Smart city new deals: unpacking the recursive entanglements of infrastructures and administrations

This chapter explores the relation between digital infrastructures and public administration in ‘smart urbanism’, so far insufficiently scrutinised in critical research. Current developments, where ‘smart city’ projects have seemingly incorporated the criticism once raised against them and instead tinker with administrative reform via digitalisation in practice, reveal a new urban political formation the authors preliminarily suggest calling ‘smart city new deals’. To attend to this formation, the chapter reviews pertinent literature and distinguishes three ways in which the co-production of infrastructures and (local) state institutions has been approached in science and technology studies: as interpretative, subpolitical and antagonist. Based on two German case studies, the chapter demonstrates how none of the three approaches allows us to fully grasp the mechanisms with which administrations are engaging in ‘smart city’ projects to change themselves. To conceptualise this interwoven, self-referential dynamic, the authors thus propose to focus on recursivity; i.e., the recursive production of the conditions for digital infrastructuring and the infrastructural relevance of organisational and cultural dimensions beyond and before (high-)technical implementation.