If courts can interrupt and inspect high-stakes public AI in real time, cities begin buying only systems that can be paused, replayed, and contested in front of a judge.
Urban procurement changes overnight. Vendors stop selling black-box speed and start selling courtroom endurance: immutable logs, simulation mirrors, appeal dashboards, and failure isolation modes. Some public services become fairer because residents can challenge them quickly, but city operations also slow under the weight of constant contestability, and officials learn to favor narrow, timid models that can survive scrutiny over ambitious ones that might improve outcomes.
At 2:10 p.m. in a municipal law office in Madrid, a junior attorney watches a benefits model rerun on a courtroom screen while a tenant and two clerks sit in silence. The replay freezes on a stale income field from six months earlier, and everyone in the room sees the mistake at the same moment.
Replayability does not guarantee justice. Governments may meet the formal requirement while overwhelming citizens with dense records, expensive appeals, and systems designed to be legible only to specialists. A city can become transparent on paper and still remain inaccessible in practice.