“Safe Cities” in Pakistan: Knowledge Infrastructures, Urban Planning, and the Security State

Abstract

Throughout the world, cities are partnering with multinational corporations to launch “safe city solutions”, technical‐bureaucratic assemblages which use integrated information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enhance urban safety and security. In metropolitan Pakistan, safe city projects are framed as responses of the “security state”—a common lens through which the country is regularly understood. The article, however, situates safe city projects and the concept of security, more generally, within the history of infrastructure development and urban planning in Pakistan. It shows that safe city projects shape the relations between the state, people, urban environments, and material things in three key ways. First, the collection and production of vast quantities of data through which ICTs make people not only the objects of—but also the input for—“safe city solutions”. Second, safe city projects idealise state modernity, professionalism, and efficiency. Finally, safe city projects are connected to complex financial and legal regimes, which position security in relation to proprietary technologies.

The Geopolitics of Infrastructure and Securitisation in a Postcolony Frontier Space

“…In this article I have argued that statecraft in the Karakoram has bypassed normative law and administration, and has been periodically accompanied by calibrated violence, evidenced in the impunity that religious militias and banned sectarian groups have enjoyed, as well as in the use of anti‐terrorism legislation against social protest. And as accompanying articles in this issue illustrate, in the present epoch infrastructure and securitisation is a state project linked to uneven development and extraction, financial and legal regimes, ideas of modernity and efficiency (Akhtar 2022; Akhter 2022; Hong 2022).…”

The Spatial Politics of Infrastructure‐Led Development: Notes from an Asian Postcolony

“…As such it is in conversation with mosquito management trends in places as far away as the state of Arizona in the southwest of the US (Robbins and Miller 2013). Hong (2022) is keen to understand the role of new "smart city" technologies that monitor and punish traffic violations on Lahore's streets by way of cameras. Although her ethnographic treatment of these new traffic monitoring technologies stays close to Lahore's streets, she is nevertheless deeply invested in understanding how the presence of new corporate actors from China are crucial to how these new technologies are rolled out.…”

The Safer City: A New Planning Perspective for the Traditional City Development

“…Hong [6] focused on the relationship of communities with the government working to adapt urban environments to be safer places, by reviewing some urban planning projects and infrastructure development in Pakistan. He suggested three ways that could be an entry point in achieving a safe city represented by collecting and producing huge amounts of data about places using technology and communications, establishing advanced and efficient projects that would develop security systems in the city, and imposing control over financial, administrative, legal and control systems in cities [6].…”