January/February 2017

Some 8,000 surveillance cameras will soon watch over Punjab’s metropolis—Lahore. This is one of the government’s many technology based initiatives to boost the security of the second largest city of Pakistan under the Punjab Safe Cities Project.

A state-of-the-art Punjab Police Integrated Command, Control and Communication Centre (PPIC3) has recently been inaugurated in Lahore while other big cities scheduled to receive such fully equipped and integrated centers are Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Multan, Faisalabad, Sargodha, and Bahawalpur. Read more

Building Smart Cities in Pakistan

There is a pressing need to deploy new technologies for city governments for better management of urban centers.

The concept of a “Smart City” is a relatively new one in the realm of modern day urban development and is being adopted by different cities in the world in the pursuit to serve their citizens in the best possible manner.

Simply, smart cities embrace information communication technologies (ICT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions to manage the use of resources in the best possible way and acquire automated feedback through specialized ICT based infrastructure. Besides providing quality of life to the citizens, the purpose is to gauge the effectiveness of different urban systems and service delivery models in place and make required improvements on the basis of this feedback. All this also involves handling of big data—something not possible to do manually—so dependence is overwhelmingly on the use of technology.

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