Smart city projects that worked

The atlas keeps a permanent address for what went wrong, so it owes one to what went right. An entry earns succeeded when it met its core goal, whether it is still running or has already finished. That is a narrower claim than it sounds: it says the goal was met — not that the money was well spent, not that the result was worth the side effects, and not that another city would get the same outcome.

The evidence behind these is the part worth reading. 104 of the 157 — 66.2% — rest on the operator's or the city's own reporting, and only 37 (23.6%) have been examined by anyone outside the delivering organisation. A success rate computed from this page would therefore mostly measure who was willing to publish a number about themselves. This is a reading list, not a leaderboard.

Membership here is decided by the data: every published entry whose outcome is recorded as succeeded appears below, and no entry can be added by hand. The counterpart page lists everything that failed or was scaled back.

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

All 157 entries

The rest of the record

Each of these is the same kind of page — a slice of the atlas whose membership is decided by a field rather than by an editor.

Where to read next

The counterpart to this page is smart city project failures, which lists everything that failed or was scaled back, grouped by how it went wrong. The State of the Evidence puts both in proportion.