Civic Innovation Lab, powered by Code for Pakistan, is joining with Lahore Garrison University to host a Smart City Hackathon in Lahore, with support from Foster Learning School. The event is designed to bring together a broad mix of participants, including students, developers, designers, GIS specialists, data scientists and urban innovators, to work on solutions addressing challenges facing the city’s infrastructure and public systems.
The hackathon is structured around three distinct challenge tracks spanning two days. The Clean City track asks participants to develop solutions addressing waste management, pollution and air quality. The City Intelligence track focuses on turning open data into a living, predictive view of the city, encouraging participants to build tools that make sense of civic data in ways that could support planning and decision making. The Public Preparedness track takes a different approach, asking participants to tell stories that move people to act on climate resilience, incorporating a communication and behavioural dimension alongside the more technical tracks.
The range of tracks reflects an intentional effort to make the hackathon accessible to participants with different skill sets, rather than limiting the event to those with strong technical or coding backgrounds alone. Teams of up to five people are being formed across all backgrounds and disciplines, allowing participants with complementary skills in design, data, storytelling and technical development to work together on a single challenge rather than requiring each individual to cover every aspect of a proposed solution independently.
Applications for the hackathon are open until August 9, 2026, giving prospective participants a short window to form teams and register before the event begins. Organisers have framed the hackathon around the idea that cities are built by everyone, positioning the event as an open invitation rather than one limited to participants with prior hackathon or civic tech experience.
Civic Innovation Lab’s collaboration with Lahore Garrison University for this hackathon continues a pattern of Code for Pakistan’s broader civic technology work, which has previously focused on bringing together technologists and civic minded participants to address public sector and urban challenges through structured, time bound building events. Register: https://forms.gle/nF6bYykFJ541iWkH6
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