The projects every smart city conversation comes back to — the pioneers, the icons, the ones that defined what a 'smart city' even means.
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One of the earliest built-from-scratch smart cities, raised on reclaimed land near Incheon and wiring sensors into everything from pneumatic waste pipes to traffic. Long a global showcase, it has fallen short of its targets — about 212,000 residents by late 2024 against a planned 265,000, with commercial space slow to fill.
Launched in 2008 as the world's first zero-carbon city, Masdar City fell far short: only a fraction of its 6-sq-km masterplan is built, and the target was downgraded to 'low-carbon' by 2050. Its wind tower, shaded streets, a 10MW/87,000-panel solar plant and short-lived driverless PRT pods still seeded a working clean-tech business cluster.
Founded in 2009 by Amsterdam Innovation Motor and grid operator Liander with the city, Amsterdam Smart City grew from energy-saving pilots into an open innovation network of thousands of members and hundreds of projects. In 2024 it rebranded as Amsterdam InChange, casting itself as a connector rather than an arbiter.
Singapore's whole-of-government digital programme, launched in 2014 and refreshed as Smart Nation 2.0 in 2024. It ties together the Singpass digital identity (used by about 97% of residents aged 15+), the LifeSG services app and nationwide sensor platforms, coordinated by the Smart Nation Group under the Ministry of Digital Development and Information.
Cable cars integrated into the metro network connected Medellín's informal hillside barrios to the city — the mobility backbone of one of the world's most-cited urban transformations. Six Metrocable lines operate today.
London's Ultra Low Emission Zone charges the most polluting vehicles £12.50 a day. Launched in central London in April 2019 and expanded to all London boroughs in August 2023, it is what TfL calls the world's largest clean air zone, enforced around the clock by automatic number-plate cameras.
SmartSantander, an EU FP7 research project (2010-2013), built a city-scale IoT testbed federating over 20,000 sensors across four European cities: Santander, Guildford, Belgrade and Lübeck. Around 12,000 were installed in Santander alone, instrumenting parking, street lighting, waste, traffic and environmental monitoring. It became a widely cited reference model for smart-city experimentation.
One of Europe's first referendum-backed congestion charges. After a 2006 trial cut cordon traffic far more than forecast, Stockholm made the ANPR-camera charge permanent in 2007 to ease inner-city gridlock and fund public transit. Most residents opposed it at first; it later won lasting majority support.
Since 17 February 2003, drivers entering central London during charging hours pay a daily fee, enforced by ANPR camera rings. Introduced under Mayor Ken Livingstone, it was the largest scheme of its kind at launch and informed later pricing schemes from Stockholm to New York. The charge rose from £15 to £18 in January 2026, with EV exemptions replaced by a smaller Cleaner Vehicle Discount.
From around 2012, Curitiba's URBS equipped some 2,500 RIT buses — a network already using contactless smart cards since 2002 — with 3G-based M2M telemetry from Ericsson, Vivo and Dataprom, tracking routes, speeds and stop times live from a central control room across roughly 2.26 million rides each working day.
Since replacing the Area Licensing Scheme in 1998, Singapore's ERP has used gantry tolling to keep expressway speeds in a 45-65 km/h target band. A satellite-based ERP 2.0, with on-board units fitted since November 2023, fully replaces the gantries from 1 January 2027, initially keeping the same location-based charges; distance-based pricing remains a future option.