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Manila's entry in this atlas comes with a caveat that is itself the finding: the City of Manila is one of sixteen cities inside Metro Manila, and almost everything below is run by somebody else — the metropolitan development authority, the transport department, the environment bureau, a private concessionaire. The city government's own digital estate amounts to a service app, a permit counter and a camera programme the Supreme Court switched off. What the metro does have is measurement: court-ordered water sampling that has run since 2008, river gauges publishing minute by minute, hazard maps for every building. What it repeatedly lacks is the authority, the collection or the construction to act on any of it.
The atlas documents 10 projects in Manila, the earliest dating to 1993: 2 with a documented success, 1 scaled back, 7 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 Manila is actually doing.
Computed from the 10 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The rationing came first, and it is still here. The metropolitan development authority began banning cars by licence-plate digit in December 1995: plates ending 1 or 2 off the roads on Mondays, 3 or 4 on Tuesdays, on to 9 and 0 on Fridays. Thirty years on the scheme is defined by its holes as much as its rule — expressways, motorcycles and, since a 2022 law, every hybrid and electric car are exempt, each city varies the window hours, and nobody has ever measured in Manila whether it reduces anything.
Measurement arrived through the courts and through foreign aid, not through city hall. A 2008 Supreme Court continuing mandamus ordered a dozen agencies to restore Manila Bay and its tributaries to swimmable quality and to file progress reports with the court indefinitely; the sampling stations set up to answer it still run, and still record failure — researchers traced most of the Pasig's fecal load to raw sewage in 2025. Australian aid and the UN mapped nine hazards across 24 local governments and handed each an average of 87 maps in October 2013.
Then came the instruments the metro built for itself. Japanese aid gave the metropolitan authority telemetered rain and river gauges for the Pasig-Marikina basin, rebuilt in 2014-2016, whose readings publish live with alert and critical thresholds; crews open the floodway gates against them by hand. Indra rebuilt the traffic command room in 2014 and the authority expanded it in 2023 into a 300-million-peso centre watching 403 cameras over its own fibre. A private consortium took over rail fares in 2014, paying the government a billion pesos for the privilege.
The 2020s brought two experiments that ran into the law and the ledger. In December 2020 Manila began issuing traffic fines by camera, explicitly to remove the roadside stop where bribes happened — with a contractor taking 60 to 70 percent of every fine collected. The Supreme Court restrained the city and four neighbours in August 2022 and only cleared the case in 2026 as moot. Meanwhile a pandemic bus lane on EDSA became permanent and carried 66.7 million passengers in 2025, though its cameras and its QR fares arrived four and five years after the concrete.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 1993 to 2020. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Manila's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Manila's pattern is not a shortage of data but a shortage of the power to use it. The metropolitan authority can see and retime the network in real time, yet the cost of Metro Manila's congestion is still quoted from a 2017 survey because nobody has measured whether any of it helped. The river has been sampled under court order for eighteen years and remains unswimmable, because a court can compel measurement but not sewers. And the sharpest case of all: the gauges warning of floods work, while the flood defences they warn about became the country's largest corruption case — a 2025 validation flagged 421 projects nationwide as never built, and in 2026 the Ombudsman charged a senator, a former public works secretary and two Metro Manila district engineers over National Capital Region flood-control funds.
Where Manila appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Manila — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Manila threads below, not counted out of them.
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.
The oldest plate rationing in the atlas and one of the least examined, side by side: Mexico City's has been evaluated repeatedly and found wanting, Manila's never at all — and both put money on a card that can quietly expire.
Opposite economics on the same object: Manila's fare card charges the rider a fee it never refunds and lets balances lapse, Los Angeles's unlocks a cap — and in both cities a threshold decides when a crew is sent.
Every editorial link from Manila'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 Manila, Philippines.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/manila/ (last verified 2026-08-27). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.