Fault reporting platforms for an optimized management of public infrastructures in Western European cities: the death of politic?

At the smart city era, questions pertaining to the digital transformation of cities are more important than ever. However, the effects of new technologies on cities’ government practices remain considerably overlooked especially from a political science perspective. In an attempt to bring politics back into the analysis of smart cities, this paper investigates the reconfiguration of urban governance surrounding the use of one specific technology to support the management of public infrastructures: fault reporting platforms. Drawing on a process‐tracing approach, my comparative case study relies on thirty semi-structured interviews conducted with representatives from relevant government departments in four Western European cities, each one of them embodying a different local administrative tradition: Bristol (Anglo-Saxon), Nantes (Napoleonic), Zurich (continental federal) and Malmö (Nordic). The analysis focuses on the forms of instrumentation surrounding the choice and use of fault reporting platforms across all four municipalities. Results show that the implementation of fault reporting platforms tends to reify an irenist vision of the state-society relationship, largely stripped out of its political nature in the name of efficiency. This necessarily goes along with structural reshuffling of how urban maintenance is governed materialized by a progressive moving away from a silo mentality toward a more holistic management of public infrastructures. Placing citizens in a position of public space watchdogs to which urban public officials are required to rapidly respond, the use of fault reporting platforms is also generally accompanied by a progressive replacement of civil engineers by communication and customer service experts. Overall, this paper shows that understanding the socio-political issues hidden behind technical architectures enables to shed some lights on the transformation of governance at the digital age beyond the question of civic technologies’ normative contribution to the advent of a participatory urban democracy.