📋 Evidence Briefs
One question, answered from the documented record. Shorter than an essay and stricter than one: a brief states an answer, three numbers, a table, the method and what it cannot tell you — and ships the data slice it counted, so the answer can be checked rather than believed.
- 🔍 Who actually evaluates smart-city projects? Almost nobody who can compel an answer: of the 1140 projects documented here, 62 cite an audit office or a court — 5.4%. Academic research reaches 22.8% of them, the press carries most of the rest, and 145 entries (12.7%) cite no voice from outside the organisations that built, run or paid for the system.
- 🕰️ How long does a smart-city project run before it stops? Longer than the word failure suggests, and the failures run longest of all. Of the 90 entries here that have finished, the median ran 4 years; the ones recorded as failed ran a median 5.5 years, against 4 for the ones recorded as succeeded. Nothing collapses — it is kept running until somebody stops paying for it.
- 💰 Which smart-city projects publish what they cost? Few of them, and not the ones you would expect. 236 of 1167 entries state a cost at all — 20.2%. A public-private partnership publishes a price 38% of the time, a publicly funded project 19%, and a privately funded one least of all at 10%. Disclosure follows the procurement announcement, not the public purse.
Why the numbers here are not typed. A brief is written to be quoted somewhere else, which makes a stale figure inside one worse than a stale figure anywhere on this site. Every number in a brief is a placeholder the build resolves from the published data at build time; the prose around it is reviewed, the arithmetic is not written by hand, and an unresolvable placeholder stops the build.