Ankara instrumented its utilities and its traffic long before it published anything about them, and the gap still shows: the water utility runs its network from a single SCADA control centre and still loses 42% of what it treats, more than twice Istanbul's rate. Since 2019 the municipality's most visible smart-city work has been about disclosure instead — a map-first open data portal under a licence the city wrote itself, a citizen request line whose queue is published, and a map on which women mark the places where they do not feel safe. The transport layer is the exception: EGO has tracked its buses in real time since 2011, but the fare card and the data behind the app both stay in-house.
The atlas documents 7 projects in Ankara, the earliest dating to 2003: 7 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (6 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Ankara is actually doing.
Computed from the 7 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Ankara's oldest digital service is a phone number with an audit team attached. Baskent 153 has taken requests since 2003 and now runs on phone, SMS, WhatsApp, web, app and social media — but what distinguishes it from a switchboard was bolted on later: a unit-audit team that meets call staff monthly, a response-audit team that checks whether an answer arrived on time and whether the problem was actually solved rather than closed, complaints that can require a photograph confirming the fix, and a reporting team mapping which parts of the city raise which problems and how long they have gone unresolved. In the first seven months of 2023 the centre logged 2,027,238 calls and 631,133 formally recorded applications. The ratio between those two numbers is the interesting one, because that is where a request line decides what counts as a request.
The transport layer arrived next, and made two opposite decisions. EGO Cep'te shipped its first Android release in November 2011 and is still updated; a rider types a five-digit stop number and sees what is approaching. The notable part is coverage: the feed carries the privately operated services that run much of Ankara's network alongside the municipal fleet, so the tracking follows the passenger rather than the operator — the harder integration, and the one riders notice. No public developer feed for that data could be found, which is a policy difference from Istanbul rather than a technical one. Baskent Kart replaced the magnetic fare system in March 2013, and from January 2024 new validators began accepting ordinary bank cards, phones and QR codes. Accepting them is not the same as treating them equally: under the tariff in force from January 2026 the bank card buys exactly one full-price ride, with no transfer, no student or teacher rate, no early-morning discount and none of the free travel the municipal card carries for over-65s.
From 2021 the most visible municipal work has been about disclosure. Mor Haritam, built with UN Women and a Turkish research foundation, maps women's counselling centres, creches, family life centres and violence prevention centres, and adds a button through which users mark places where they do not feel safe and then follow what was done about it — a measurement of the fear that changes a route before anything is reported, which incident statistics cannot see. A year later Seffaf Ankara opened as a map-first data portal publishing excavation sites, transit boarding counts, reservoir levels, social assistance payments by district and the incoming, pending and completed counts of the 153 line. Its licence is the city's own instrument: it names the same unmodified international licence Montreal uses, then reserves the right to publish new versions and treats continued use as acceptance of them, which the licence it names does not allow.
The two systems with the longest run behind them are honest about themselves in opposite directions. ASKI has run the drinking-water network from a single round-the-clock SCADA centre for years and publishes the result in its own strategic plan: a 42 per cent loss rate at the opening of the 2025-2029 period against a 25 per cent target for 2029, with high losses listed among its self-declared weaknesses and SCADA renewal recorded as nought per cent complete in 2025. Istanbul, running the same architecture, reports 18.6 per cent. The traffic control centre demonstrably closes a loop from detector to signal timing and from fault to crew, and the most recent inventory anyone has published for it is from 2018: 545 of 864 signalised junctions reporting faults, loop detectors at 50 junctions, green wave on 21 arteries. A system whose last public count is eight years old cannot be described in the present tense with those numbers.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2003 to 2022. Pick a dot to read what it was.
No start date on record: ASKİ SCADA Network and Ankara's Water Losses, Ankara Traffic Control Centre and Adaptive Signals
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Ankara's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Ankara publishes an unusual amount about itself, including the numbers that do not flatter it, and the places where the publishing stops are the ones to watch. The water plan is the sharpest test the city has set itself: a 42 per cent loss rate is supposed to reach 25 by 2029, while the SCADA renewal that is meant to help opened the period at nought per cent complete — and the utility running the same playbook in Istanbul is already at 18.6. Three smaller questions follow from the same habit. Whether the traffic centre ever publishes a current inventory, since nothing since 2018 exists. Whether the bus feed that already covers operators the municipality does not own is opened to developers, as Istanbul's is. And whether the data licence is brought into line with the one it names, because a bespoke wrapper that reserves the right to re-version takes back what the standard licence makes irrevocable.
Where Ankara appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Ankara — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Ankara threads below, not counted out of them.
Two cities that built the same two things — adaptive signals and an open-data portal — and cannot say what became of either: the traffic figures are stale on both sides, and the licence is unnamed in one, revocable in the other.
Every editorial link from Ankara's entries into another city, strongest first. Each one is a statement about two projects, not about two cities — the three above are the ones the atlas is willing to make at city level.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Ankara, Turkey.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/ankara/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.