Berlin's angle is doing the smart city bottom-up. The 2022 'Gemeinsam Digital' strategy was shaped with around 2,000 residents and funds pilot projects that test digital tools out in the districts. One strand became the U-Space Reallabor in Tempelhof, trialling drone delivery of medical samples and food — the strategy's agenda put into practice rather than left on paper.
The atlas documents 9 projects in Berlin, the earliest dating to 1975: 9 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is independent (1 entry) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Berlin is actually doing.
Computed from the 9 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Berlin's smart layer began as quiet public infrastructure, long before the branding. The BLUME air-quality network has measured the city's pollution since 1975 and today streams it as five-minute open data; in 2011 Berlin opened one of Germany's first municipal open-data portals, and in 2015 it released a semantic 3D model of all 550,000 buildings as free open data, later used to rate the solar potential of every roof. The instinct throughout was to publish the city's data rather than lock it in a control room.
The next layer was physical testbeds. From around 2014 the EUREF-Campus in Schöneberg ran a "micro smart grid" around its historic gasometer — renewables, storage, CHP and one of Germany's largest EV-charging clusters — doubling as a research campus for coupling energy and e-mobility. On the other side of the city, Siemens began turning its century-old factory quarter into Siemensstadt Square, a multi-billion-euro smart district planned on digital twins and still under construction through the 2030s — an ambition deliberately logged here as a promise, not a finished city.
Berlin's most characteristic strand is bottom-up. The city-funded CityLAB builds open-source prototypes with residents — its best-known, Gieß den Kiez, maps some 625,000 street trees and lets neighbours adopt and water them through drought summers. In 2019 transit operator BVG launched Jelbi, bundling buses, trains, shared bikes, scooters, mopeds and taxis into a single app and network of mobility hubs. And the 2022 'Gemeinsam Digital' strategy was shaped with around 2,000 residents rather than written top-down.
Most recently the strategy has been turned into street-level experiments: the U-Space Reallabor in Tempelhof (2025) trials drone delivery of medical samples and food — the agenda put into practice rather than left on paper.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 1975 to 2025. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Berlin's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Berlin's coming years hinge on whether its bottom-up habit scales. The big physical bet, Siemensstadt Square, must actually deliver its promised smart-district features as it is built out toward 2035, while the open-data and 3D-model foundations feed a newer city-scale digital-twin effort on the former Tegel airport site. The open question is continuity: Berlin is unusually good at launching resident-shaped pilots like Gieß den Kiez and the Tempelhof drone lab, and less proven at turning them into permanent city infrastructure.
Where Berlin appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Berlin — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Berlin 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.
The operator's app against the regulator's rules: Berlin's transit company bundles every shared mode into one product, Milan's mobility agency licenses the operators instead — and both publish a 3D model of the whole city.
Two reference air networks feeding a real pollution protocol, and two transit operators that built the shared-mobility app themselves rather than buying one — the same two instincts, a thousand kilometres apart.
Every editorial link from Berlin'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 Berlin, Germany.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/berlin/ (last verified 2026-07-25). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.