Tbilisi is a city whose public systems mostly belong to someone else. A commercial bank bought the ticket machines on its buses, a national agency runs the stations that measure its air, the Interior Ministry runs the cameras on Rustaveli Avenue, and until 2018 a private concessionaire wrote the parking fines. Its clearest result came from a reform rather than a device: property registration took 2 days by 2012, before Georgia began anchoring its extracts to Bitcoin in 2016.
The atlas documents 6 projects in Tbilisi, the earliest dating to 2004: 6 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 Tbilisi is actually doing.
Computed from the 6 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The record starts with a reform, not a technology. In June 2004 a law created the National Agency of Public Registry, and the reform behind it fired all 2,200 public registry employees in a single day and connected 68 registry offices to one computer system. By the World Bank's count, registering property took 39 days in 2005 and 2 days by its 2012 report, when Georgia ranked first in the world for ease of registering property; for Tbilisi, all properties have been transferred into the electronic database. That is the property register, and it was fast before anything was added to it.
The street was handed out next. In November 2007 a private firm, C.T. Park, won an exclusive municipal auction for on-street parking; from August 2009 drivers paid by phone, scratch card or meter, and the company issued the fines, with 60% of the penalty total going to the city. On the buses, the 2008 buyer of 1400 ticket machines was Bank of Georgia rather than the transport operator, and in 2017 the bank won the exclusive right to upgrade the payment system. Parking and the fare rails both began as something the city did not own.
Then came platforms whose consequences were thin. In 2016 automatic stations began replacing the old ones that measure the capital’s air, and a pilot started anchoring every property extract to the Bitcoin blockchain; a peer-reviewed study later found no specific metrics for evaluating it. On 12 February 2018 the mayor presented Your Idea for the City Mayor, an online petition portal that asks for 2,500 signatures within 60 days; by March 2021 IDFI counted three ideas granted. On 10 April 2018 City Hall ended the parking concession it had said in 2016 would cost 25 million lari to cancel, and since 1 August 2019 it has run zonal parking itself.
The latest chapter is about cameras and plans. Since 31 December 2019 one body, the Public Safety Command Center 112, answers emergency calls and runs video surveillance of the whole country. A 2020 amendment turned air-quality breaches into a duty to plan, and the plan for the Tbilisi agglomeration came in September 2024; on 1 February 2022 the city made a GEL 1 fare buy 90 minutes of travel. During the street protests in late 2024 the centre bought facial and emotion recognition cameras for Rustaveli Avenue; the data protection inspection opened in February 2025 produced no substantive response before the regulator was abolished in March 2026.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2004 to 2018. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Tbilisi's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The next tests are about who measures. The air plan for 2024–2026 has readings to answer: in 2025 nitrogen dioxide exceeded the legal limit at 12 monitoring points in Tbilisi, and the portal still labels its own station data as not verified. Oversight of personal data has moved to the State Audit Office, which inherits the open question about the cameras; and Georgia still sets no response-time standard for emergency medical services. The city says zonal parking is meant to reduce the role of cars, and no source yet shows whether it has. And the Ministry of Justice signed a memorandum with Hedera in December 2025 to explore moving registry data onto a blockchain — the second time the register has been offered one.
Where Tbilisi appears in the atlas's own analysis.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Tbilisi, Georgia.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/tbilisi/ (last verified 2026-11-04). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.