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Curated tours

Guided routes through the atlas, curated stop by stop — a way in when you don't yet know what you're looking for.

A tour is a reading order, and the order is the argument: which entries, in which sequence, and one line at every stop saying what it changes about the one before. Where you want the complete set instead of a selection — every failure, every evidence grade, every operator — that is what the track record is for, and the topic guides explain the subjects themselves.

Where to start

Two ways into a corpus of more than a thousand entries when you don't yet know what you're looking for.

How it turns out

Routes read from the far end: what the record says happened after the ribbon was cut.

One mechanism, many cities

The same idea followed across borders, so the differences are the argument.

Hangzhou 🤖 AI in Action Beyond the buzzword: how much is the machine actually allowed to decide? 6 stops · 6 cities · 6 countries · 2012–2026 Take the tour →Route last checked August 2026 🌱 Small Towns, Big Ideas What a town of a few thousand people actually builds when it builds a smart city. 5 stops · 5 cities · 3 countries · 2015–2025 · 1 graded independent or peer-reviewed Take the tour →Route last checked August 2026 🐸 Leapfrog Cities What cities build when there is no legacy system to upgrade — and how far a phone can carry it. 8 stops · 8 cities · 8 countries · 2012–2026 · 2 graded independent or peer-reviewed Take the tour →Route last checked August 2026 🎫 From city card to bank card Nearly three decades of the fare card, in order: how a city's own plastic became a payment system, where the value on the card became the weak point — and why the newest systems skip the card entirely. 7 stops · 7 cities · 7 countries · 1997–2025 · 2 graded independent or peer-reviewed · 1 failed or scaled back Take the tour →Route last checked August 2026 👁️ Who is allowed to watch? The cameras are much the same everywhere. What separates these seven networks is who is allowed to check what they do — a ladder from a private network nobody audits to a city that banned the technology before anyone had to sue. 7 stops · 7 cities · 7 countries · 2009–2019 · 5 graded independent or peer-reviewed · 2 failed or scaled back Take the tour →Route last checked August 2026 🚱 Running out of water Seven utilities run the same recognised playbook — meters, telemetry, district zones. This route orders them by how hard the instrument bites when the water actually runs short: from finding lost water to deciding, household by household, who gets it. 7 stops · 7 cities · 5 countries · 1993–2024 · 4 graded independent or peer-reviewed · 1 failed or scaled back Take the tour →Route last checked August 2026

Not a route: your own surroundings