Baghdad

The clearest thing the atlas holds about Baghdad is a documented failure, and it is documented because someone paid for the evaluation. In 2017–18 UNICEF and the Mayoralty piloted 149 smart water meters in the affluent Al Mansour district. They were never networked, so readings still needed a six-monthly site visit, and an independent 2021 evaluation found the pilot cut neither consumption nor network losses. The lesson generalises: the intelligence lives in the telemetry and the billing reform around a meter, not in the meter.

The complaints channel arrived next and inverted the direction of the reporting. The Mayoralty's Citizen's Voice app lets residents file photo-documented complaints with case tracking, and in April 2023 the mayor ordered every department to prioritise them — with periodic responsiveness evaluations sent to the Council of Ministers rather than published. Complaint volumes, response times and resolution rates have not been released.

Enforcement came last and out of order. Camera-based fining went live on five intersections and two arterial roads on 1 July 2025, with drivers checking penalties through a state app and a build-out plan covering 138 smart intersections. The adaptive signal layer that was meant to complement it began trial operation at about 20 intersections in March 2026 — a year later, and explicitly without recording violations during the test. As of June 2026 the directorate reported monitoring as ongoing and published no violation or accident statistics.