Tech Education
Smart cities around the world: London
30 June 2026
How do you turn a 2,000-year-old city into a smart city? London's approach to open data, digital infrastructure, and smart mobility offers valuable lessons for all cities.
Nine million residents. Street layouts that go back two millennia. Some of the most advanced smart city infrastructure on the planet.
Those three things don't usually go together. Yet London has managed to make them work.
In the 2026 IMD Smart City Index, London ranked fourth globally and remains the highest-ranked English-speaking city. However, unlike many newer smart cities, London doesn't have the luxury of starting from scratch. Every fibre cable, every sensor, every data layer has to be threaded through Victorian tunnels, listed buildings, and a governance structure split across 32 boroughs. The result is a city that has had to make its smart credentials work in conditions most planners would call impossible.
The foundation: A city-wide connectivity backbone
Smart cities run on connectivity, and London has been quietly laying the groundwork for years.
Transport for London (TfL) awarded Boldyn Networks a 20-year contract in June 2021 to install over 2,000 kilometres of fibre cabling through the Underground tunnels, bringing 4G and 5G connectivity to every Tube station and tunnel.
The point is not just that commuters can stream podcasts between stations. The same infrastructure also supports Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, closed-circuit television (CCTV), and a growing range of smart city applications across the wider city.
In other words, infrastructure built for transport is now powering innovation across the city.
Above ground, it is just as striking. Gigabit-capable connectivity now covers 97.3% of London, up from just 4% in 2017. New planning policies require full-fibre connections in every new building, locking in the digital baseline for decades to come.
Open data as urban infrastructure
If connectivity is the plumbing, open data is the current that flows through it.
The London Datastore gives developers, researchers, and businesses access to over 700 datasets covering transport, environment, health, and the wider economy. Rather than treating data as something to be guarded, London treats it as a public asset that others can build upon.
TfL's open data application programming interface (API) is the most visible example. Hundreds of third-party apps use it to deliver journey planning, real-time arrivals and service alerts to millions of Londoners every day. The city did not build those apps; it made the data available, and developers filled in the gaps.
The underlying principle is simple: public data can unlock innovation when it's made accessible.
Smart mobility: From Oyster to autonomous vehicles
London's Oyster card, launched in 2003, was a quiet revolution. It introduced pay-as-you-go contactless travel at scale and laid the foundation for the contactless bank card and mobile payment system that now handles tens of millions of journeys a week across the TfL network. The model has gone on to influence transit systems in cities around the world.
But mobility has moved well beyond tap-and-go.
The Congestion Charge and Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) are two of the most studied smart traffic interventions in the world. Both combine pricing signals with real-time monitoring to reduce emissions and ease congestion, and both have generated rich evidence on what changes driver behaviour at scale.
Looking ahead, the Smart Mobility Living Lab in Greenwich, launched in 2016, provides companies with a real-world urban environment to trial connected and autonomous vehicles on live streets. The United Kingdom's Automated Vehicles Act, passed in 2024, has cleared the legal path for commercial autonomous vehicle deployment as early as 2026.
The London Office of Technology and Innovation
Sometimes the smartest innovation isn't a new technology; it's finding a better way for governments to work together.
The London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) was established in 2019 as a collaboration platform for 27 of the city's 32 boroughs.
Its purpose is simple. Solving shared digital delivery challenges collectively, rather than duplicating efforts across local governments. To date, LOTI has delivered more than 50 resources and programmes, including Get Online London, a pan-city digital inclusion service that connects excluded residents with skills training, devices and connectivity.
The model matters beyond London. A city with 32 semi-autonomous boroughs needed a coordination layer to achieve smart city scale, and LOTI is that layer.
It's also a reminder that becoming a smart city isn't just about building technology. It's also about building the partnerships needed to make that technology work across government.
Sustainability as a smart city priority
London has committed to reaching Net Zero by 2030, and smart infrastructure is doing much of the heavy lifting. Air quality monitoring networks track pollution street by street. For example, in Belgravia, a pilot project retrofitted six lamp posts with pollution-filtering vegetation to improve air quality. Public buildings are also increasingly fitted with smart energy management systems that cut consumption without reducing comfort.
The London Community Energy Fund supported 21 clean energy projects in 2024 and 2025, channelling investment into community-led decarbonisation.
The Bunhill 2 Energy Centre captures waste heat from a Northern line ventilation shaft to warm around 2,400 homes in Islington, showing how even centuries-old infrastructure can be reimagined using modern technology.
There is also a deliberate equity dimension. The Mayor's Future Neighbourhoods 2030 programme specifically targets London's most disadvantaged areas, ensuring the benefits of smart city investment are distributed rather than concentrated.
Singapore and London: Lessons across borders
London and Singapore look very different on a map. However, they share a structural challenge: scaling smart-city solutions within complex, multi-agency governance.
LOTI's coordination model has clear parallels with Singapore's digital government approach. Here at GovTech, we build and operate the common digital infrastructure that agencies across the public service draw on. Both cities have recognised that pooled capability beats duplicated effort, and that a coordination layer is not a bureaucratic overhead but a force multiplier.
London's open data strategy is another transferable lesson. TfL's developer API shows how making public infrastructure data freely available can multiply innovation at no additional public cost. Singapore's own open data portal, https://data.gov.sg/ reflects a similar philosophy, treating data as a foundation for others to build on.
With more than 4,500 datasets from over 70 government agencies available free for commercial and personal use, the platform enables individuals and businesses to make better-informed decisions, while interactive visualisation and real-time updates help users explore and understand the data more easily.
The biggest lesson we can take away from London is that smart cities aren't defined by their newest technology, but by the digital foundations that connect everything together.
Singapore is already putting this philosophy into practice. Through our mission of engineering digital government, GovTech is building the shared digital infrastructure that enables agencies to innovate faster, work better together, and deliver seamless services to citizens. At the end of the day, the smartest innovation isn't always about building something new. It's about building the foundation that lets everything else work.