Urban services are increasingly being integrated with digital technologies, under the auspices of the ‘smart city’(Marvin et al., 2015; Picon, 2018). This trend has been brandished as a solution for more efficient resource management by industry actors and consulting firms (eg, Ballard et al., 2018; Deloitte, 2019). For the proponents of ‘smart utilities’, digital technologies improve services for end-users, allow for real-time control of urban metabolism and increase overall system efficiency. By contrast, a growing number of in-depth analyses in cities of the global North (Levenda et al., 2015) and South alike (Guma, 2019; Pilo’, 2021) have emphasised that the depoliticised vision offered by the proponents of smart cities conceals highly political questions that have to do with democracy, citizenship and socio-spatial justice (Sadowski and Levenda, 2020).

This chapter aligns with such calls to re-politicise urban service provision. More specifically, I will focus here on energy, water and waste-management services, and explore the ways in which they are undergoing forms of ‘digitalisation’. By this, I mean the integration of hardware within existing infrastructure (eg, sensors) to generate data on the socio-technical system, as well as the use of new software to process and act on these new data (eg, the use of algorithms to detect leaks in the system). Against this backdrop, I seek to explore the interplay between streams of data on the one hand, and streams of matter and energy on the other hand. More specifically, I draw attention to how data are generated to better identify, localise, quantify and/or visualise urban metabolism–and raise the question of how they ultimately lead to actual transformations of urban flows of matter and energy. In doing so, I answer to recent calls for better articulation of scholarship addressing infrastructures and the distribution of resource flows. Indeed, Coutard and Florentin (2022 and 2024) argue that while considerable progress has been made by urban political ecology scholars to examine the uneven distribution of natural resources by urban infrastructure, much less attention has been directed at the extraction, transformation, degradation and depletion of resources. Focusing on how infrastructures increasingly include digital technologies that facilitate the visualisation of resource metabolism is one way to contribute to these debates and work towards paying greater attention to the materiality of resources. With these elements in mind, this chapter seeks to develop a research agenda for thinking about the digitalisation of urban services by drawing attention to several questions. Do data slow, accelerate and/or (re) direct urban flows? Are data produced evenly across territories? If not, what are the consequences for the blind spots of data generation–for service operators as well as for end-users? Throughout the chapter, I will mobilise James C. Scott’s (1998) concept of legibility. It will allow me to explore how data deriving from the digitalisation of urban services are instrumental to making urban circulations visible, thus rendering them governa-