the engineering of the new public toilets on a visit to Paris, and was invited by Jean-Claude Decaux, an avid film fan, to tour the company's R&D facilities. Back home, Coppola lauded "Monsieur Decaux a true connoisseur of art and design," and added "how wonderful it would be if a man like this and his exceptional company could design a city of the future."

San Francisco signed a 20-year contract with JCDecaux for 20 universally accessible automatic public toilets and 90 kiosks, 70 of which are newsstands and 20 that display art provided at no cost to the city. San Francisco has since expanded its partnership ahead of schedule to include 30 additional toilets and 135 more kiosks. Outside of Moscone Convention Center, 14 JCDecaux streetlamps, designed by Philippe Starck, stand as elegant vertical sculpture during the day, lowering automatically to a horizontal position at dusk when the lights come on.

While the idea of acquiring free street furniture designed by renowned architects is enticing to many cash-strapped local governments, the JCDecaux program isn't right for every city. In 1992, Seattle requested a full line of street furniture, but vetoed the deal because it didn't want the contract to include advertising. JCDecaux, in turn, is only interested in cities that have sufficient population and pedestrian street traffic to generate advertising revenue to support its street furniture program.

The company makes no apologies for its advertising-driven business. "In Europe, the level of advertising creativity has actually gone up because of our street furniture. It's become a real showcase for ad agency creative people," says Suzanne Davis, senior vice president, JCDecaux USA. In San Francisco too, JCDecaux kiosks are noted for their upscale advertising display.

JCDecaux is beginning to garner attention on the East Coast as well. However, city politics with public hearings, local contractor requirements, etc. present many obstacles. In 1998, JCDecaux, in partnership with GE Capital Services, enlisted seven different architects and designers to create coordinated street furniture prototypes for New York City. But last June, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration suspended its search for new bus shelters, newsstands and toilets.

JCDecaux is hopeful that New York City will reconsider that decision. It's easy to see why: The winning company, in the competitive bidding, could have expected gross revenue of between $1 billion and $2 billion over the 20-year contract from advertising income, against an investment of about $100 million to build the structures, as well as the costs of maintaining them. It is also promised great promotional value as the provider of fixtures designated as NYC's official standard.

Nonetheless, JCDecaux continues to make progress in bringing to American streets the style and functionality already familiar to Europeans. Last year, in a demonstration program, Chicago took on 24 of the company's pedestal newsstands. JCDecaux expects an RFP (request for proposal) for a more expansive line of street furniture to be issued shortly.

The company is also committed to new technology and new avenues of expansion in America, says JCDecaux USA CEO Bernard Parisot. In 1998, JCDecaux established its MallScape operations, a program that positions the U.S. shopping mall as a new advertising medium. JCDecaux signed an exclusive 15-year contract with the Simon Property Group, the world's largest commercial real estate owner and manager. As a result, JCDecaux will install over 5,000 advertising structures in 130 malls in 35 states. In addition, it signed a contract with Urban Shopping Centers, America's third-largest shopping center operator. That deal adds more than 35 prestigious malls like Water Tower Place in Chicago, San Francisco Shopping Centre and Copley Place in Boston.

"It's an extension of our business. With their mixture of entertainment and retail, American malls are more like a recreation of your traditional downtown areas. They even have names like 'Town Center,' 'Town Square,'" says Parisot. "We've been working with developers from concept. They want them to incorporate signage, to function like a downtown." JCDecaux USA's colleagues in Europe are now exploring their own version of those American efforts.

If the U.S. subsidiary is beginning to influence European operations, it's the company's continental traditions that may help change the face of American urban life. Much of the outdoor advertising in Europe has long been accepted as a lively kind of street art, with ad agencies turning out some of their most sophisticated work for use on city streets. The U.S., of course, has a different history of the medium. Inconsistent at best, much of the country's outdoor ads are relegated to bottom-of-the-barrel billboard status. JCDecaux's street furniture elegantly frames outdoor ads, showcasing them in large back-lit kiosk panels. In doing so, the company helps elevate the medium, enhancing the quality of what is already an inevitable part of urban life, and makes it more palatable for cities to incorporate it into their urban design planning making street furniture work double duty as an advertising forum and means to reduce street clutter. "It's an obvious urban solution," says the company's US chief, Parisot. "JCDecaux wants to enhance the quality of life and offer services at no cost."