Warsaw

The city’s digital work sits in its IT office, the Biuro Informatyki. Its director, Joanna Szafarczyk-Kurek, is the city’s chief IT systems architect, and the office runs a smart-city projects unit as well as the city’s data, internet-of-things platform, fibre network and data centres. A separate digitalisation office, created in 2017, no longer appears among the city’s offices.

Much of what residents touch is contracted or arm’s length. Veolia runs the heat, Nextbike operates the Veturilo bikes, and the city’s own companies run the trams, metro and most buses. The 486 city CCTV cameras across 18 districts are watched in police centres and keep footage for 30 days. Open data is moving to a new city portal, while the national portal lists only 22 datasets from the city office.

• Research: the Warsaw University of Technology works on smart-city research, and Warsaw Medical University experts have spoken for the clean-transport zone’s health case.
• Civic groups: Miasto Jest Nasze, an urban movement with councillors in the districts and, with the Left, a club on the city council, is a persistent critic of the civic budget. Polski Alarm Smogowy and Clean Cities Polska press for camera enforcement of the zone.
• Digital inclusion: Fundacja DigitalPoland, whose managing director sits on the city’s dialogue committee on digitalisation, is running the city’s free digital courses for over-60s in seven districts, which opened for sign-up in October 2026.
• Districts: Warsaw’s 18 dzielnice, the city districts, each have an elected council and an office that runs local services; it was a district, Ursynów, whose chargers stood unconnected for a year.

The contact centre is the machine the rest depends on. It takes reports by phone, app, web and e-mail and passes them to the district or company responsible; in its first years it logged about 2.5 million reports, by the account of the official who ran the city’s digitalisation office. The city’s internet-of-things platform carries the air sensors’ readings and opens them to residents and developers.

A digital-transformation policy, announced in draft by the then head of the digitalisation office, promised an open city platform, an internet-of-things platform, a city e-services portal, a loyalty programme and digital parking. The portal and the platform exist; we found no sign of the rest, or that the policy was adopted.

Rafał Trzaskowski of the Civic Coalition (KO), Donald Tusk’s party, has been mayor since 2018 and was re-elected in April 2024, when his party won 37 of the council’s 60 seats and can govern alone. In June 2025 he lost the presidential run-off with 49.11% of the vote to Karol Nawrocki, backed by the Law and Justice party and now president, and said he was concentrating on being mayor. The city is drafting a strategy to 2040 to follow #Warszawa2030.

The climate plan comes with an estimate and a label. Arup, which drafted the Green Vision, puts its potential savings at up to PLN 608m a year. In May 2025 the European Commission gave Warsaw, with Kraków, Łódź, Rzeszów and Wrocław, the mission label for climate-neutral and smart cities.

The region and the State set many of the terms. Mazowieckie’s air programme of 2020 obliged Warsaw to renew its fleet, build tramways and prepare low-emission zones under the 2018 electromobility act. The Supreme Audit Office, NIK, found in 2023 that the city had met the national quota for zero-emission buses, a 9% share in 2021–22, but had not updated its transport plan on time. The government-appointed voivode reviews every council resolution.

From our library

Wystąpienie pokontrolne NIK P/23/064: Działania na rzecz ograniczenia zanieczyszczeń komunikacyjnych w miastach (Urząd m.st. Warszawy)

The audit office on Warsaw’s measures against traffic pollution.

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The State’s delays land in the city too. In June 2026 an MP, Wioletta Kulpa, asked the interior ministry about residence-permit cases at the voivode’s office that ran for almost two years, writing that such delays for a lawfully employed taxpayer “cannot build citizens’ trust in the State”. The ministry replied that online filing had begun only in April 2026.

The zone is lenient by design. Warsaw taxpayers and over-70s are exempt until the end of 2027 for cars registered before 2024, any car may enter on four days a year, and the municipal police check with four mobile cameras. Of 222,000 vehicles checked in 2025 to August, 0.59% did not meet the zone’s standard, most of them within their four free entries, and none was fined. By the end of June 2026 the guards’ system had read the plates of 635,000 vehicles, and 50 drivers had been fined; the first fine came only at the end of 2025. The city says it has no legal basis to fine automatically from its own CCTV.

From our library

Gonienie króliczka, czyli warszawska SCT

Zero fines reported after checking 222,000 vehicles, with only 0.59% non‑compliance in Poland’s inaugural clean‑transport zone.

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Participation is the other worry. The civic budget, a legal duty since 2018, grew from over PLN 120m for 2026 to PLN 137.9m for 2027, but only 55,366 people voted in June 2026, about 3% of residents and 17,000 fewer than a year earlier, against more than 25% in Białystok and Rzeszów. The city puts it down to a format worn out after more than a decade. Miasto Jest Nasze says the vote filled with projects that belong in the city’s ordinary budget once the district teams that screened them were abolished, and that some winners, such as a Białołęka cycle path, have waited a decade to be built.

The clean-transport zone opened on 1 July 2024 over 37 km², about 7% of the city and all of the centre, with five stages planned to 2032. Average nitrogen dioxide at stations inside it fell 18% between 2023 and 2025, against about 5% outside, by the city air office’s figures; Clean Cities Polska calls that “a promising signal, not final proof” of the zone’s effect. Kraków, Szczecin and Katowice have opened zones since; Kraków’s and Katowice’s were compulsory under the 2024 amendment to the electromobility act, where the air breached the nitrogen dioxide limit.

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Dwa lata SCT w Warszawie i wyraźny spadek emisji NO₂. Średnio o 18 procent!

Two years of the zone, and what the air data can and cannot show.

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From our library

Social aspects of low emission zones: Warsaw case study (IEEP policy brief, July 2024)

An independent look at who the clean-transport zone affects.

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The Warsaw Climate Panel of 2020 drew 90 residents by lot; 49 of their 93 recommendations were adopted, among them a call for a green building standard. By July 2025 about 55% of the panel’s recommendations had been delivered, according to the official in charge of them, who aimed for about 63% by the end of that year. OKO.press’s headline asked why nobody knows.

That recommendation became the Warsaw Green Building Standard, binding on every new city-owned building since July 2025 after a ten-month grace period. It covers greenery, water, energy, mobility, materials and health, and requires every new building to keep its rainwater on site. A district building in Białołęka was the first certified, five city projects were certified voluntarily before it became binding, and the Warsaw School of Economics was the first outside the city’s own estate. Retrofits of existing buildings are the next step. By its team’s account, Wrocław, Katowice, Bratislava and Poznań are exploring standards of their own, drawing on Warsaw’s.

From our library

Building for the Future: How Warsaw's Green Building Standard is changing the city

How the city’s green building standard works.

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The air-sensor network reaches beyond the city line: its more than 160 sensors measure fine dust and nitrogen dioxide in Warsaw and 17 surrounding gminas, and their readings feed the Warsaw Air Index on the city’s website and in its contact-centre app. Veolia’s smart heat network, a PLN 52m project begun in 2015, was to put 2,500 substations under remote control and save up to 14,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year; we found no published account of what it achieved.

Veturilo, the public bike system, opened its fifteenth season in 2026 with 3,460 bikes at 344 stations in every district, and recorded over 4.6 million rentals in 2025. The bikes work with four suburban systems.

Public charging grew to about 900 points by mid-2025, the most of any Polish city, mostly built by private operators. Clean Cities counted 924 in July 2026, about 0.5 per 1,000 residents against 5.3 in Paris. The city’s own attempt stalled: chargers built by the Ursynów district in 2023 stood unconnected for a year awaiting technical approval, and the city is now piloting, in Ursynów, leases of land to private operators, who have up to three years to build.

The M2 metro extension to Bemowo was promised for 2025. Its cost rose by about PLN 300m, its contract deadline moved to November 2026, and its depot is due in 2027. In October 2026 trains were running tests on the new section. From 17 to 25 October the two stations at its end, Bemowo and Ulrychów, were closed while it was joined to the line. The city’s transport authority was consulting residents until 25 October on bus routes to its three new stations.

Warsaw ranks 31st of 148 in the IMD Smart City Index 2026, down from 28th of 146 a year earlier, on residents’ answers to a survey. Among 27 European and American cities we compared, its residents rate online ID processing, online reporting of street problems and the city’s ideas platform the highest, and its medical services the lowest. Housing is the weakest score: 25.5 out of 100 on finding a home at no more than 30% of a salary.

The rules Warsaw writes for itself are the ones it can show: the green standard binds every new city building, and the official in charge put the climate panel’s recommendations at more than half delivered in mid-2025. The rules that reach drivers are lenient by design: in the zone’s first year almost every car checked already complied, residents’ older cars are exempt until 2028, and the city has no legal power to fine from its own cameras. Whether the zone bites will be known in January 2028, when those exemptions end.