Surabaya's digital-government record is older than most: e-procurement and e-budgeting date to 2002–2003, and by 2013 the city had folded business licensing into one online window. What it built later is a traffic-control room descended from a 1990s system and a free 112 emergency line watching hundreds of cameras — both still running. Its best-known export, a bus that let riders pay with plastic bottles, kept growing its routes and fleet after 2018 but quietly moved the bottle swap off the bus in 2022, and the city still hasn't matched the fare subsidy some peer cities offer. The newest project — GPS on the rubbish trucks — only started in 2026 and has no results yet.
The atlas documents 7 projects in Surabaya, the earliest dating to 2004: 1 scaled back, 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (3 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Surabaya is actually doing.
Computed from the 7 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Surabaya's record starts earlier than almost any other city's in this atlas, and it starts with money. An e-procurement pilot in 2002 grew into the Government Resource Management System, run since 2004 across planning, budgeting, projects, procurement, delivery, controlling and performance — one of Indonesia's earliest municipal e-procurement platforms, and a system academics were still publishing evaluations of in February 2025. Those evaluations describe adoption as uneven across departments. The city has never published a citywide efficiency figure of its own.
The 2010s wired the counters and the junctions. A traffic control system dating to the early 1990s was rebuilt on Australian adaptive signalling from 2010 and now runs as SITS from a 24-hour operations centre, linking timing to live cameras across more than 130 signalised intersections; no independent travel-time study of it was found. Surabaya Single Window went live in March 2013 under a mayoral regulation, moving permits out of separate paper trails at each department and into one system, rebuilt and relaunched in December 2021 with a promise that the remaining paper permits would follow. And e-Health Surabaya let residents take a queue number at any of 63 public clinics from 2014, in Indonesian, Javanese and Madurese, instead of arriving before dawn — although a published evaluation at one clinic found many patients still needed counter staff to complete the registration.
In 2016 the city put a free emergency number behind a wall of monitors. Command Center 112 opened that July inside the Siola public-service building, coordinating police, fire, health, sanitation and public works around the clock, with operators watching roughly 600 cameras and routing each call to the responsible department. The national social affairs ministry cited it in 2021 as a model worth replicating and the service has kept winning awards. No average response time has been published.
Then came the export. Suroboyo Bus opened in April 2018 with a fare that travelled further than the bus did: three large plastic bottles, five medium ones or ten cups bought a two-hour ticket. Since May 2022 the swap has happened at staffed exchange posts and through an app rather than on board, and the ordinary cash fare does the work of keeping the line running. The network itself grew steadily, from 3 routes and 8 buses at launch to 15 routes and 39 buses by April 2025, but riders pay more than in some peer Indonesian cities because Surabaya has not matched their central-government subsidy, and 2025 reporting described subsidy costs climbing against ridership local officials called stagnant. The newest entry, GPS on the refuse fleet, started in 2026 and is too young to have a before-and-after.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2004 to 2026. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Surabaya's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Surabaya has the longest municipal digital record in this atlas and close to the shortest list of published results, and after two decades that gap is the story rather than a caveat. Five figures would settle most of it, and none of them requires new technology: a citywide efficiency number for the budget and procurement platform, a permit processing time for the single window, an average response time for the 112 centre, an independent travel-time measurement on the adaptive signal network, and the first before-and-after from the cleanliness dashboard on how long a truck actually takes between transfer point and landfill. The bus raises a different question, which is a budget one: the bottles were never what paid for it, and the subsidy line is rising against ridership the city's own officials describe as flat.
Where Surabaya appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Surabaya — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Surabaya threads below, not counted out of them.
The same pattern on two continents: a camera-fed control room sold as adaptive with no independent study behind it, an emergency line fused with the police camera network, and a flagship transit novelty that had to be rescued later.
Every editorial link from Surabaya'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 Surabaya, Indonesia.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/surabaya/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.