What happens when only half a system gets built?
Half a system — 24 documented cases in this atlas, each linked to its sources.
The test: Was the piece that would have made it work cancelled, deferred or never funded?
These projects were delivered. What was not delivered is the other half, and without it the delivered half does the wrong job. Accra bought the buses and the contactless fare cards, then cancelled the 9.1 km of dedicated lane — so a service designed to beat the shared minibuses now queues behind them. Baghdad installed 149 water meters that were never networked, so readings still needed a site visit twice a year. Dhaka wired 29 junctions with automated signals that went largely unused while police kept directing traffic by hand. Buenos Aires bought signalling that can run a train every 2 minutes 15 and runs one every 3, because the fleet is what sets the service.
Two labels, kept apart. 5 of these are recorded as failed — stopped, cancelled, or demonstrably not doing what it was built to do — and 19 as scaled back, which mostly means a service that still runs but delivered materially less than promised. An entry earns either label only where a named source says so.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
The 24 documented cases
The other five patterns
The whole record
Every entry in the atlas that failed or was scaled back, all six patterns in one place, with the arithmetic behind the share: smart city project failures.