Smart city control rooms are prominent components of the smart city agenda. They attempt to fulfil a longstanding dream to visualize and manage multiple urban processes in real-time through the collation of dataflows. In this talk, I contextualize the smart city control room within a history of central government policy aimed at increasing administrative control over Indian cities. Previous research suggests that smart city control rooms exert new forms of technical control on cities. However, this strict focus on the technological sophistication of smart city control rooms overshadows the governance rearrangements that are intertwined with the processes of digitalizing the urban fabric. By studying a control room in the making, we can understand how it serves as a vehicle to disrupt the urban governance landscape in India. This is done through an in-depth qualitative case study of the smart city control room in the city of Kochi. The control room has not yet achieved its technical goal of ICT-mediated control. Nonetheless, the ongoing rewiring of institutions, infrastructures, and imaginaries through the control room has already succeeded in introducing ICT companies as influential stakeholders in the local governance landscape.