Beijing's instinct is to ration and to measure. Long before the word 'platform' entered its vocabulary, the city was capping how many cars could be bought, counting particulates on a denser grid than almost anywhere, and watching its traffic from a single room. What came later — complaint scorecards, a robotaxi district wired at the roadside, a data zone where the data never leaves — is the same instinct in newer clothing.
The atlas documents 11 projects in Beijing, the earliest dating to 2011: 2 with a documented success, 9 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (2 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Beijing is actually doing.
Computed from the 11 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Beijing's smart-city record starts with two crises rather than a strategy: congestion and smog. In 2011 the city opened the Traffic Operation Coordination Center, pulling GPS from tens of thousands of vehicles and thousands of video feeds into one room, and in the same year began rationing the right to buy a car through a licence-plate ballot — quantity rationing where London and Stockholm chose price. A peer-reviewed study using the lottery's own randomisation later put its effect at a 14% smaller car fleet. Then in 2013, after the winter that gave the world the phrase 'airpocalypse', the city built one of the densest air-quality monitoring networks anywhere: reference stations, over a thousand low-cost grid sensors, satellite retrieval and laser radar.
The second act was about regaining control of things other people had taken over. In 2017 fifteen companies flooded the streets with more than 2.35 million dockless shared bicycles; Beijing froze new deployments and, instead of banning them, made operators stream their fleet and trip data to the city and park inside geofences — a regime that outlived ofo, which ran out of money in 2018 and left millions of users queueing for refunds. The same year the Yanfang line opened as a demonstration that a fully automated metro could be built without imported signalling — though it took until December 2019 to actually run unattended. In 2019 the city took back its kerbs, replacing cash-collecting parking attendants with camera-based charging that routed the money to district treasuries, and consolidated dozens of hotlines into one 12345 number that turns every complaint into a tracked work order and every district into a monthly ranking.
2020 was the platform year, and each of its projects works the same way: a rule, then a data layer to enforce it. Household waste sorting became mandatory in May, backed by a citywide tracking platform and, in some compounds, face-scanning bins. Yizhuang began its build-out as a high-level autonomous driving zone, wiring intersections with lidar and cameras so that vehicles read the road through infrastructure as well as their own sensors. The financial public data zone opened on a rule that inverts the usual open-data bargain: approved banks may compute on municipal data but never receive it. And the MaaS carbon-credit scheme started paying people in tradable credits for leaving the car at home. Two more platform pieces followed in 2022 — State Grid AI dispatch and the Jingtong services gateway.
The most recent turn is a partial reversal, and it comes from above. National rules in force since 1 June 2025 bar facial recognition as the only way through a gate, which reaches the smart bins directly. And in April 2026, after more than a hundred Apollo Go robotaxis froze simultaneously in Wuhan, regulators stopped issuing new autonomous-driving permits nationwide — Beijing's existing services keep running, but the expansion stopped.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2011 to 2022. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Beijing's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Two questions hang over Beijing's record, and both are about verification rather than ambition. The first is that almost every headline number here is self-reported: a 97% complaint-resolution rate, a three-second self-healing grid recovery, thirty-eight million autonomous test kilometres. The exceptions are instructive — where independent researchers have looked, they have found both a real effect (the plate lottery genuinely shrank the car fleet by 14%) and a real cost (the 12345 system sharpens accountability upwards to superiors, not outwards to residents, while intensifying pressure on the lowest tier of officials). The second is how much of this survives contact with national policy: the robotaxi zone cannot grow while the permit freeze holds, and the face-scanning layer on the waste bins now needs an alternative route by law. The most distinctive idea in the city's portfolio may be the quietest one — the data zone where nothing leaves, an answer to the data-market question that Shanghai answered by building a marketplace instead.
Where Beijing appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Beijing — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Beijing threads below, not counted out of them.
The same money, two theories of air: Beijing spent it measuring the airshed, Delhi on machines meant to filter it. Their second levers diverge the same way — Beijing rations car plates, Delhi pays the buyer and tenders the charging.
Two governments that answered the app question the same way and the driverless one differently: each bundles hundreds of services behind one gateway, but Beijing issued a fully driverless permit where Dubai's zone still carries a person.
China's two rationing capitals and two robotaxi hubs: Beijing runs a pure lottery for car plates where Guangzhou mixes lottery with auction, and Beijing wired the roadside where Guangzhou bet on the vehicles.
Every editorial link from Beijing'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 Beijing, China.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/beijing/ (last verified 2026-08-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.