Impasse of Data-Drivenness: Bureaucratic Data Work and Reproduced Siloed Governance in Coordinating Smart Cities

Bureaucratic complexities play a critical role in shaping the data-driven governance of urban spaces and citizens. Drawing on an ethnographic project in Shanghai, this paper attends to the construction and practical operation of a centralized data infrastructure as part of the city’s smart city initiative, which sought to streamline collaboration across bureaucratic silos within the governance structure. By showing the friction in the production and citation of centralized governance data across otherwise fragmented silos, we unpack how these data embody decision-making hierarchies and administrative boundaries. To enact intra- and inter-silo coordination, frontline bureaucratic workers have to take on new forms of what we call bureaucratic data work to carry out practical governance tasks in particular governance scenarios. As such, smart city infrastructures become intertwined with existing silos, thereby reproducing bureaucratic orders and inefficiencies. We argue that data-drivenness itself paradoxically becomes both the driving force and the structural impasse in reproducing siloed governance and the untenable technocratic imaginaries embedded in smart cities.