Cities Chase Smart Innovation While the Maintenance That Sustains It Goes Unrecognized

Cities around the world have embraced innovation as the defining language of urban progress, pouring public investment into digital platforms, sensor networks, data dashboards, and flagship smart-city pilots. Yet a new perspective published in Discover Cities argues that this enthusiasm conceals a structural blind spot with serious consequences for the systems that keep urban life running. Tianheng Shu of the University of Hong Kong calls it the urban innovation paradox: a self-undermining condition in which cities pursue efficiency and resilience through innovation while giving limited institutional recognition to the maintenance and renewal capabilities on which all digital systems ultimately depend. The argument is not that maintenance spending is simply too low, although the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates a substantial gap between expected investment and the resources required to sustain infrastructure performance in the United States. Rather, the paradox operates through the institutional rules that decide which activities count as innovation in the first place.

Shu defines urban innovation governance as the institutional rules and organisational arrangements that determine which activities receive recognition and support as innovation. Institutional recognition functions as a filter: it decides whether an activity becomes formally legible and supportable within municipal programmes, procurement systems, and funding streams. Drawing on the Oslo Manual’s definition of innovation as implemented products or processes that differ significantly from previous practice, the paper argues that maintenance can genuinely qualify as innovation. When significantly different materials, analytical tools, construction methods, or organisational processes change how maintenance or renewal is diagnosed, planned, delivered, or monitored, the result is maintenance-related process innovation. A cured-in-place pipe lining that rehabilitates a century-old sewer, or a computer-vision system that classifies defects from closed-circuit television footage, represents implemented technical change of exactly the kind innovation policy claims to reward.

The difficulty, according to the analysis, is that such innovation rarely looks like innovation to the institutions that allocate attention and money. The paper identifies four pathways through which the paradox may arise. The first is programme eligibility: when funding rules treat maintenance primarily as an operating expense rather than a possible site of innovation, operators and utilities are effectively excluded from applying, from defining public innovation challenges, and from having their evidence counted. The second is political visibility. Megaproject research shows how large, conspicuous projects acquire strong political sponsorship, while the benefits of preventive maintenance appear only as service continuity or avoided failure, outcomes that are inherently difficult to attribute to any individual decision-maker. Research on electoral incentives confirms that infrastructure quality can reflect the politics of project selection, with effects that persist well beyond the immediate electoral cycle.

The third pathway runs through organisational attention. Building on Ocasio’s attention-based view of the firm, Shu argues that municipal attention is structured through formal roles and decision processes, and that a high-salience digital programme can draw leadership focus and administrative capacity even when its budget remains formally separate from physical renewal. Attention displacement, on this account, concerns agenda capacity and organisational sequencing as much as expenditure. The fourth pathway concerns lifecycle responsibility. Digital platforms and sensing systems require continuing technical support, data stewardship, and specialist capacity, and smart-city implementation studies repeatedly identify cost, interoperability, long-term finance, and skills constraints as barriers that emerge as pilots move towards durable municipal capability. When ownership and operating arrangements remain unclear, sensors and digital twins deepen lifecycle obligations instead of strengthening stewardship.

Empirical cases give the argument concrete shape. Research on Hamburg’s fibre-optic infrastructure shows that maintenance labour and material systems remain integral to digital urbanism while receiving limited visibility in smart-city imaginaries. Singapore’s Digital Underground initiative sought an integrated representation of subsurface utilities but encountered fragmented data and coordination problems rooted in the material complexity of underground assets. In Barcelona, a sewer-robotics programme demonstrated that innovation policy and robotic technology depended on care and practical coordination within the maintenance setting itself; technical performance was inseparable from the needs of users and the operating environment. These cases reveal that digitalisation increases the importance of reliable asset knowledge and institutional cooperation around maintenance, and that digital representations remain operationally valuable only when organisations keep records aligned with physical conditions and assign responsibility for acting on the information produced.

The engineering content of maintenance innovation is often substantial. The rehabilitation of Los Angeles’s North Outfall Sewer Unit 10 used custom-fabricated fibreglass-reinforced polymer mortar pipe to fit a non-circular trunk sewer beneath active rail infrastructure, with access and bypass arrangements designed around continuing service. Harrisburg’s Front Street Interceptor applied cured-in-place pipe rehabilitation to a 113-year-old non-circular sewer under a newly adopted structural design standard. Automated inspection research has developed sewer-defect classification methods using CCTV images and sequences, while bridge-monitoring studies show how digital twins can combine condition data and intervention histories to support diagnosis and lifecycle decisions. Shu is careful to note that industry reporting supplies project detail rather than comparative evaluation, so these cases serve as bounded illustrations. Their analytical value lies in showing how design adaptation and construction sequencing enable renewal under difficult access and continuous-service constraints, precisely the conditions that define mature urban networks.

The paradox also carries a distributive dimension that aggregate spending figures cannot reveal. Research in Lilongwe, Malawi, demonstrates how everyday operation and maintenance practices can reproduce unequal water continuity and allocation within a single network, while studies across large United States cities show that incomplete household water access is patterned by housing conditions, income, and racial inequality. Maintenance decisions determine who bears service disruption and related environmental or mobility harms. Advanced monitoring can improve diagnosis, but unequal monitoring or unequal response may simply reproduce existing spatial priorities. The assets rendered visible to innovation programmes, in other words, may differ from those most consequential to marginalised communities, giving institutional recognition a territorial dimension that participatory assessment techniques, such as neighbourhood-level infrastructure monitoring developed in Houston, can begin to address.

Importantly, the paper does not claim that narrow innovation framing produces the same outcome everywhere. Strong asset-management institutions can interrupt the proposed pathway, while weak or fragmented arrangements can amplify it. Regulatory standards and protected utility revenues can sustain renewal even when innovation programmes remain digitally oriented, and capable operators may appropriate digital tools for maintenance without relying on an explicit innovation label. Cross-country evidence even indicates that fiscal and political decentralisation can be associated with higher road-maintenance expenditure, a relationship that varies sharply across sectors and institutional designs. Comparative stormwater research shows that similar technologies encounter distinct governance arrangements in Chinese and Swedish cities, and studies of Melbourne’s water transitions highlight the bridging organisations and long-term institutional work required to stabilise new practices. These countervailing conditions form part of any honest empirical test of the paradox.

The governance implications are correspondingly practical. Shu proposes broader programme eligibility, with funding bodies explicitly including innovative inspection, rehabilitation, and asset-management methods in renewal delivery, and requiring applicants to explain how proposed changes improve service reliability, asset life, risk reduction, or equity. Public procurement should permit functional specifications and early dialogue with operators and suppliers, and programme managers should involve maintenance staff in defining challenges and scaling decisions. For digital projects that monitor physical systems, lifecycle coupling means specifying ownership, data stewardship, and the route from monitoring to funded physical action before contracts are signed. Evaluation should follow the chain from information quality to funded decisions and service outcomes, including their spatial distribution, rather than counting technology adoption rates that reveal little about stewardship. Organisational capability, supported by current asset data, procurement expertise, workforce development, and stable renewal leadership across political cycles, ultimately determines whether any of these instruments change established practice.

The framework remains conceptual, and Shu is explicit about its limits: the governance configurations are illustrative, the selected cases are not representative, and institutional recognition must be measured separately from expenditure and asset condition. The proposed research agenda includes comparative documentary analysis of innovation strategies and procurement rules, process tracing of how proposals are filtered before funding, and quantitative tests of whether recognition predicts renewal outcomes after accounting for fiscal capacity and network age. But the central message is already actionable. Digital technologies occupy both sides of the paradox: installed as stand-alone demonstrations they add obligations, but connected to decision rules and funding responsibilities they become genuine maintenance-related process innovation. Cities strengthen innovation capacity, the paper concludes, when maintenance expertise and renewal capability enter the institutional definition of innovation itself, aligning technological ambition with the durable physical systems through which urban life is sustained.

Subject of Research: The urban innovation paradox, in which institutional underrecognition of infrastructure maintenance-related process innovation weakens urban innovation governance and infrastructure renewal.

Article Title: The urban innovation paradox emerges when infrastructure maintenance is underrecognized

Article References: Shu, T. (2026). The urban innovation paradox emerges when infrastructure maintenance is underrecognized. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00367-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00367-0

Keywords: urban innovation, infrastructure maintenance, smart cities, process innovation, infrastructure governance, innovation policy, urban policy, asset management, digital twins, public procurement, organizational attention, infrastructure renewal