Chongqing is a direct-administered municipality the size of a small country — its registered population runs to roughly 32 million, but most of that is farming counties spread across a mountainous jurisdiction bigger than Austria. The figure the atlas uses here, about 11.5 million, is the actual built-up urban area (Demographia's 2025 estimate, ranking it 36th worldwide), the dense, cliff-and-river city of bridges and the monorail that famously runs through a residential tower. Its smart-city record leans hard on transport and infrastructure safety rather than citizen services: two of China's first fully-driverless robotaxi permits (in the outlying district of Yongchuan, not the city centre), a national connected-vehicle test corridor, sensors on most of its Yangtze River crossings, and a river-monitoring dashboard for 17,500 volunteer 'river chiefs'. Almost everything measured here is self-reported by the agency that built it, and the record includes a real embarrassment — a driverless taxi that drove into an open construction pit in 2025 — alongside the official successes.
The atlas documents 6 projects in Chongqing, the earliest dating to 2018: 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (5 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Chongqing is actually doing.
Computed from the 6 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Chongqing's government app came first and set the pattern for how the rest of the record reports itself. Yukuaiban launched in November 2018 as the municipality's unified portal for approvals, tax, social security and business registration, replacing dozens of separate department counters with one login. It reported ten million registered users and more than 55 million completed transactions within a year, growing to 25 million verified users and over 250 million cumulative transactions by January 2023, with a redesigned version added in 2025. Like Shanghai's and Shenzhen's equivalents, every milestone comes from the agency that runs it — a growth curve that is easy to publish and hard to verify.
From 2021 the municipality collected designations. Liangjiang New Area became China's fourth national connected-vehicle pilot zone and the first in the west, tasked with wiring roads and intersections with cameras, lidar and radar so that vehicles can see beyond their own sensors — and three years in, the verifiable footprint was an eleven-kilometre demonstration corridor, a separate 55-kilometre network of test roads, and a stretch of expressway running thirty-odd use cases. A national label describes a regulatory status, not a finished city-scale system. The following year a different district issued something more consequential: Yongchuan, about fifty kilometres from the downtown core, granted one of China's first commercial permits for paid robotaxi rides with nobody behind the wheel, starting with five cars over thirty square kilometres and reaching nearly 4,000 pickup points across roughly 130 square kilometres by March 2025. In August that year one of those cars drove into an open municipal construction trench with a passenger inside, who was pulled out by nearby workers and residents.
Also in 2022, the river office built the layer that covers the largest area and reports the least verifiable numbers. The Smart River Chief platform pools satellite imagery, drone and unmanned-boat surveys, video analysis and automated water-quality sensors along the Yangtze, the Jialing, the Wu and several smaller rivers into one dashboard used by roughly 17,500 city, district and township river chiefs for patrols and pollution reports, claiming to flag illegal dumping automatically and trace a pollution source within thirty minutes. By 2025 one district reported 38 riverside cameras feeding an enforcement alert system with a hundred per cent detection and response rate. A perfect figure with no audit behind it is a claim to flag, not to repeat.
The two most recent systems are the ones where measurement reaches an action, and they do it very differently. The public facilities centre runs structural monitoring on the city's cross-Yangtze bridges — 24 of 28 in the central urban area live by the end of 2023, each carrying more than a hundred stress, strain, deflection and temperature sensors generating over 100,000 readings a day and triggering automatic alerts past preset thresholds — and on two of those bridges a weigh-in-motion subsystem is certified to metrology standards precise enough for traffic police to cite an overweight truck without a roadside stop. That is the automation layer most bridge-monitoring projects never build. In late September 2024 the traffic police stood up a data-fusion system for the central core, pulling roughly 1.5 billion records from twelve departments and sixty data categories to run automated signal retiming, roadside displays and patrol dispatch — across seventeen roads and fifty-one intersections.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2018 to 2024. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Chongqing's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The recurring gap in Chongqing is between the size of the label and the size of the footprint. A national pilot zone is eleven kilometres of demonstration corridor; a traffic brain built from 1.5 billion fused records reaches fifty-one intersections; a river platform with 17,500 users produces a district claiming perfect detection. The exception is the bridges, and it is worth stating plainly why: structural sensors earn their keep when they connect to an action, and weigh-in-motion data feeding directly into a citation is the rarest thing in this record — a reading with a legal consequence attached and a metrology certificate to survive being challenged. Two questions follow. Whether the traffic system's fifty-one intersections grow toward the data integration that already exists behind them, or whether integration stays the cheap half. And whether the robotaxi service, which expanded for three years before a car drove into an unmarked trench with a fare aboard, publishes anything about that incident beyond what bystanders reported.
Where Chongqing appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Chongqing — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Chongqing threads below, not counted out of them.
The clearest pair inside China: the same river-quality platform tracing discharges back to their source, the same e-government super-app reporting its own milestones, and a robotaxi permit resting on Shenzhen's law.
Neighbouring Sichuan-basin megacities running the identical three programmes: signals reading live video, the same robotaxi fleet scaled up from a handful of cars, and a one-network government portal reporting its own numbers.
Two Chinese cities running the same national programme in parallel — robotaxis from one operator, a wired-road pilot zone, bridges under sensors — and both report kilometres of instrumented road rather than journeys served.
Every editorial link from Chongqing'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 Chongqing, China.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/chongqing/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.