Tokyo's entry is a single district doing what no other Japanese housing had. HARUMI FLAG, on the former 2020 Olympic Village, runs pure-hydrogen fuel cells fed by an underground pipeline in each residential block, powering shared facilities across 5,632 homes. It is the country's first full-scale hydrogen infrastructure in a neighbourhood — a bet on hydrogen where showcase districts elsewhere chose solar.
The atlas documents 11 projects in Tokyo, the earliest dating to 2014: 11 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (11 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Tokyo is actually doing.
Computed from the 11 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Tokyo's smart-city record starts underground and out of sight. From 2014, Tokyo Electric Power Company began swapping analogue electricity meters for networked ones across its entire Kanto-region service area — a roughly 28-million-meter grid modernisation (TEPCO Smart Meter Rollout) on track to finish by fiscal 2020, years before any of the city's more visible pilots opened. It set a pattern that recurs through everything that followed: some of Tokyo's most consequential smart-city work is infrastructure retrofitted at utility scale, not a headline app.
The late 2010s opened several fronts at once, mostly independent of one another. On the Toyosu waterfront, Mitsui Fudosan began building a mixed-use district run on an urban 'operating system' (Toyosu Smart City, 2019), joined a year later by Tokyu Land and SoftBank's sensor-dense Takeshiba tower a few kilometres south (Smart City Takeshiba). The Tokyo Metropolitan Government took a different tack on the same 2019-20 moment: its TOKYO Data Highway strategy turned ordinary streetlights in Nishi-Shinjuku into shared 5G, Wi-Fi and AI-camera 'smart poles' (TOKYO Data Highway Smart Pole Network) — open public infrastructure rather than a single developer's showcase. Shibuya Ward went further still, opening a browser- and VR-accessible replica of its own streets for concerts and festivals (Virtual Shibuya), while a private operator, LUUP, quietly began building the dockless e-scooter and e-bike network (LUUP Shared E-Scooters & E-Assist Bikes) that would take six years to reach all 23 of Tokyo's wards.
By 2021 the Tokyo Metropolitan Government moved to model the whole city at once, releasing a free browser-based 3D viewer of all 23 wards and, later, open aerial point-cloud data for planning and disaster response (Tokyo Digital Twin). The same year, two narrower, more experimental efforts began: in the historic Marunouchi business district, an area-management consortium started running recurring low-speed autonomous shuttle trials on a pedestrian mall (Marunouchi Naka-dori Low-Speed Mobility & Hub Trials), and on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay, the metropolitan government opened an annual call for pilot projects in energy, mobility and the environment (Tokyo Bay eSG Project) — a programme whose clearest built result so far, Japan's first offshore floating solar plant, wasn't installed until 2024.
The newest entries return to physical infrastructure built one district at a time. On the former Olympic Village site, an underground hydrogen pipeline now feeds fuel cells across 5,632 homes (HARUMI FLAG Hydrogen Town) — Tokyo's bet on hydrogen where comparable showcase districts elsewhere chose solar. At Haneda Innovation City, an autonomous shuttle graduated from trial to a standing, driverless-permitted route (Haneda Innovation City Level 4 Autonomous Bus) — the fixed, operational counterpart to Marunouchi's still-recurring low-speed demonstrations a few kilometres away.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2014 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 Tokyo's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Two threads remain open. The Tokyo Bay eSG Project's long-range vision — AI-managed smart grids, hydrogen, even flying-car vertiports — is still mostly a 2050-horizon plan; only its floating solar demonstrator and a handful of other pilots are actually built, so whether the wider bay district gets built at that scale is still an open question. And Tokyo's fastest-growing network, LUUP, is being tested by its own success: after six years scaling to all 23 wards, a fatal collision in June 2026 and a rising nationwide accident count for its licence-free vehicle class have put safety scrutiny on a service that only recently went citywide.
Where Tokyo appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Tokyo — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Tokyo threads below, not counted out of them.
Two ways to treat the same street furniture and the same model of the city: Tokyo adds function to a handful of new poles while Shanghai merges its existing ones away, and Tokyo's twin plans where Shanghai's operates.
Japan's two Level 4 buses, opposite fates: Haneda's airport loop became a standing service, Osaka's Expo shuttle was written off with the fair. The other thread is the meter: Osaka wants its water readings sent over the electricity rollout.
The boring programme and the loud one, twice over: a utility metering rollout that quietly reached almost every household in both cities, and beside it a culture pilot that was always the smaller, softer bet.
Every editorial link from Tokyo'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 Tokyo, Japan.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/tokyo/ (last verified 2026-08-27). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.