What cities try, and what it delivers
Long reads on the digital projects cities run: what works, what stalls when the pilot money ends, and who decides. Every number links to its source; every source sits in the library.
Deep dives
Why do smart-city pilots stop when the grant ends — and what did the survivors have in common?
Europe has paid cities to try out smart-city ideas for two decades; its auditors and evaluators have now counted how many outlived their grants. Most did not, and the ones that did share a handful of unglamorous traits: an owner, a duty, open code and a budget line.
What does a city's Chief Digital Officer actually do now that AI has arrived?
Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Amsterdam built AI assistants for their staff; New York switched off a business chatbot that reporters and its own auditors had found unreliable. Behind both stories is one job, the city's digital chief, now running assistants, keeping registers and steering a legal clock, while few cities can yet show what their AI has changed.
When a city's cameras start deciding what matters, what do they actually achieve?
France ran AI on Olympic CCTV and its own evaluators found it rarely led to anyone being sent; London's facial-recognition cameras report arrests by the hundred; Warsaw's clean-air zone fined no one in its first year. A look across eight countries at which algorithmic cameras deliver, which cannot show results, and who decides what a city may switch on.
Browse by topic
All topics →Mobility & Urban Logistics
Moving people and goods more efficiently and sustainably across cities.
Energy & Environment
The natural world and the infrastructure that sustains it.
Built Environment & Liveability
Designing the physical city for the people who live in it.
Digital Infrastructure & Data
The connective tissue of the smart city.
Governance & Civic Innovation
How cities are managed, how citizens engage, how cities cooperate.
Then go and look
Every number in these reads comes from somewhere. Follow it into the data, or into the cities themselves.