1001 Smart Cities — smart city projects worldwide, graded by evidence

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How this works

This atlas is a map into the subject, not a substitute for it. Entries are AI-generated summaries of the sources listed on each page — generative AI is what makes this breadth possible, and that should be visible rather than disguised. Nothing is published from a first draft: a source-check protocol requires two independent sources or one authoritative one for every load-bearing claim, and entries that don't hold up stay unpublished. Entries marked ◆ Source-checked have passed it. What that is not is a line-by-line human fact-check — so follow the sources, and tell us when something is off. Insights signed by name are reviewed personally.

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Evening traffic on Mexico City's Circuito Interior in February 2023 — under Hoy No Circula, the last digit of each plate decides which weekday the car stays home

⭐ Landmark

Hoy No Circula: Mexico City's Plate-Based Driving Restriction

In November 1989, choking on ozone, Mexico City ordered most of its cars off the road one weekday a week, picked by the last digit of the plate. Thirty-seven years on, the ban is still running — five ozone alarms fired in the first four months of 2025 alone. Four peer-reviewed studies have examined what it achieved. Not one of them found what it was built to deliver.

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🌆 City of the Day

🇪🇪 Tartu

Estonia's e-state is national; Tartu shows what the city layer beneath it does. It insulated its Soviet-era blocks to class A and coined a word for the result — smartovka — delivering 17 of the 22 it budgeted. The pattern of its decade: the concrete half lasts, and the digital half is the cheap half — the lighthouse portal is gone, while the data store beneath it became the city's plumbing.

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Go deeper

💡 Insights How cities are ranked, why projects fail — the editorial deep dives. Read the insights → 🧭 Curated tours 12 guided tours — classics, failures, AI in action and more. Browse the tours → 📖 Glossary Every smart-city term explained with real, documented projects. Browse the terms →

The whole atlas, filterable Find the projects you care about Search every documented project, or narrow them down by category, topic, status, region, city size and launch year — including the ones that failed. Open the explorer →