Amsterdam's answer to the smart city is a network, not a command centre. Founded in 2009 by an innovation agency and the grid operator with the city as just one partner, Amsterdam Smart City grew into an open platform of thousands of members and hundreds of projects — and in 2024 renamed itself InChange to underline that it connects rather than directs.
The atlas documents 9 projects in Amsterdam, the earliest dating to 2009: 1 with a documented success, 3 scaled back, 5 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is independent (3 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Amsterdam is actually doing.
Computed from the 9 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Amsterdam's smart-city story starts with a decision about who runs it. In 2009 the grid operator Liander and an innovation agency founded Amsterdam Smart City as an open network the municipality would join as one partner among many, not direct — a model the platform kept even after rebranding as Amsterdam InChange in 2024, and one that shows up again and again in what the city built next.
Circular-economy thinking became infrastructure rather than slogan: the Circl pavilion at Zuidas got Madaster's first digital material passport in 2017, and by 2019 eight Amsterdam-region municipalities had their own. The same instinct — keep resources in local use — drove the EU-funded Buiksloterham Positive Energy District, where a planned peer-to-peer energy market at the Republica block ran into a hard limit: the grid operator could supply only about a quarter of the capacity the project needed, forcing a pivot from trading energy to simply managing flexibility within what the wires could carry.
Energy resilience also took a more theatrical form a few kilometres south, where the Johan Cruijff ArenA turned 148 old and new Nissan LEAF batteries into a 3 MW stadium power plant in 2018, later adding a small vehicle-to-grid pilot and a second battery. Real-world testing of harder problems needed a place with looser rules than a stadium or a residential block, which is what the Marineterrein Living Lab supplied from 2019: a former Navy yard, closed to the city for roughly 350 years, reopened as a fast-permit outdoor testbed. It hosted, among other pilots, MIT and AMS Institute's Roboat research into autonomous canal boats — five years of prototypes that ended in 2021 without the driverless water-taxi fleet it set out to build, but did spin off a company now selling more modest crew-assistance automation to the city's own ferries.
What ties the decade together is a habit of registering rather than hiding the machinery of city administration. Signalen, the open-source system residents use to report potholes and nuisance, has run since 2018 and added a self-disclosed machine-learning classifier in 2022. The Public-Space Sensor Register, live since 2021, makes anyone deploying a camera or sensor in public space list it on a public map. And the Algorithm Register, launched jointly with Helsinki in 2020, did the same for the city's own AI systems until it was folded into a Dutch national register in 2025 — Amsterdam's transparency instinct, absorbed into a bigger system rather than switched off.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2009 to 2021. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Amsterdam's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Two open threads run from what's already built. Buiksloterham's real constraint wasn't ambition but grid capacity, and Liander's limits there are a national problem the EU-funded programme's April 2026 closure leaves for others to solve at other sites. Roboat's shift from autonomous canal taxis to crew-assistance software for existing ferries suggests the harder version of autonomous water transport has been shelved for now, even as the Marineterrein site that hosted it keeps its fast-permit model open for whatever tries next. And with Amsterdam's own algorithm register absorbed into the Dutch national one, the city's transparency-by-disclosure approach to sensors and AI now runs partly through The Hague rather than the town hall alone.
Where Amsterdam appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Amsterdam — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Amsterdam threads below, not counted out of them.
Two cities that put the coordinating body outside city hall: Amsterdam's smart-city network is run by partners with the city merely one of them, Berlin's by a state-owned agency — and both wired a district to test the grid.
Every editorial link from Amsterdam's entries into another city, strongest first. Each one is a statement about two projects, not about two cities — the three above are the ones the atlas is willing to make at city level.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Amsterdam, Netherlands.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/amsterdam/ (last verified 2026-08-24). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.