Changelog

Research is AI-assisted; every entry then passes the editorial fact-check before it goes live, and only three verdicts exist: published, held back, rejected. This page lists all three, because the ones that did not make it say more about the standard than the ones that did.

• Week of 20 July 2026 Europe finished, Asia begun

  The biggest week so far: the European flagship cities were completed and the Asian run started, which is why 28 cities gained three or more verified entries at once. Ten of the atlas's largest subjects finally got a proper topic hub, and the build learned to declare its editorial process in structured data.

  242 projects published28 cities deep-built13 held back or rejected1016 cross-links added
  • AtlasTen Asian metropolises were built out from a single entry each to full city profiles: Shanghai, Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Osaka, Busan, Jakarta, Bangkok and Manila. All cities →
  • AtlasCopenhagen and Madrid went live as new cities, adding Denmark as the atlas's 81st country. Copenhagen →
  • AtlasTen new topic hubs (open data, traffic, AI, water, energy grids, lighting and more) now explain what the evidence across the corpus actually supports, including where it does not. Topic hubs →
  • AtlasNew insight: how urban digital twins compare once you look past the renderings. Read the insight →
  • Held backOsaka's Expo 2025 was rejected as a smart-city entry: every technology element was scoped to the six-month event and stopped with it. Osaka →
  • Held backA Mumbai transit entry was withdrawn after review: its content described the intercity Mumbai-Pune expressway, run by a highway authority, not the city. Mumbai →
  • Held backBeijing Daxing airport's biometric boarding stays unpublished. The scope check passed, but no source could tell us whether travellers are able to decline face recognition. Beijing →
  • Held backA widely repeated claim that most of Mumbai's police cameras are broken was traced to neighbouring Navi Mumbai, a different city. The entry is held until the real figure surfaces. Mumbai →
  • Held backSeven of Darmstadt's narrowest entries were taken off the site. They were sound, but a mid-sized German city outweighing genuine metropolises misrepresents the atlas. Darmstadt →
  • SiteEvery project page now declares its sources, review date and editorial byline as structured data, so the fact-checking is machine-readable and not just prose.
  • SiteCSS and JavaScript are minified and bundled at build time (esbuild), and long lists on city and topic pages collapse behind a native disclosure so the important content stays near the top.
  • SiteContributions are protected by Turnstile, and Search Console data now feeds the SEO review directly.
• Week of 13 July 2026 The atlas goes public

  The first public week: 205 fact-checked projects across 137 cities and 80 countries, plus the editorial machinery around them. Twenty-two candidates did not survive review, which is roughly one in ten of everything researched.

  205 projects published137 cities live22 held back or rejected801 cross-links added
  • AtlasSix insight essays went live, on how cities are ranked, why smart-city projects fail, fifty years of congestion pricing, and more. All insights →
  • AtlasNineteen glossary entries explain the jargon in plain language, each linked to the projects that actually use it. Glossary →
  • Held backSeattle's RainWatch was submitted as live since 2021. The operator's own page says funding was withdrawn and the system shut down in December 2018. Rejected.
  • Held backMetaverse Seoul was described as running on a 224 billion won budget. It was switched off in October 2024, and the real spend was closer to 6 billion. Rejected. Seoul →
  • Held backA Copenhagen lighting entry turned out to bundle three separate things, including a pilot that belongs to a neighbouring municipality. Rejected, and rebuilt properly later. Copenhagen →
  • Held backMadrid's green-belt monitoring is held back: the trees, hectares and CO2 figures all check out, but the satellite and AI layer the entry was built around could not be confirmed for this programme. Madrid →