Switzerland

What the record shows

In the Swiss record the institution outlasts the technology, and the oldest entry is not a machine but a vote. Zurich's electorate rejected a metro in 1973; a 1977 initiative funded giving trams and buses priority at traffic lights instead, and that decision still governs about 400 signalised intersections half a century later. It is also honest about its limits — of some seventy junctions re-examined in 2016, about twenty had to be reprogrammed to match the principle they were supposed to embody. Nothing else in this atlas has been running on a referendum result for fifty years.

The delivery vehicle here is not a smart-city office but a municipal utility. Zurich's city-owned ewz finances and operates the Greencity district's heat, cooling and power on a thirty-year contract — six groundwater wells and 215 geothermal probes driving five megawatts of ammonia heat pumps, with rooftop photovoltaics and a biogas boiler for peaks — and it also runs the citywide LoRaWAN with the municipal IT department and the meter rollout, replacing roughly 300,000 electricity meters by 2029 over its own fibre network, which carries the city's water and gas meters too. Greencity also supplies the record's neatest lesson about certification: it was certified in 2012 as Switzerland's first 2000-Watt district, and the federal label it pioneered was scrapped in 2024 for lack of demand, so later buildings on the same site certify under a different standard. Labels expire faster than the infrastructure they certify: the certificate is gone and the plant runs on.

What is unusual about Zurich's instrumentation is how willing it is to stay small and say so. The LoRaWAN, live since 2018 pilots and routed into the city's own data centre, carries a 185-space parking pilot and sixteen chair sensors that measured how two public squares are actually used. The automated shuttle trial ran for two weeks in February 2018 on a closed 1.3 km loop inside a depot, capped at 12 km/h with an attendant aboard; more than 500 staff rode it, and the operator still describes automated driving as exploratory. Set against the robotaxi entries elsewhere in this atlas, that is not timidity — it is a trial that was scoped to answer a question rather than to produce a photograph.

The data position is the most permissive this atlas has counted. Zurich opened Switzerland's first open-government-data portal in June 2012, and today every one of its 937 datasets carries a licence: 908 are public-domain dedications, the rest attribution or share-alike. A 2021 council decision made "open by default" binding rather than aspirational. Other catalogues here are complete too — Montpellier's is larger and leaves nothing unlicensed — but it is built on a share-alike licence, and no other complete catalogue counted here is overwhelmingly public-domain. Set that against the ladder the other pages here have been assembling — a catalogue whose only statement of reuse rights is an FAQ answer, a policy that promises open principles without naming an instrument, a bespoke wrapper reserving the right to re-version an irrevocable grant — and the distance is the whole argument. Geneva makes the same point across a longer span: its cantonal geodata platform has pooled eighteen public partners since 1991, which makes it the oldest data-sharing arrangement in this record by a decade and more.

Geneva's other entry is the one piece of heavy infrastructure here. GeniLac pumps cold water out of the lake through a hydrothermal network planned to run about 30 km, grown from a 2009 scheme that first served the UN district and now reaching the airport, cutting the electricity buildings spend on cooling by up to 80 per cent. Its headline numbers are projections rather than measurements — 70 GWh of electricity and 70,000 tonnes of emissions a year, once 350 buildings are connected by 2045 — and the page above says so, which is the right way to carry a target.

The remaining entries are about how a Swiss city handles the gap between answering and fixing. Züri wie neu, running on the same open-source platform as Brussels's reporting site, routes each report to the responsible department within one working day and promises a conclusive answer within five — and the entry is careful to say that the promise covers the answer, not the repair, a distinction citizen-reporting platforms routinely blur. It has something rarer than throughput statistics: a 2017 University of Bern study of 738 users found the platform's clearest perceived benefit was greater trust in the city administration. EnerGIS answers a single question per address — whether a building sits in a thermal-network zone, whether a heat pump is feasible, how suitable its roof is for solar — which is what a heat-transition dataset looks like when it is built for a decision rather than for a dashboard. And in Winterthur the scale drops again: a citizen association's air-sensor pilot validated exactly three sensors against the official network in its first phase, with a plan to put mobile units on trolleybuses, while a small AI interface for querying municipal geodata in plain language is still at the stage of publishing no usage figures at all. If the entries below agree on one lesson, it is that Switzerland tends to put the durable thing — a vote, a utility, a licence, a partnership — underneath the instrument, and then lets the instrument be as small as it needs to be.