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

The study draws on qualitative field data analysed through a critical-realist and political-economy lens, a methodological combination that allows the researchers to look beyond visible hazards and interrogate the hidden structures that produce them. Rather than treating landslides or dried springs as isolated technical failures, the authors trace them to entrenched mechanisms: political patronage networks that award contracts to allies, weak governance that fails to enforce safety codes, and a dominant narrative that equates infrastructure with development regardless of how it is built. These structures, the paper argues, are not background conditions but active causal engines behind Nepal’s growing disaster toll.

The empirical texture of the research is striking. The authors document bulldozer-led road construction that slices through unstable slopes without adequate drainage or retaining structures, a practice so aggressive that local communities have coined the term ‘dozer terrorism’ to describe it. They describe the annual fiscal-year budget rush, in which local governments scramble to spend allocated funds before the financial year closes, leading to projects approved and executed in weeks with minimal environmental assessment. Tunnel blasting for hydropower schemes has destabilised hillsides and drained the springs that mountain villages depend on for drinking water and irrigation. Unregulated extraction of sand, gravel, and stone from riverbeds and slopes further weakens the terrain, while unsafe settlement expansion pushes homes onto land that engineers would classify as hazardous.

The consequences are already visible across the landscape. The study records slope instability along newly cut road corridors, the drying of natural springs, displacement of communities, and biodiversity loss in fragile mid-hill environments. Crucially, the authors emphasise that these impacts do not remain confined to individual project sites. Disaster risk, they show, extends across roads, rivers, settlements, and entire infrastructure corridors, linking one community’s hazard to another’s downstream vulnerability. A road cut high on a ridge can deliver sediment and debris to villages far below; a tunnel that drains an aquifer can force families to abandon land their grandparents farmed for generations.

What makes the study analytically distinctive is its refusal to treat development as inherently safe or inherently risky. The authors argue that outcomes hinge on how, by whom, and under what conditions development is pursued. The same road, built with proper geological assessment, drainage design, and community consultation, can transform livelihoods; built hastily under patronage pressure, it becomes a scar that sheds landslides for decades. This reframing challenges both the triumphalist infrastructure narrative that dominates national politics and the simplistic view that all development in fragile mountains is destructive. The problem, in other words, is not development itself but the political economy that shapes its execution.

The critical-realist framework the researchers employ deserves attention in its own right. Drawing on the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and the tradition of realist social science, the study seeks to identify the underlying generative mechanisms—patronage, fiscal incentives, institutional weakness—that produce observable events such as unsafe construction and subsequent slope failure. By blending this ontology with political-economy analysis, the authors offer what they describe as a methodological path for future research on the development-disaster interface, one that moves beyond correlational studies of hazards and toward explanations of why risky practices persist despite their known consequences.

The political-economy dimension of the analysis resonates with a broader international literature on disasters and corruption. Previous research has shown that corrupt practices in the construction industry, from substandard materials to rigged procurement, measurably increase disaster losses, and that the political economy of ‘natural’ disasters often determines who suffers and who profits. The Nepal study extends this line of inquiry into a mountain setting where the physical fragility of the terrain amplifies every governance failure. It also connects to earlier work by Nepali and international scholars documenting how road building in the Himalaya has repeatedly increased landslide activity, and how haphazard urbanisation in the Kathmandu Valley has followed a similar logic of risk creation.

The timing of the study is significant. Nepal’s post-2015 federal restructuring devolved substantial planning and budget authority to local governments, unleashing an unprecedented wave of rural infrastructure construction. While this decentralisation has delivered roads and electricity to communities long neglected by the centre, the new study suggests it has also multiplied the sites at which risk is being manufactured, often by local institutions that lack the technical capacity, environmental safeguards, or accountability mechanisms to build safely. The authors warn that disaster risk is likely to expand further as development penetrates ever more fragile landscapes and creates new exposure in places that previously had little built infrastructure at all.

The paper’s central prescription is correspondingly radical. Building mountain safety, the authors argue, demands more than coping capacity, early warning systems, or hazard management. It requires rethinking the very development processes that produce risk in the first place. Without a shift toward transparent, accountable, and risk-informed planning, Nepal’s present rural development model will, in the authors’ words, continue to normalise risk, reproduce disasters, and deepen vulnerabilities in the name of development. That means enforcing environmental impact assessment, curbing the fiscal-year spending rush, subjecting contract allocation to genuine public scrutiny, and treating geological and hydrological evidence as binding constraints rather than inconvenient formalities.

For the wider disaster research community, the study is a pointed reminder that the line between development and disaster is thinner than policy frameworks usually acknowledge. Every bulldozed slope, every blasted tunnel, and every budget-deadline project embeds decisions about risk into the physical landscape, decisions that will surface years later as landslides, floods, and displacement. The Nepal Himalaya, where some of the world’s most energetic tectonics meet some of the world’s most ambitious rural infrastructure ambitions, offers perhaps the sharpest available illustration of this development-disaster interface. Whether the region’s roads and dams become instruments of resilience or engines of catastrophe will depend not on the mountains, but on the politics that shape how they are built.

Subject of Research: Political economy of development-induced disaster risk creation in the Nepal Himalaya

Article Title: Development-disaster interface: Political economy of development-induced risk creation in the Nepal Himalaya

Article References: Development-disaster interface: Political economy of development-induced risk creation in the Nepal Himalaya. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01139-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01139-3

Keywords: Nepal, Himalaya, disaster risk, development, political economy, road construction, hydropower, landslides, critical realism, vulnerability, infrastructure governance, haphazard planning