1001 Smart Cities
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Who publishes the sources?

Every source in the atlas belongs to somebody. 3032 organisations stand behind the 6540 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

72% of published entries (857 of 1189) cite no auditing institution — no audit office, no court, no research venue. A further reading of the same data is gentler: 12% (141) 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 6.6% of entries, research 23.3% — 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 73 entries across 55 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
📰 Press1247918News media, including trade press.
🏛️ City government336602An organ of the city executive: the Alcaldía, a Secretaría, a city programme or the city's own portals.
🎓 Research248277Academic venues, repositories and research projects.
🚊 Operator247277The organisation that runs the system an entry describes (transit company, fare system, bike-share platform).
🔧 Vendor189212A supplier, manufacturer or contractor to the project — not the organisation that operates it.
🏢 National government187204A national ministry, agency or legal registry.
🤝 Ngo154179A non-governmental organisation.
🗺️ Regional government93122A province, state, county, region or metropolitan authority above the city and below the nation.
🌐 Community28109Community-maintained reference works (Wikipedia, Wikinews).
🌍 International organisation52108A multilateral body, development bank or supranational institution (EU, UN, OECD, NDB).
💡 Utility89100A public utility company.
🔍 Oversight body6072An audit or ombudsman institution that examines the administration (Contraloría, Personería).
📦 Platform4159A hosting or listing platform. The page is published there by a third party, usually the operator — the platform vouches for nothing.
🏭 Industry association4044A trade or business association.
🗳️ City council1117The city's elected legislative body.
⚖️ Judiciary109A 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

159 publishers are cited by 5 entries or more and have a page of their own. The remaining 2873 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 135 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.

✉️ One source-checked project a week. No pitches, no vendors.

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