Five cities with a record to read
Not the best-run cities — the five whose record the most outsiders have actually checked.
5 cities · 60 documented entries · 5 countries · 1975–2024 · 27 graded independent or peer-reviewed · 8 failed or scaled back
This is not a ranking of who is doing it well; the atlas has an essay on why those rankings mostly measure who filled in the survey. It is a selection by a different measure, one we can compute from our own record: which cities have the largest share of entries whose results were examined by someone other than the operator — an audit office, a court, a university. What follows is a reading list, not a podium.
Read in order: every stop answers the same question differently.
- 1 🇲🇽 Mexico City Six of eight documented entries rest on independent or peer-reviewed evidence — the highest share in the atlas. It includes three evaluations of the city's own driving ban, none of which finds cleaner air.
- 2 🇺🇸 Chicago Half the record checked from outside, including the audit the city itself commissioned — and which ended its gunshot-detection contract.
- 3 🇨🇴 Bogotá Thirteen entries from the 1997 BRT to the 2024 water rationing, six of them independently evaluated: the longest continuously examined record in South America.
- 4 🇦🇷 Buenos Aires Eleven entries, four of them recorded as failed or scaled back — the most candid balance sheet here, and the city where a court stopped facial recognition on the city's own security law.
- 5 🇪🇸 Barcelona Twenty entries across three decades, including a superblock measured by the city's health agency and a flagship parking-sensor network that was quietly removed.
What this route shows
No Asian city is on this list, and that is a finding rather than an omission: 13.0% of documented entries in Asia rest on independent or peer-reviewed evidence, against 23.1% in North America. The selection measures who has been checked, not who is doing best — and being checked is unevenly distributed.