WRITING in a contemporary newspaper, Nighat Dad, a digital rights advocate, offered a critical comment on the idea of a ‘smart city’: it is not built of sensors and data; it is built of trust. And trust, once breached by surveillance without accountability, cannot be reinstalled like a software patch. This is the central argument around smart cities: the promise of order against the risk of control. In Pakistan, where the distance between protection and persecution has often been no wider than a single government directive, this question is urgent. Principally, the idea of a smart city rests on integrating information and communication technology into urban infrastructure to improve safety, efficiency and quality of life.

Technically, smart cities use IoT devices, AI-driven traffic systems, environmental sensors and predictive policing algorithms to govern urban life. Singapore’s Smart........

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