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Tianjin's flagship smart-infrastructure showcase is Section C, a container terminal at the Beijiang port area that has run commercially since October 2021 without a crewed forklift or crane in sight. 5G-connected Level 4 autonomous transport robots ferry containers between quay and yard while remotely controlled cranes and cloud AI plan the loading sequence, and the whole terminal draws its power from an on-site wind, solar and storage microgrid — a combination Chinese authorities and state media call the world's first zero-carbon smart container terminal.
The atlas documents 6 projects in Tianjin, the earliest dating to 2017: 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (6 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Tianjin is actually doing.
Computed from the 6 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Tianjin's most convincing system is also its oldest, and it is convincing because it is documented by the minute rather than by the year. Since 2017 the city's emergency warning centre has run an automated waterlogging network fusing radar and rain gauges with dedicated depth sensors reporting every five minutes, extended in 2022 to nineteen devices across the metro's nine lines, and feeding the water authority, the meteorological bureau, traffic and emergency management together rather than any single agency. What makes it readable is that the record names occasions: 54 centimetres of standing water detected near a district shopping mall during a typhoon in July 2023 and cleared within the hour, and five to nine centimetres of pooling across several districts in April 2024 that triggered coordinated traffic control. Two years later, from 2019, the water utility began replacing residential meters with remote-read units, reporting more than three million replaced and 600 kilometres of aged pipe renewed by late 2022, with the network leakage rate down to 9.4 per cent.
The government layer arrived at the end of the same year. Jinxinban launched in December 2019 as the municipality's single mobile front door — social insurance, housing fund, transit, certificates and appointments across city, district and street level, delivered through its own app and two national payment platforms under a one-login design. Registered users passed ten million by May 2021 and more than twenty-two million by late 2025, when the platform won a national recognition for handheld government services. Every one of those figures is the operator's own, which is the ordinary condition of the genre and worth restating each time it appears.
2021 brought the two things Tianjin is best known for outside China. The port's Section C terminal went into commercial operation that October running fifth-generation-network-connected autonomous transport robots and remotely controlled cranes coordinated by cloud scheduling, powered entirely by an on-site wind, solar and storage microgrid — described by Chinese authorities and state media as the world's first zero-carbon smart container terminal, a claim this atlas attributes rather than asserts. Its efficiency figures come from the operator and its technology partner: about 30 per cent less capital investment, 60 per cent fewer staff, more than 17 per cent less energy and roughly 20 per cent higher crane efficiency than a comparable conventional automated terminal. In May of the same year the big-data centre launched the City Brain, one overview screen over five thematic dashboards feeding named application scenarios — policy-benefit delivery, digital services for elderly residents, ride-hailing compliance oversight, dispute triage — whose strongest published endorsement is a citation from another arm of the same municipal government.
The newest layer is the smallest and the most precisely bounded. In February 2024 Baodi district opened Tianjin's first intelligent connected vehicle corridor: an 11.3-kilometre public route linking the district's high-speed rail station to a science park, where a cloud control system coordinates sensing and decisions for the vehicles and all nineteen intersections carry signal control that gives the demonstration bus priority. The bus runs the five-stop route in eighteen minutes with a safety officer aboard and nobody at the wheel. A citywide count in September 2025 put 128 autonomous vehicles on Tianjin's open-road network, without a district-level breakdown.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2017 to 2024. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Tianjin's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Tianjin documents individual moments unusually well and aggregate outcomes hardly at all, and the two halves belong to different systems. The waterlogging network is the one entry here that can point at a date, a depth and a consequence, which is exactly what the rest of the record lacks: the port's efficiency ratios come from the operator and its supplier, the super-app reports registrations, and the City Brain's evidence is a citation from a neighbouring department. Three things would change that and none requires new hardware. A count of how many flood alerts led to an intervention across a whole season rather than on two named days. An independent look at the terminal's zero-carbon claim, which is repeated internationally on the strength of one set of self-reported figures. And a district-level breakdown of the autonomous fleet, since the connected corridor is currently one bus on one route and the only citywide number covers the whole municipality.
Where Tianjin appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Tianjin — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Tianjin threads below, not counted out of them.
Where the name came from and where it went: Tianjin's platform borrows the City Brain idea Hangzhou built first — and in both cities the headline accuracy and leakage figures come from the operator and nowhere else.
Every editorial link from Tianjin'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 Tianjin, China.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/tianjin/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.