A six-dimensional review of the EU’s smart city agenda in practice

European Smart City policy has become a flagship of EU innovation, yet systematic evidence on how these ambitions translate into real urban projects remains scarce. Using project metadata from the European Commission’s CORDIS (Community Research and Development Information Service) repository extracted in 2025, we harmonize completed projects across FP7 (2007–2013), Horizon 2020 (2014–2020) and Horizon Europe (2021–2027) to identify 725 Smart City projects with explicit city-level targeting. Each project is coded across six thematic dimensions: digitalisation and technologies, energy and environment, mobility and transport, governance and public services, social and participatory innovation, and explicit Smart City framing; enabling a multi-dimensional view of the EU’s Smart City agenda in practice. Results reveal a strong geographic and thematic concentration: a limited number of metropolitan areas (e.g., London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Milan, and Vienna) capture a disproportionate share of both project counts and total EC funding, while medium-sized and peripheral cities remain marginal participants. The distribution of projects also varies by thematic orientation, digitalisation dominates the portfolio, followed by energy and mobility initiatives, whereas governance and social participation dimensions appear underrepresented. When normalised by funding volume, social and governance projects are notably smaller in scale and shorter in duration, suggesting that socially oriented innovation is less capital-intensive and more fragmented. These imbalances stress persistent tensions between excellence-driven concentration and cohesion-oriented inclusiveness within EU innovation policy. The findings provide an empirical baseline for evaluating how future European funding frameworks can better balance technological leadership with territorial equity in the Smart City domain.