Algiers

Algiers had a public air-quality network before most cities in this atlas had anything. Samasafia — clear sky — gave the city four fixed stations in 2002 measuring nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, fine particles and ozone, run by the national environment observatory on a World Bank loan, and published a daily index in the newspapers and on public display panels. The last measurements date from August 2009 and the last annual report from 2008. By 2012 the screens were black, and in July 2024 the environment ministry was still preparing a replacement. It was the second Algiers network to be dismantled, after an earlier one taken out in the early 1990s: building the stations was never the hard part.

The two control rooms that did last were both built by somebody with a contract to keep them running. The water utility has supervised its networks from a remote-control centre at Kouba since 2008, polling more than 300 drinking-water sites and about 100 sewerage sites over radio and mobile links onto a projection wall, and has been entirely Algerian-managed since the foreign management contract ended in August 2021. The metro opened on 31 October 2011 as a Siemens turnkey system — communications-based train control with moving block and automatic train operation, track-to-train radio, train location and a central control post at Ruisseau — across 16.8 kilometres reaching ten communes.

Then the city tried to run two systems of its own, and finished neither. A joint venture was contracted in 2017 to fit 500 intersections with adaptive, camera-linked traffic lights run from a control centre in Kouba. Only 22 of the 200 first-phase junctions were ever wired; unresolved fibre-optic links and a national-security refusal to authorise the integrated cameras froze the network, officials were publicly calling it a failure by 2021, and the Spanish partner left — after which, in April 2024, the interior ministry was briefed that the 22-point pilot had proved its worth, in a statement made while seeking money to extend it. In June 2018 the urban transport authority issued a multimodal card and a common technical reference so that six operators' ticketing systems could work together. What runs today is a tram-and-metro subscription on a physical card, with buses and cable cars still outside it — and it is the one product that cannot be renewed online, while the tram-only subscription can.

The reason the signal project stalled is visible in the last entry. The city's camera grid is operated by the national police from a command centre in the Sidi M'Hamed administrative district — 1,837 cameras in service as of April 2024, with a further 5,592 planned — and that same room hosts the capital's traffic-decongestion plan and its traffic-light management. Surveillance and signal timing are supervised from one place, run by the national police rather than by the city, which is why the wilaya could install the hardware and never authorise it. Every figure published about that network counts effort — cameras installed, cameras planned — and none counts a result. The water utility is the same shape: it publishes what it supplied in 2024 and roughly 28,000 leak interventions, and neither result carries a network-efficiency or non-revenue-water rate, which is the one number that would say whether twenty years of telemetry moved anything.