Manaus

Manaus remeasured itself and learned that a survey arrives as a bill. The municipal property register had not had a full update since 2010; from late 2019 the finance secretariat ran Mapa de Manaus with an aircraft flying metric aerial photography and laser profiling over more than 520 square kilometres, a vehicle capturing street-level façade imagery and around seventy field teams verifying buildings on the ground, producing a ten-centimetre orthophoto base and a catalogue of roughly 600,000 property units. By March 2023 some 345,000 of about 601,000 registered properties had been updated and around 10,000 entered the register for the first time. Residents told the press their bills had doubled, tripled or quadrupled — one owner's registered floor area jumped from 76 to 126 square metres on a house he said he had not altered in thirteen years. The city's answer was technically correct and politically insufficient: the rate had not risen, only the recorded area.

The operations room and the signals arrived next, and both are measured mainly by their own operators. A municipal law of July 2020 created the Centro de Cooperação da Cidade, putting traffic management, public transport, the municipal guard, civil defence and telehealth monitoring in one room; its camera network tripled from 41 to 159 lenses in 2022, and since October 2025 the mobility institute has worked from the same building on a platform that ingests navigation-app reports and driver-submitted incidents for fifteen agents across four shifts. The city publishes a selection of the live camera views on its own portal, which is a real transparency step and also the only outside view anyone has of the system: no audit of detection rates, response times or footage retention has been published. In 2022 the same institute began converting pre-timed signals into a centrally supervised adaptive network, with cameras counting queues, plate reading that can hold a phase for a late bus or an ambulance, and remote fault diagnosis that cut the response time to a dark signal from forty minutes to a minute and a quarter. By 2026 it covered roughly 48 per cent of the city's 278 signalised junctions.

The water concession has the control room, the telemetry and now a model, and still loses nearly half the water. The concessionaire's operational control centre supervises more than 4,000 kilometres of mains, 43 reservoirs and 56 wells, and since November 2024 has fed a machine-learning model with the daily telemetry stream so that it learns normal consumption and pressure patterns and flags deviations pointing to a burst or a failing pump before customers notice. The utility reports water reaching 99 per cent of the capital and about 700 million litres delivered a day. An independent study of 2024 national returns puts the city's distribution losses at 45.25 per cent against a national average of 41.51, and ranks Manaus among the seven worst state capitals for sanitation. An anomaly detector reads the network it is given, and most of that loss sits in ageing pipe and irregular connections.