Pakistan at a crossroads.

Byline: Nuno Lopes and Shahid Farooq

WITH over 200 million inhabitants, PakisAtan stands at a crossroads. Recovering from a devastating surge of terrorism, it is now in its third consecutive democratic government.

In the run-up to elections, distinct voices advocated for accountability, good governance, urban sustainability - ie, quality of services such as electricity, water, sewage and mobility - and social and environmental health. Yet citizens have had these unmet expectations for decades, and these issues are only getting worse with time.

Traffic congestion and air pollution are common features in Pakistan today, and rapid urbanisation has created under-resourced urban settlements, causing unprecedented levels of economic, spatial, social and infrastructural challenges.

Urban settlements are the engines of growth and development, and, therefore, they can make or break a country's sustainability. Pakistan is experiencing a turning point in sustainability, with many areas at the lowest ebb of urban crisis. In the UN 2018 e-government index for 2018, Pakistan's largest city Karachi was ranked as the lowest among 40 cities of the world assessed for resilience and sustainability through e-governance.

The country must transform its urban hubs into sustainable settlements.

This makes a holistic and integrated vision of urban challenges more necessary than ever. In this context, a smart sustainable cities paradigm has emerged worldwide as a solution to these challenges. As defined by the Operating Unit on Policy-Driven Electronic Governance of the United Nations University, a smart sustainable city is one that implements a transformative governance process, oriented at building capacities to solve multidimensional and complex problems, conducted within a multidisciplinary team and with the collaboration and cooperation of all stakeholders, aiming to achieve sustainable economic, social and environmental development.

Pakistan's major cities are exactly at the threshold where policymakers have no choice but to adopt this concept. Implicitly, Pakistan Vision 2025 already suggested a smart city transformation, by stating that it 'seeks to ensure that Pakistan's cities are digitally connected [and] equipped with wireless network sensors ... thereby laying the foundations for the cities of Pakistan to be smart and creative'. However, this is still a very simplistic smart city vision, as it is based only on technologies and does not mention the need...