Smartness and thinking infrastructure: an exploration of a city becoming smart

Purpose The paper explores the emergence of smart city governance with a particular focus on the cognitive value of the new technologies and the different accountabilities emerging in the digital infrastructures attempting to visualize and rationalize urban dynamics. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on ethnographic, netnographic and interview data from an empirical case study of the Smart and Wise City Turku spearhead project, the study builds on the assumption that smart cities emerge from the interaction between the characteristics of technologies, constellations of actors and contextual conditions. Findings The results report smart city activities as an organizational process and a reconfiguration that incorporates new technology with old infrastructure. Through the lens of the empirical examples, we are able to show how smart city actors, boundaries and infrastructures are mobilized, become valuable and are rendered visible. The smart cities infrastructure traces, values and governs actors, identities, objects, ideas and relations to animate new desires and feats of imagination. Practical implications In terms of implications to practice, the situated descriptions echo recent calls to leaders and managers to ask how much traceability is enough (Power, 2019) and limits of accountability (Messner, 2009). Originality/value The central theoretical concept of “thinking infrastructure” highlights how new accounting practices operate by disclosing (Kornberger et al ., 2017) new worlds where the platforms and the users discover the nature of their responsibilities to the other. The contribution of this paper is that it examines what happens when smartness is understood as a thinking infrastructure. Different theorizations of infrastructure have implications for the study of smart cities. The lens helps us grasp possible tensions and consequences in terms of accountability that arise from new forms of participation in smart cities. It helps urban governance scholarship understand how smartness informs and shapes distributed and embodied cognition.