1001 Smart Cities
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Who publishes the evidence

Every source in the atlas belongs to somebody. 2804 organisations stand behind the 5788 source records this atlas has identified — and counting them says something about the record that no single entry can.

How this is decided. Which entries cite a publisher is computed at build time from the source registry. Who the publisher is, and what kind of body it is, comes from a reviewable file — not from a rule about the domain name. The classification describes who publishes. It is never a statement about how strong the evidence is: that judgement stays on each entry, in its grade.

✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.

What the count says about this atlas

74% of published entries (838 of 1140) cite no auditing institution — no audit office, no court, no research venue. A further reading of the same data is gentler: 13% (145) cite no independent voice at all, not even a newspaper. The evidence brief on who evaluates smart-city projects takes the same count apart — an audit office or a court reaches 5.4% of entries, research 22.8% — and ships the rows it counted.

Neither figure means those entries are wrong. An operator's own report is the right source for what a system does, how many stations it has and when it opened; it is the wrong source for whether it worked. The gap between those two questions is what this number measures, and it is the reason every entry carries a grade instead of a tick.

The single most-cited publisher in the atlas is Wikipedia (English), named by 72 entries across 54 cities. That is worth knowing about a reference work, and it is exactly the kind of thing a source list buried under each entry will never tell you.

The kinds of publisher

KindPublishersEntriesWhat it means
📰 Press1133854News media, including trade press.
🏛️ City government326571An organ of the city executive: the Alcaldía, a Secretaría, a city programme or the city's own portals.
🎓 Research224260Academic venues, repositories and research projects.
🚊 Operator231254The organisation that runs the system an entry describes (transit company, fare system, bike-share platform).
🔧 Vendor180200A supplier, manufacturer or contractor to the project — not the organisation that operates it.
🏢 National government173189A national ministry, agency or legal registry.
🤝 Ngo147172A non-governmental organisation.
🗺️ Regional government88113A province, state, county, region or metropolitan authority above the city and below the nation.
🌐 Community25106Community-maintained reference works (Wikipedia, Wikinews).
🌍 International organisation50100A multilateral body, development bank or supranational institution (EU, UN, OECD, NDB).
💡 Utility8595A public utility company.
📦 Platform4156A hosting or listing platform. The page is published there by a third party, usually the operator — the platform vouches for nothing.
🔍 Oversight body4556An audit or ombudsman institution that examines the administration (Contraloría, Personería).
🏭 Industry association3539A trade or business association.
🗳️ City council1219The city's elected legislative body.
⚖️ Judiciary98A court or tribunal. Kept apart from oversight-body on purpose: an audit office examines the administration, a court can order it to act — and in this corpus the order is often the whole story.

The most-cited publishers

136 publishers are cited by 5 entries or more and have a page of their own. The remaining 2668 appear on the entries that cite them and in the open dataset; a page listing one or two entries would be a list, not a reading.

Show 112 more publishersShow fewer

The registry as data

Stable source ids, publisher, kind of publisher, language, which entries cite each URL and the archived copy where one exists — published as open data under CC BY. The rules it sits under are written down in the evidence standard.

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