(Re)Producing smart urban spaces: Situating maintenance labour and care in Hamburg's fibre optic infrastructures

At/in the foundation of the computational city lies its often-overlooked material infrastructures – socio-technical systems such as fibre optic cables and ducts that enable digital connectivity while remaining largely invisible within dominant technocratic visions of the smart city. This paper examines how fibre optic infrastructure shapes contemporary urban spatialities through the lens of maintenance labour and care relations in Hamburg, Germany. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observations and expert interviews, it reveals how telecommunications infrastructure is materially embedded in urban spaces and (re)produced through embodied practices, exposing its entanglement with wider political-economic dynamics and spatial inequalities. By foregrounding care practices and maintenance labour, the paper highlights the expertise central to sustaining digital networks while underscoring the inequities in infrastructure development and access. Blending feminist theories of care with critical urban and infrastructure studies, it argues that maintenance labour disrupts dominant imaginaries of seamless urban digitalisation, offering critical insights into more equitable approaches to urban infrastructure (re)production. In doing so, the paper contributes to (literally) grounding infrastructure debates in the embodied realities of spatial production and advocates a shift towards infrastructural futures grounded in care.