Cape Town is the best-evidenced city this atlas has found in Africa, and what the evidence keeps showing is a boundary. The metropolitan municipality genuinely owns things — it distributes electricity to about seventy per cent of the metro, it runs its own water reticulation, it publishes its own catalogue — and each of those holdings stops at a line drawn long before the city drew it. Steenbras protects the customers the City bills and nobody else. The rooftop buy-back pays people who own a roof, an array and a City account. Bulk water belongs to a national department. And on the two occasions the city was tested hardest, by drought and by a collapsing national grid, an independent study found the relief real and the distribution of it inherited: the areas shielded from load-shedding hold 81 per cent of Cape Town's white residents and 27 per cent of its black African ones.
The atlas documents 5 projects in Cape Town, the earliest dating to 2015: 2 with a documented success, 3 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 Cape Town is actually doing.
Computed from the 5 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The drought made the city famous for a number that turned out not to bind. From 2015 Cape Town published a weekly water dashboard and named a threshold, 13.5 per cent combined dam storage, at which taps would close and residents would queue: Day Zero. Consumption fell from about 1.2 billion litres a day in February 2015 to 511 million on 12 March 2018, and Day Zero never came. But the threshold actuated nothing — the date was recalculated weekly and moved with judgement and rain. What bound was the household meter: Level 6B set 50 litres per person per day from 1 February 2018, and a water management device could physically close the supply once the daily allocation ran out. By that March roughly 250,000 were fitted, 64 per cent of them in indigent areas, while peer-reviewed work later found the richest 13.7 per cent of the population using 51 per cent of the water.
The second crisis was electrical and the city answered it with a dam from 1979. Steenbras is a pumped-storage scheme the City owns and operates, and from June 2015 it was dispatched to hold City-supplied customers one stage below the national load-shedding level — occasionally two, sometimes none at all. Nothing about it is smart: four reversible turbines run through the evening peak and pump the water back overnight. It failed at Stage 6 and weekends went on refilling the reservoir. An independent synthetic-control study estimated about 547 premature deaths averted among City-supplied residents over 65, and in the same breath measured who was inside the boundary and who was not.
Then the city started buying electricity back. Since 2023 Cash for Power has paid customers for surplus rooftop generation at a nationally approved feed-in rate plus a 25c per kilowatt-hour incentive the City adds itself — and once a bill reaches zero, the remainder can be taken as actual cash rather than credit. That is a genuinely new answer to who gets money out of a meter. The brand overstates it slightly: the City's own wording is that the earnings are largely bill credits, with cash a residual above a R1,000 threshold. Selling also requires an approved bidirectional meter at R6,043, and the roughly thirty per cent of the metro Eskom supplies directly cannot take part at all.
Running underneath all of it is a habit of publishing. The weekly water dashboard outlived the emergency and was still being issued in July 2026. The City's open data catalogue held 256 items when counted through the platform API in July 2026, and a Council-approved Open Data Policy has been revised twice. Its licensing clause is one sentence: use of the portal is subject to its Terms of Use, and those terms will conform with open data principles. Three versions and twelve years on, no licence is named — a criticism Code for South Africa made in 2014 and which still stands.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2015 to 2023. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Cape Town's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Cape Town's record poses a question the rest of this atlas mostly avoids: what happens when a city genuinely can act, and the reach of its action was decided by somebody else decades earlier. Every entry here has a boundary in it, and in three of the four the boundary is the same one — the line between what the City bills and what Eskom bills, or between a roof someone owns and one they do not. The load-shedding protection is dormant rather than finished; South Africa has had no national load-shedding since 15 May 2025, and Steenbras is under a R1.2 billion refurbishment for whenever it returns. The drought lesson has not held: by February 2026 the city was drawing 212 litres per person per day, above its own summer target, with no restrictions in force. And the one gap that could be closed cheaply is the licence. The catalogue applies its instrument more consistently than Toronto or Bogotá apply theirs — the instrument is simply a link to a terms page rather than a licence anyone can read and rely on. Naming a standard licence would move Cape Town from the middle of this atlas's ladder to near the top in an afternoon.
Where Cape Town appears in the atlas's own analysis.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Cape Town, South Africa.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/cape-town/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.