Alba Iulia is known as the city that opened its streets to companies as a free testbed: by its own 2019 count, 100 solutions from 45 companies between 2016 and 2019. What lasted is what the city later bought with EU grants. In almost every case the equipment arrived before the people, the contracts or the measurements needed to run it.
The atlas documents 7 projects in Alba Iulia, the earliest dating to 2011: 1 scaled back, 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (1 entry) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Alba Iulia is actually doing.
Computed from the 7 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The record starts with a gift. On 2 December 2016, under a protocol with the Ministry of Communications and with the centenary of the 1918 union in view, Alba Iulia opened itself to companies as a free testbed. Alba Iulia Smart City 2018 grew to 100 solutions from 45 partner companies by the city's 2019 count. Orange Romania built its own LoRaWAN network of six gateways and put LoRa modules on about 100 street lights; in 2018 another trial put 50 wireless sensors in the asphalt of parking spaces. The pilot's own account was uneven: the same city manager described it in February 2018 as costing the city nothing and in July 2018 as 85% funded by the European Commission, and a peer-reviewed study called Alba Iulia a digital city, not a smart one.
What continued was what the city paid for. Its e-administration had run on EU money since 2011, and a 2018 project produced today's online portal. In 2020 three EU-funded projects began rebuilding the street lighting as LED lamps that report to a dispatch centre, each one dimmed, metered and able to raise its own fault alert. Paid parking by app, SMS and online followed in January 2021, and an online participatory budget opened in September 2020, with 1,000,000 lei per edition for projects residents proposed and voted on.
The next systems came with construction budgets and arrived ahead of the people to run them. The mobility dispatch, a control room for the traffic lights of two EU-funded street projects, was handed to the city on 30 May 2025; in October 2025 the mayor said about 75–80% of it worked and that staff were not yet intervening from the room. The VeloCity bike-share bikes, bought with European funds, sat in a depot for nearly a year until an operator was contracted, and opened on 16 March 2026.
The open question is now measurement. The lighting system meters every lamp, yet the savings a national agency presented as results are the targets on the city's own project page. The city's portal carried 7% of the payments made outside the counters in the first quarter of 2026, against 66% for the national ghiseul.ro. Votes in the participatory budget fell from 17,970 in 2021 to 2704 in 2023, and the platform lists no edition after 2023.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2011 to 2026. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Alba Iulia's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The next tests are numbers the city already collects. From September 2026 a plate-scanning car checks parked cars against the payment database; the city's own estimate that only about 50–70% of drivers pay is the baseline it should report against. The control room still has to show that staff steer the lights from it, the lamp meters could publish a measured saving instead of a target, and in May 2026 the city signed contracts for an AI-based virtual assistant on top of a portal most residents bypass.
Where Alba Iulia appears in the atlas's own analysis.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Alba Iulia, Romania.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/alba-iulia/ (last verified 2026-11-05). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.