Bangkok publishes an unusual amount about itself — a live register of every tree planted, a scorecard against its own campaign promises, a public count of citizen complaints and how many were closed — and the recurring limit in the entries below is not measurement but authority. The city has no power over traffic, so it borrows disaster law to keep lorries out on smog days. It reads 523 air-quality points and can close its own schools but only ask employers to send staff home. Its cameras flagged 90,907 pavement-riding motorcyclists in a year and collected 10,977 fines.
The atlas documents 10 projects in Bangkok, the earliest dating to 2007: 1 scaled back, 9 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 Bangkok is actually doing.
Computed from the 10 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Bangkok counted before it connected. From a 330 million baht procurement in 2007 the city built one of the world's larger municipal camera fleets, past 65,000 units at 16,623 sites — but that same contract bought 1,325 dummy casings alongside 2,046 working cameras, and the city only declared the last fakes gone in May 2014. Most cameras remained standalone recorders rather than pooled feeds: in 2017 the drainage of information was as poor as the drainage of water, with 38,404 of 53,249 cameras unconnected and about a fifth of footage requests coming back empty.
The water was instrumented earlier and better. The drainage department runs two weather radars, rain gauges and canal, river and road level sensors into a control centre staffed around the clock, and has pushed rain and standing-water alerts to residents every 15 minutes since 2017. A Delft-FEWS system built for the city in 2021 forecasts street-level flood depth at four-metre resolution, and a 2024 tie-up with Weathernews added three-hour nowcasts. What none of it changed is capacity: crews still work the pumps by hand, and on 3 November 2025 the 131.5 mm that fell on Lak Si met a system designed for 60.
May 2022 turned the city into a scoreboard. Days after Chadchart Sittipunt won the governorship, Bangkok adopted Traffy Fondue citywide, letting residents report a broken pavement inside LINE and watch the ticket move; it has since taken more than 1.2 million reports. In the same weeks the city opened its draft 79-billion-baht budget for comment, started a public register that now holds 2.68 million plantings, and set up a prototype health area where clinics and a hospital read the same patient record. Each of them publishes its own shortfall as readily as its total.
Since 2023 the readings have carried consequences, within the limits of what a Thai city may do. When PM2.5 goes red, Bangkok closes its own schools — 352 of 437 on 24 January 2025 — and turns unregistered lorries back under the Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Act, because it has no traffic authority of its own. AI cameras began ticketing motorcyclists on footpaths. Meanwhile the fare system stayed stubbornly fragmented: a network-wide 20-baht fare was budgeted, opened for registration, missed its launch and was replaced in June 2026 by a 17-45 baht cap.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2007 to 2024. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Bangkok's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Bangkok's constraint is authority and collection, not instrumentation. Its cameras detect eight times more violations than it collects on; its air thresholds bite hardest on the schools it happens to own; its rail fares stay fragmented because buying back the concessions would cost around 100 billion baht and some run to 2029. The green fleet that carries much of the city is one private operator's, and its supplier has been writing down what that operator owes. Chadchart was re-elected in a landslide on 28 June 2026, four days after telling voters that 235 policies were done or under way against 216 promised — a number citizens can check on the city's own site, though the data behind it carries no open licence.
Where Bangkok appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Bangkok — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Bangkok threads below, not counted out of them.
Both publish the numbers that undercut their own programmes — a tree count that turns out to be mostly shrubs, a bike register that recovers more bicycles than it ever registered — and both measure air they have little power to clean.
Two capitals whose cameras and portals run far ahead of the authority behind them: each detects vastly more violations than it ever collects on, and each publishes open data that carries no open licence.
Two capitals where the common fare card never spanned the network and the cameras detect far more than anyone ever collects on — and where the flood forecasting is good while the pumps and gates are still opened by hand.
Every editorial link from Bangkok'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 Bangkok, Thailand.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/bangkok/ (last verified 2026-08-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.