Dortmund's record is unusually honest about small numbers, which is what makes it readable. Driverless cabins have shuttled above the technical university's campuses since May 1984 with nobody on board — and the operator's own account of why it held is that the guideway is elevated, closed and serves a single corridor, so the environment does the safety work rather than the software. The open-data portal sits near the top of this atlas's licence ladder because it has no unlicensed remainder at all: 823 datasets, every one licensed, and 539 of them waiving attribution entirely. The municipal utility bought citywide radio coverage for sensors within a year of starting and then spent the following years looking for applications that pay for it, the largest so far being about 2,500 water meters in underground shafts. And the kerbside charging programme publishes the figure most operators leave out — 5.5 per cent utilisation on its newest units, which the utility frames as a very good value for inner-city charging.
The atlas documents 5 projects in Dortmund, the earliest dating to 1984: 5 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 Dortmund is actually doing.
Computed from the 5 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Dortmund's automated transport predates the phrase smart city by three decades. The suspended monorail above the technical university has carried passengers in driverless cabins since 2 May 1984, supervised from a central control room, with the operator calling it Germany's first fully automatic transport system in regular passenger service. Extensions in 1993 and 2003 grew it to 3.4 kilometres linking the two campuses with a neighbouring district, a technology park and a suburban rail station, carrying around 7,000 passengers a day in term time. Over its first forty years it logged 45 million passengers and 5.9 million kilometres at an availability above 99 per cent. Elsewhere in this atlas automated lines put attendants back on board after incidents; this one has run unattended from its first day, and the reason is the guideway rather than the software.
The city's smart-city programme proper is a convening structure rather than a system. The Allianz Smart City Dortmund, running since 2016, networks businesses, universities and residents to co-design and test projects, using the northern renewal area as its main real-world laboratory. Two years later the city began publishing open data, relaunching the portal in February 2024 with nearly 490 datasets, built-in charts, combinable maps and a public interface, financed through the federal smart-cities model programme. By August 2026 the catalogue had grown to 823 datasets and every one of them carries a licence — 539 under the German open data licence variant that waives attribution entirely, 284 under its attribution variant. On this atlas's licence ladder that is near the top, and rarer than it sounds, because most portals leave an unlicensed remainder.
In 2019 the municipal utility built the radio layer and put the governance question first. It reported near-complete outdoor low-power radio coverage across the city by the end of that year and in October founded a wholly owned subsidiary, co-steered with the city, to run both the network and a smart-city data hub — so that urban data stays in municipal hands. The workload since has been deliberately unglamorous: around 2,500 water meters in underground shafts converted to daily remote reading, with several hundred in test operation first, alongside pilots in parking, waste fill levels and carbon-dioxide monitoring. Coverage was the cheap rung and the city bought it inside a year; the applications that pay for it have taken longer, and no public inventory says how many sensors actually transmit today.
The same year Dortmund led a three-city project under the federal clean-air programme to build electric-vehicle charging into existing streetlights where residents park at the kerb. The first lamppost charger went live in December 2019; by late 2022 the utility and its contractor had 320 points running, while two universities studied the effects on the grid. The 2021 rollout announcement had spoken of up to 500 points for Dortmund and the completion reports count 320 and declare the goals met, without explaining the gap. The chargers now run as ordinary utility infrastructure, and in summer 2025 the same idea was extended with charging kerbstones on one street — ten units that logged over 3,000 sessions at about 5.5 per cent utilisation.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 1984 to 2019. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Dortmund's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Dortmund's open questions are mostly about whether the cheap rungs it bought early ever carry weight. The radio network reached near-complete outdoor coverage in a single year and the largest application seven years later is a few thousand water meters, with no public count of how many devices transmit — so the honest test is not more coverage but a published inventory. The charging programme is the model of what candour looks like in this genre: the interesting number was never the count of points but the utilisation the operator was willing to publish, and 5.5 per cent framed as a good value tells you what success here actually is. Two things are genuinely due. The monorail's roughly two-kilometre extension to the light-rail network, funded up to 95 per cent under the federal programme and targeted at 2029, which would turn a campus shuttle into part of the city network. And an evaluation of the data portal, because a catalogue with no unlicensed remainder is an achievement in governance and still says nothing about whether anyone uses it.
Where Dortmund appears in the atlas's own analysis.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Dortmund, Germany.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/dortmund/ (last verified 2026-08-15). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.