Abstract

This paper examines maintenance and repair work as forms of inquiry, experimentation and innovation in the city. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations with maintenance agents of the Parisian public bicycle scheme (Vélib), this paper show that the maintenance and repair operations which stabilise the service are primarily based on inquiry. Vélib’s handling and resolution of practical problems tests a type of inquiry ethic which is central to the development of the technology. By describing the knowledge and know-how used by maintenance agents, we show how these maintenance agents, through daily contact with the city and users of the scheme, become sort of ’sociologists’ on the subject of mobility and users. For these actors the urban ecology becomes a place of inquiry and experimentation, a space populated with uncertainty which they must repair and maintain using diverse instruments and practices. The aim was to trace the trajectory of Vélib’ technology in the act of maintenance and repair rather than through seemingly stabilised and ready to use objects. This approach invites us to study the infrastructures of the so-called smart city from the perspective of its varying degrees of temporary and material opening, observing its successive reconfigurations in the field.