Showcase or use case — what does a smart city actually need?

In March 2024, the company behind the world's most famous smart-mobility app went bankrupt. Whim had made Helsinki the global reference for mobility-as-a-service: one monthly fee covering transit, taxis, bikes and rental cars, and a decade of conference stages to go with it. It no longer runs. What does still run in Helsinki is the thing nobody made a keynote about — the transit authority's journey-planner interface, opened to developers in 2009, which quietly turned into open-source software that Estonia, several German cities and Oklahoma City now run too. Which raises the question this piece tries to answer without picking the winner in advance: what does a smart city actually need — the showcase or the use case?

Two words that get used interchangeably — and shouldn't be

A use case starts from a problem that already exists, usually an analog process that wastes time: applying for a residence permit, renewing a licence, reporting a broken streetlight. The smart-city version is rarely photogenic. Offenbach's AI-assisted document check for residence permits or Buenos Aires putting city hall inside WhatsApp are use cases: their success metric is whether Tuesday got easier.

A showcase — in funding language, a lighthouse project — demonstrates what is newly possible: drone deliveries over Berlin, a hydrogen-piped housing district, an entire city built from scratch in the desert. Its success metric is different: what it attracts (funding, talent, attention) and what it teaches.

The evidence against showcases is really evidence against orphaned pilots

The research critique has a name: pilotitis. The most careful study of it, by Van Winden and van den Buuse in the Journal of Urban Technology (2017), followed smart-city pilots in Amsterdam and found that many simply fade out — because scaling up demands different people, funding and governance than piloting, and nobody planned for that handover.

A pilot that is poorly connected to its parent organisation becomes a sandbox that will stay a sandbox.

— paraphrased from Willem van Winden's own summary of the Journal of Urban Technology study (2017) on why smart-city pilots fail to scale

A 2021 study in Nature Humanities & Social Sciences Communications coined "pilot project purgatory" for autonomous-vehicle trials that never graduate into service, and Germany's driverless-shuttle scene illustrates it: some twenty pilots, completed and ongoing, have run in Munich, Hamburg and Ulm alone, and the transport association VDV's own president has pleaded to stop adding test labs and get autonomous services into regular operation. Germany's own programme evaluation points the same way: the federal institute BBSR commissioned dedicated studies on scaling because keeping pilots alive and transferring them beyond the 73 funded projects, to the roughly 11,000 municipalities the programme is meant to benefit, is the acknowledged weak spot.

This atlas's source-checked entries sharpen the point: Dhaka's automated signals and Algiers' camera-linked network were installed and never operated, and Masdar City delivered a fraction of its zero-carbon promise. The pattern in every case is not "the technology failed" — it's that nobody owned the operating model after the ribbon was cut.

What showcases actually buy

And yet the ledger has a second column. The EU has put, by its lighthouse community's own tally, some €920 million into eighteen smart-city lighthouse projects precisely because demonstrations do things spreadsheets can't: prove replicability, create city-to-city learning structures in which lighthouse cities mentor followers, and pull in private investment. Some showcases convert directly into infrastructure: London's congestion-charge cameras — a bold demonstration in 2003 — became the ANPR backbone that now runs the ULEZ. Barcelona's Poblenou superblock began as a cheap, contested demonstration and ended as permanent public space — the showcase was the method.

Munich's Smarter Together is the cleanest German example: being picked as an EU lighthouse city alongside Lyon and Vienna was pure showcase — and what it bought Neuaubing-Westkreuz was refurbished buildings, eight mobility stations, smart lampposts and a data platform. The EU money stopped in 2021; the infrastructure it paid for is still in use. The showcase paid for the use cases.

The quiet counter-model: infrastructure for use cases

The purest use-case strategy on record is Estonia's. Its X-Road data-exchange layer is invisible, unphotogenic plumbing — and it carries, by the operator's own figures, some 3,000 e-services, with the operator's current count putting 100% of state services online. Germany's "Einer für Alle" principle (one state builds a service, all reuse it) applies the same logic: Offenbach's residence-permit AI wasn't built in Offenbach — it was built once, piloted in seven authorities from February 2026, and switched on nationwide by late June, with trade-press reporting some 350 immigration authorities already running the shared service. Use cases compound; each one makes the next cheaper.

Side by side

Helsinki, live: what outlived the showcase

Which brings the question back to where it started — and the honest reading of Helsinki is not that the showcase failed and the boring thing won. Whim did what showcases do: it made a small northern capital the reference case for an entire category of transport policy, and it proved the model worked well enough for others to copy. What it could not do was survive on its own economics once the attention moved on; MaaS Global filed for bankruptcy in March 2024, and the buyer did not bring the service back to Helsinki.

The journey-planner interface did the opposite in every respect. It launched with no fanfare in 2009, was never a product, and grew from a handful of registered developers into the open-source platform now running in Estonia, several German cities and Oklahoma City. Nobody was ever going to fly to Finland to look at an API. Fifteen years later it is the piece still doing work for residents every morning — and, unlike the app, it is the piece other cities could actually take home. That is the pattern in miniature: the showcase bought the attention, and the use case kept the value.

So: showcase or use case?

The honest answer from the evidence is that they are not competitors — they run on different clocks and fail in different ways. Showcases are how a city buys its future options: attention, funding, partners, and proof that something works at all. Use cases are how a city pays its present debts: services that quietly compound. The failure mode is symmetry-breaking — all showcase and you collect orphaned pilots (the sandbox that stays a sandbox); all use case and you may never attract the money, talent or political spark that makes the next leap fundable.

If a single test cuts through it, it is the one this atlas applies to every entry it verifies: who operates it in year five? A showcase with a year-five answer is an investment. One without is an event. A companion pillar pushes the same scepticism onto the data itself: your city's problem map is really a map of who complains, not of what is broken.

Frequently asked