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Nanjing's smart-city work sits almost entirely in the machinery of enforcement and dispatch rather than in showcase districts: an environment bureau that watches 3,976 permit holders and 36,000 heavy diesel trucks from one screen, a flood platform that texts district officials to pre-lower river levels before a storm, and a signal-timing office that buys its evidence from a ride-hailing company's floating-car data. Most of it is bolted onto systems the city already ran — parking meters, bike quotas, e-bike sales counters, metro signalling — which is also why so many of the published numbers describe process (fewer site visits, faster work orders) rather than outcomes. Where the city does claim a technical first, its own wording is careful: Line 7's trains are described as having the capability to run without a driver, not as running without one.
The atlas documents 9 projects in Nanjing, the earliest dating to 2014: 9 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (8 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Nanjing is actually doing.
Computed from the 9 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Nanjing's digital layer opened with a front door and a bus nobody had ordered. My Nanjing launched in August 2014 as one mobile entrance to the output of more than eighty departments, and has since accumulated over 290 service scenarios and more than 4,000 functions; by August 2024 the data bureau counted 11.25 million cumulative real-name registrations against a resident population of 9.58 million. The following year the bus group started letting riders design lines instead of requesting stops: Customised Bus clusters app requests into a candidate alignment, puts those riders in a group chat, and surveys the route only once at least sixty of them have paid. Both are worth reading together, because both are reported in the same currency — sign-ups and route counts — and neither publishes how many people used the thing last month.
From 2017 the city turned to what private operators were putting on its streets, and to its own kerbs. A joint rule of the transport, police and urban-management bureaus made every shared bike a licensed object: positioning modules, filed deployment plans, at least fifty field staff per 10,000 bikes, live data into a government platform, and twice-yearly scored evaluations published for each operator — 87.88, 76.61 and 75.16 out of 106 in the first half of 2024, across a licensed fleet of 305,000. Shared electric bikes are not permitted at all. In 2019 the traffic police opened a signal timing centre that buys commercial floating-car trajectories from a ride-hailing firm to rank junctions before an officer changes a plan, reaching 154 green-wave corridors over 1,080 junctions; the urban management bureau ordered a single parking platform the same year, which now shows live occupancy for 83,000 kerbside bays inside a stock of about 600,000 spaces.
The 2020s brought the two biggest platforms, and with them the city's most careful sentence. Line 7 opened in three sections dated 28 December in 2022, 2023 and 2024, completing a 35.49 km line with no enclosed driver's cab — and every official announcement describes the trains as having the capability to run without a driver, which is a statement about the design rather than about who is aboard. In September 2023 the ecology and environment bureau put its monitoring streams behind one enforcement platform: 113 air stations, 42 water stations, 3,976 permitted dischargers and some 36,000 heavy diesel trucks, with an AI model sorting anomalies into reminder, warning and suspected violation. Its headline results are on-site inspections down 41.8 per cent, online inspections up 12.5 per cent to nearly 90,000 firm-visits, and the problem-detection rate up nine percentage points.
2024 gave the pattern its two clearest tests. The water facilities centre added 544 devices to 1,293 existing sensors and tagged more than 6,000 outfalls with a live three-colour submersion state; across two August rain events the waterlogging platform pushed 12 flood warnings, 18 work orders, 8 video-AI alerts and 26 dispatch instructions, and on 20 August turned a 6:41 complaint into a named officer's work order in four minutes — inside an instrumented sample zone of 5.8 km2 in a municipality of 6,587. Four months after a February fire in Yuhuatai district killed fifteen people, the market regulator launched Ninganxing, binding one e-bike, one battery and one QR code at the point of sale across more than 2,000 shops. The official investigation had found the fire started in an over-capacity pack the owner bought from an unlicensed online seller — a battery that was never in a compliant retailer's ledger to begin with.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2014 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 Nanjing's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Nanjing's open question is whether any of these process figures ever becomes an outcome figure. The enforcement platform reports fewer visits and more detections and says nothing about emissions; the super-app reports cumulative registrations and not monthly use; the waterlogging platform reports warnings issued rather than basements kept dry, and covers under a thousandth of the municipality's area. The one place the city built a real consequence is the bike scorecard, where the sanction escalates from a public naming to a restriction on deployment volume to an order to leave the market — which only works because the fleet is licensed and counted first. The two things worth watching are whether that enforcement ladder is ever used, and whether any document names the day the Line 7 console is left unattended.
Where Nanjing appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Nanjing — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Nanjing threads below, not counted out of them.
City-run against licensed-private, twice over: Seoul owns its bike fleet while Nanjing caps three operators who own theirs, and Seoul drew its night routes from call records while Nanjing makes the riders form the group themselves.
Every editorial link from Nanjing'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 Nanjing, China.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/nanjing/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.