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Yokohama spent the first half of the 2010s as one of Japan's four national smart-community laboratories, and the second half discovering how little of a demonstration survives its funding. The city was picked by the trade ministry in 2010 to test what a smart grid does to a real metropolis, ran it with 34 companies for five years, then wound the programme into an industry association and moved on. What the city kept was not the hardware but a habit: Yokohama publishes. Its open-data portal licenses every one of its 654 datasets, and when it changed how it counts visitors to its waterfront district it printed the old number next to the new one — which is the only reason anyone can tell that the district's headline growth of 23 per cent was, measured the same way twice, a fall of 8.3 million people.
The atlas documents 6 projects in Yokohama, the earliest dating to 2010: 1 with a documented success, 1 scaled back, 4 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 Yokohama is actually doing.
Computed from the 6 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Yokohama's smart-city record starts with a national designation rather than a local plan. In 2010 the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry named the city one of its Next-Generation Energy and Social System Demonstration Areas, and 34 energy companies, electronics manufacturers and construction firms spent five years running the Yokohama Smart City Project across the city. It is the most-cited thing Yokohama has ever done in this field, and the city's own page about it publishes no result figures at all.
When the demonstration period ended in 2014 the city did not extend it. The partners were folded into a new public-private body, the Yokohama Smart Business Association, under the slogan 'from demonstration to implementation' — the standard Japanese ending for a national pilot, and one that leaves no public scoreboard behind. What continued instead was private: in March 2018 Panasonic and Nomura Real Estate opened Tsunashima Sustainable Smart Town on a former Panasonic factory site in Kohoku ward, with a hydrogen station and flats whose control panels show residents their own water and energy use.
The same spring, Minato Mirai became a test track. Nissan and DeNA ran the first public Easy Ride trial in March 2018 — 4.5 kilometres, 300 groups, two weeks — and said a full service would follow in the early 2020s. It did not. The brand went quiet, and when it returned in November 2025 it was the same name, the same district and the same 300 people, still with a safety driver at the wheel and the promise moved to the 2027 financial year.
What Yokohama has built steadily is the paperwork layer. Its open-data portal carries a licence on every dataset without exception, which almost no city in this atlas manages. And in 2025 it swapped the method behind its most quoted number — visitors to Minato Mirai — from counting people crossing the district boundary to counting phones that stay inside it, published both figures, and thereby documented the size of its own measurement break.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2010 to 2026. Pick a dot to read what it was.
No start date on record: Yokohama Open Data Portal
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Yokohama's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The near-term test is whether the second autonomous attempt ends differently from the first. Nissan, BOLDLY, Premier Aid and Keikyu say the pilot that ran through January 2026 leads to a commercial driverless service from the 2027 financial year; the 2018 version made the same kind of promise and produced seven years of silence. A second, quieter trial matters more for most residents: the Level 2 bus between Futamatagawa station and the Sakonyama housing estate exists because Sotetsu cannot find enough drivers, which is the problem autonomy is actually being bought to solve here. Neither is driverless yet, and both say so in their own footnotes.
Where Yokohama appears in the atlas's own analysis.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Yokohama, Japan.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/yokohama/ (last verified 2026-08-18). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.