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Bristol built its smart-city reputation on vehicles it did not keep. The joint venture behind Bristol Is Open lasted about three years and left a company on the register trading in nothing. The district heating the council built passed to a private operator in 2023, and in 2026 the council consented to its sale again. What has lasted is what the city could not hand over or could not refuse: a control room it staffs itself, and a clean air zone it is not allowed to suspend without a minister's consent. The same gap runs through what Bristol says about itself. Its open data portal states one licence, and its metadata says forty-four different things.
The atlas documents 7 projects in Bristol, the earliest dating to 2015: 3 scaled back, 4 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (1 entry) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Bristol is actually doing.
Computed from the 7 entries below — a profile, not a score.
2015–2018: the company that was the network. Bristol's reputation was built by Bristol Is Open, a joint venture between the city council and the University of Bristol running a city-scale programmable network. It lasted about three years. The university left, the council-owned company closed out its projects, and the legal vehicle outlived the programme it was built to run — still on the register, filing accounts, trading in nothing.
2016–2017: the instruments the council kept. While the testbed ran, the city built things it operated itself. It laid district heating in Redcliffe, Old Market, Bedminster and Temple, metered at each building's substation. It began assembling the Think Family Database, a joint council and police platform that would eventually score children for risk. And in October 2017 it merged three control rooms — emergency, traffic and community-safety CCTV — into the Operations Centre, which answers a traffic camera and an elderly resident's alarm from the same floor.
2016: the residents who built their own. In east Bristol, five households built their own damp sensors on a small council grant and ran them for two weeks. The deployment was tiny and it ended, but the finding was not about damp: asked who should hold the readings, the participants preferred a not-for-profit over their own council.
2022–2026: what the city no longer decides. The clean air zone began charging in November 2022 — not because a reading crossed a threshold, but because a government direction requires it, and forbids the council from suspending it without the Secretary of State's consent. The heat network passed to Vattenfall in January 2023. Two of the three risk-scoring models were withdrawn in 2023 as not fit for operational use, while the collection that fed them kept running.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2015 to 2022. Pick a dot to read what it was.
No start date on record: Open Data Bristol: one licence stated, forty-four in the metadata
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Bristol's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The open question in Bristol is not what it will build but what it will still own. The council consented in 2026 to the sale of the heat network it built, to a buyer that is not a utility; the first consumer protection rules for heat networks took effect in January 2026, and the operator is not registered with the voluntary scheme, giving as its reason that it has no direct customers here. The clean air zone is the opposite case: the council cannot stop it, and its own status report records that compliance has not yet been achieved. And the Think Family Database is the one to watch, because withdrawing a model is not the same as withdrawing the data — the scoring stopped, the collection did not.
Where Bristol appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Bristol — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Bristol threads below, not counted out of them.
Both built the instrument and found the lever belonged to someone else. Oslo recapitalised its plant and has let a reading close a road, once; Bristol sold the heat network it built and prices its zone by the calendar, not by its sensors.
Every editorial link from Bristol'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 Bristol, United Kingdom.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/bristol/ (last verified 2026-08-25). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.