Why do smart-city pilots stop when the grant ends — and what did the survivors have in common?

Copying was one of the key goals of the EU’s smart-city lighthouse programme. Horizon 2020 put €381 million into projects that paired lighthouse cities, which demonstrated solutions, with fellow cities that were meant to replicate them. In 2023 the European Court of Auditors found that seven closed projects had met or beaten about two-thirds of their targets. But the Commission did “not currently plan to assess the replication” of the solutions. Without that, the auditors wrote, nobody could tell a replicable solution from one that had become obsolete or unsustainable.

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Smart cities – Tangible solutions, but fragmentation challenges their wider adoption (European Court of Auditors, Special Report 24/2023)

Audit reveals only 13.3% solutions replicated, 21.1% in fellow cities, no EU investor secured.

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So the auditors counted for themselves, in the nine projects that had closed. The chart sets what lighthouse cities said they intended, in a survey, against what had been replicated.

Plans ran nearly three times ahead of what fellow cities had copied, and more than four times ahead of what the lighthouse cities had.

After the audit, the Commission asked the Scalable Cities consortium to carry out that assessment for its executive agency, CINEA; the report is dated October 2025. The headline reads well: many lighthouse cities “successfully upscaled 40–60%” of their solutions. The report’s own database is plainer. Lighthouse cities fully upscaled 60 of 227 solutions they had planned to spread across their own territory, and fellow cities fully replicated 82 of 316. That is about a quarter each. The share passes half only when solutions still “in the process” of upscaling are counted too.

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Advancing Smart City solutions across Europe – Assessment of upscaling and replication in the European Smart Cities and Communities Lighthouse projects (CINEA / Scalable Cities, October 2025)

Examines 44 Lighthouse and 64 Fellow cities, showing 60 upscaled and 82 replicated solutions Europe-wide.

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Country by country the gap between plan and delivery varies a great deal. Look at the distance between each pair of dots.

The Netherlands finished one but had 20 more under way; in Germany 22 of 28 had not been upscaled at all.

Other programmes use other yardsticks, and they do not all agree. The Urban Innovative Actions gave cities up to €5 million to test bold ideas. Their evaluators judged in 2020 that 4 of 22 early projects were likely to sustain or scale up their activities fully, 5 mostly and 10 partly. The longest look back, from transport, is far more cheerful. Five years after CIVITAS II ended in 2009, the 14 cities that answered reported that 129 of 186 planned measures still existed, which the evaluators called “a very good result”. Which ones matters. In traffic management 90% were still fully in place, as were nearly all cycling and walking measures, while clean vehicles and goods logistics scored below average.

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Assessment Study of the Urban Innovative Actions 2014-2020 – Final Report (CSES for DG REGIO, December 2020)

Only four of twenty‑two UIA projects fully succeeded, revealing €372 million funding gaps and scaling hurdles.

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Long term evaluation – Memo 2 based on outcomes from CIVITAS II (2005-2009) and status of measures today (2014) (CIVITAS WIKI, TNO)

129 of 186 measures survived five years; cycling thrives, clean vehicles lag, funding dries up.

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Some of the best-known numbers come from the funders themselves. Glasgow’s Future City demonstrator delivered a £144 million return on £24 million, according to a case study by Innovate UK, the agency that paid for it. An independent evaluation, by the research firm mruk for the city council, did appear. But it was formative and, in its own words, did “not aim to determine or measure final outcomes”, and the return figure is not in it.

Read the counts with care. They rest on what projects and cities reported about themselves: CINEA’s tallies compare each project’s plans with its own end reports, and its survey heard back from 12 of 48 lighthouse cities. CINEA itself thinks its count probably understates upscaling that was still under way. Definitions move between “upscaled”, “replicated” and “sustained”. CINEA’s own totals disagree, with 227 planned solutions in one place and 230 a few pages later. Single cities flip between sources: CINEA scores Barcelona 0 of 9, while the auditors report that after its project ended Barcelona “started installing more towers in other parts of the city”. And nothing here looks more than about five years past the grant.

Still, where the evaluators compared plans with results (the auditors and CINEA), plans ran well ahead of what continued. Where the measures were signals and cycle lanes, most of them lasted. The question is what separates the two.

Jan Abt studies what happens to Germany’s funded smart-city projects after the money. City apps, sensor-guided waste collection, citizen portals and chatbots are launched with grants, and when the funding runs out quite a few stay pilots and are switched off, kommunal.de reported. The critical factors are paying for what comes next and organising who runs the service. The cases in this read show the other ways a pilot stops.

The first is money for running costs. “We are under tight budgets over the next few years,” Gary Walker, programme director of Future City Glasgow, told Holyrood; some of the apps would be hard to keep, the magazine reported, because of what they cost to run. In Vienna an e-car share for social-housing estates proved “unsustainable without EU grants”, the auditors found, and the cooperation with its provider did not continue after the project.

Then an operator walks away, as Enigma did in Wrocław. Or an election intervenes. MARES de Madrid was an Urban Innovative Actions project to grow the social and solidarity economy in four neighbourhoods. It “ended … in the context of a difficult and challenging local political transition”, wrote Alessandro Coppola, the programme’s expert on it, and the partners no longer manage its spaces. CIVITAS cities also named local elections among the reasons measures were changed or cancelled.

People are the next break. Germany’s Modellprojekte Smart Cities have €691.0 million committed to 73 model projects. By 30 November 2024 they had drawn €146.0 million. In its answer to a parliamentary question the federal government gave several reasons. Among them, the last evaluation had found that 25% of the posts created in the projects could not be filled for lack of skilled staff.

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Antwort der Bundesregierung: Mittelabfluss der Smart-Cities-Modellprojekte (BT-Drucksache 20/14210)

€146 million already spent on 73 smart‑city pilots, revealing limited fund drawdown by late 2024.

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An unspent grant is not a failed pilot. It does show how much depends on people: the posts that go unfilled during a project are the ones a city would need to run the service afterwards.

Contracts nobody enforces are another break. Santander’s council spent years promoting its sensor-based “Smartcity” platform and required the firm renewing its underground bins to connect them to it. An audit commissioned by the council found no fill-level sensors in the bins, and the platform’s manager confirmed she had received no data for years. Fixing everything the audit listed would cost more than €600,000, on a contract tendered at about €850,000.

Sometimes a bigger subsidy wins. In Trento a Horizon 2020 retrofit of 156 social-housing flats, which had already slowed under red tape, stopped when Italy’s 110% “super bonus” offered more, and some owners chose conventional works. Sometimes the vehicle was built for research, not service. Bristol is Open, a council–university venture launched in April 2015 as a programmable test-bed, hosted smart-city research projects; after three years the council took sole ownership to finish them, and “the company is now dormant”.

And sometimes a pilot never belonged to anyone. The Dutch enterprise agency RVO wrote that some past pilots “turned out to be insufficiently anchored in the organisation in which they were run”. The CIVITAS look-back shows how the problem shifts. At the end of the projects cities most often reported technical barriers, for 46% of measures. Five years on, the barrier they named most was money.

The researchers Jonas Torrens and Timo von Wirth use a word others coined for the pattern, “projectification”: relying on “temporary, situated interventions to address persistent, systemic challenges”. Some interventions did become permanent, though. What did they have?

Hamburg did not set out to build a shared product. In 2012 the city passed a transparency law that made publishing its geodata compulsory. No product on the market met the law’s needs, so the city built a map portal on open-source code, the Masterportal. In 2018 five public bodies signed an agreement to develop it together. By the end of 2025 the partnership had 56 members, all of them public, according to a study for the federal transfer office. Members and non-members alike can pay into a development fund from €1,000 a year.

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Open-Source-Projekte gemeinsam steuern: Community- und Produktmanagement in interkommunalen Entwicklungspartnerschaften (KTS, April 2026)

German intermunicipal guide reveals masterportal’s 56‑member network, CIVITAS/CORE ties, and OSCA’s three‑fork fragmentation.

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Set its timeline beside Vozilla’s. This one starts with a duty and grows a community.

In the cases here, four traits recur. The first is a duty or a standing procedure that outlives the people who started it, which is why neither of the first two examples needed a grant to begin with. Madrid’s participatory budget, which began in 2015, lived through the same change of government as MARES. The new administration cut its budget in half in 2020 and changed the rules, according to the project behind its software, but kept it.

The second is an owner who runs it. Grevesmühlen, a small town in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, set up Digitale Stadt Grevesmühlen GmbH as a subsidiary of its municipal utility to build its smart-city measures. The utility later took the solutions over, and the roles were planned while the measures were still being designed, the federal study records. In Glasgow about half the Future City money, £12.7 million, went into an operations centre for public-space CCTV, traffic management and police intelligence. Those services had departments behind them, and the centre was still running when a minister visited in November 2017, while the apps had no such owner.

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Von der innovativen Idee in den Regelbetrieb – Fünf zentrale Faktoren als Planungshilfen für den Verstetigungsprozess von Smart-City-Maßnahmen (BBSR / KTS, Difu, July 2025)

Five key factors guide Smart‑City measures from pilot to permanent, highlighting municipal‑company pathways and intentional wind‑downs.

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The third is open code with a community around it. Berlin’s tree-watering app, Gieß den Kiez, was rebuilt for Leipzig from its open-source code, launched there on €5,000 of local public money and has since been adapted for Potsdam, though further growth needs more funding. CONSUL, the participation software behind Madrid’s budget, is used by more than 250 cities and organisations; Decidim counts more than 500 installations. Open code does not guarantee one shared product: OSCA, a city app started by Solingen with Wolfsburg and Remscheid, split into three main forks as cities went their own ways. Solingen’s version lives on, run with the municipal IT company regio iT, with about 25,000 users.

The fourth is a model rebuilt to stand on its own. Vienna’s social-housing company and other operators redesigned the e-car share that had lost its EU money, opened it to the wider public and found a new provider; the auditors call it “now operative and sustainable”. Barcelona’s lamp-post towers, which the auditors say the city went on installing, are the contested case met above.

None of this argues against pilots. Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria, then Barcelona’s chief technology officer, called for “constant small-scale pilot projects and experiments” that keep what serves residents “and discard those which are not”. Elsewhere in the same report they warn that cities must “avoid proprietary solutions favoring vendor lock-ins”.

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Rethinking the Smart City: Democratizing Urban Technology (Evgeny Morozov & Francesca Bria, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York, January 2018)

Morozov and Bria argue tiny, replaceable pilots protect cities, champion open-source code for urban tech.

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When CINEA asked lighthouse cities what made upscaling work, almost half named political support; 4 of 12 named funding. Rotterdam described a “circle of innovation” of thinkers, deciders, sponsors and implementers: “if even one part of this circle is missing, successful replication becomes very unlikely.” Some funders have begun to change their rules.

When the Urban Innovative Actions chose projects, “transferability and scaling up” was worth 10% of the score. Its evaluators concluded in 2020 that the initiative “lacks a structured approach to supporting transfer and replication”, and suggested writing sustainability into the selection criteria.

Its successor asks more. From the European Urban Initiative’s 2023 call, supported cities “will set up transfer partnerships with three other cities to replicate the projects”, and 22 projects launched such partnerships from January 2025. Wallonia’s second Smart Region call, worth €3,113,250, made replicating, improving or scaling existing smart projects one of the two kinds of project it would fund, naming the 35 finished winners of its first call. And the Commission had the replication assessment the auditors asked for carried out.

Germany built a transfer office, the KTS, beside its model projects. The chart shows what municipalities without federal funding had done with the projects’ work by June 2024. Compare the top bar with the second.

Unfunded municipalities had looked to a model project as an example nearly five times as often as they had taken over one of its solutions, the government told the Bundestag. The MPs who asked put the number of unfunded municipalities at 11,000. A step plan adopted in June 2024 provides for an open marketplace for smart-city applications, online in its first stages. It also provides for a competence centre for all municipalities, on which preparatory work had begun by December 2024.

France checked its own programme halfway. Territoires d’innovation holds €450 million for 24 winning territories over fifteen years; by the mid-point more than €220 million had been awarded. On how the projects will carry on, the operator’s mid-term report is candid: “these questions are still in their infancy for most beneficiaries”, though they will be a priority for the second half. The relay it suggests is other national, or even European, calls for projects.

That is the tension. Programmes pay for novelty and, increasingly, for spreading it. None of the programmes in this read is designed to pay a pilot’s running costs once its project period ends; that part still falls to the city.

If the evidence holds one lesson for a city, it is the one Abt gave kommunal.de: “Making it permanent always starts earlier than you think. In theory it starts when the measure starts.” The Difu study turns that into five factors. Here they are as things to do in the first month, plus one for the last.

1. Say what it is for, from the start, to the people who will decide its future.
2. Measure a baseline before launch. One German model project wanted to keep its planning software, surveyed staff and costed the savings, and still failed to convince the decision-makers in time. Data from the start, the study concludes, would have helped.
3. Build it into the city’s own systems. In Grevesmühlen the solutions went into the municipal utility’s technical systems, and the utility later took them over.
4. Name the owner and put the running cost in a budget line. Abt’s rule of thumb, depending on the size of the measure: thinking that starts less than eighteen months before the funding ends is too late.
5. Share the cost. Develop with other cities, under an open licence, and look for those already running something similar. Shared tools halve development and maintenance costs, Abt says.
6. And plan the ending. Difu calls a deliberate decision to stop “a normal and usually sensible step”, and asks cities to wind a measure down rather than break it off. Keep the useful parts, say so in public and write down what was learned.

Lahti’s CitiCAP shows what a planned ending can leave. Its carbon-trading app, an EU-funded trial, was withdrawn from the app stores in March 2021 and archived. The bicycle highway built in the same project, about 2 kilometres of lane and a new bridge, was finished a month earlier.

None of this has to be worked out alone, city by city. The Smart Cities Hub is being built to map who runs what, to connect cities facing the same problem and to gather evaluations in the languages they are written in. If you are piloting something now, join the Hub’s community on the participate page and describe it under your ideas for collaboration; the cities, projects and organisations profiled here are the first place to look for one that already runs it. The joint-procurement and open-source routes are gathered under City Networks, Procurement & Innovation, and the audits quoted here are in the Resource Hub.