Trust and the Smart City: The Hong Kong Paradox (original) (raw)
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Public trust and political legitimacy in the smart city: a reckoning for technocracy
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The 2020 introduction by China's central government of a national security law in Hong Kong marked a watershed moment in the social and political history of the semi-autonomous city. The law emerged after months of street protests that reflected declining public trust in Hong Kong's government. Against this turbulent backdrop, Hong Kong's policy projects moved forward, including smart city development. This article explores public trust in and political legitimacy of Hong Kong's smart cities endeavors in the period leading up to the introduction of the national security law. At a theoretical level, the smart cities phenomenon invites critical reflection about tensions between technocracy and democracy, but this topic remains largely unexploited by empirical literature. Using survey data from 1,017 residents, this study identifies confidence in the benefits of smart cities but lesser trust in privacy and security and lesser satisfaction with participation opportunities in related policymaking. Probing these dynamics, the study finds that trust in smart city mechanics and governance associate positively with support for smart cities, controlling for ideology and issue awareness. Illuminating a theoretical and practical puzzle, these findings contribute empirically to discussions about the political legitimacy of scientific, technological, and technocratic undertakings in the public sector.
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The smart city concept is an increasingly popular urban policy framework, and recent advances in technologies like artificial intelligence are poised to shape this trend in unprecedented ways. As public sector investment in technology accelerates, it is prudent to consider how smart cities shape and are shaped by public trust in government – an issue about which there is a growing body of research but lingering questions. This study investigates determinants of public trust in government technology, including public awareness, government communication, personal ideals and aspirations, and personal perceptions and expectations. Data come from a 2021 survey (N = 1500) about smart cities in Singapore, a country with high developmental ambitions and sufficient resources to pursue advanced smart city programs. This study seeks to deepen scholarly and practical understandings about the mutually necessary but often diverging forces of public trust in technology and public trust in government.
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With nearly half of the world’s population living in the cities, many city and local governments are seeking to deploy smart solutions to their everyday city operations through the implementation of smart city services. However, the subject of smart city services has always been associated with trustworthiness of the services by its users due to security and privacy concerns. These issues may have a major impact on the smart city services adoption. The aim of this proposed research is to examine the technology, organisational, environment, and security determinants that influence stakeholders’ trust towards their intention to adopt smart city services in Australian regional cities. For this, Technology-OrganisationEnvironment framework together with security related factors for ensuring stakeholders’ trust will be tested using both quantitative and qualitative data. Structural equation modelling technique will be carried out using Smart PLS to test the presented hypotheses and the r...
Can we negotiate? Trust and the rule of law in the smart city paradigm
International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 2019
This article focuses on the smart city as a political place. It analyses how both the technologies and the ideas smart cities are built on, oust trust and the rule of law as two important conditions for the city as a thriving political community. In particular, three challenges to the city as a political place are identified: desubjectivation, invisibility, and a neo-liberal value shift. In order to address these challenges, we introduce the term 'negotiation' as a new guiding principle to the use of smart technologies in cities. Through negotiation, we underline some necessary steps to resubjectify citizens and to put the acceptance of vulnerability and transparency at the centre of our thinking and evaluation of the smart city. This article concludes that the current focus on participation and citizen-centric smart city projects is not sufficient to build and contribute to a genuine political community and that a re-evaluation of active citizenship in the smart city context is therefore needed.
The 'Smart City' between urban narrative and empty signifier: the case of Hong Kong
Constructing Narratives for City Governance, 2022
The chapter consists in an in-depth interpretative study of Smart City in the case of the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, China. It proposes a framework of analysis as a heuristic tool to interpret narratives in general and those of Smart City Hong Kong in particular. The capacity of a narrative to confer meaning draws upon three criteria: its originality (degree of endogeneity); its sincerity (internal validity and trustworthiness), and its extension (its ability to provide a convincing account to the outside world). These three criteria are central to the proposed interpretative framework. They are also affected by the form of diffusion and communication. Four types of account emerged from the empirical investigation: survey responses (n.808); written responses from official agencies; face to face interviews; and collective interviews in focus groups. The substantive message conveyed differed as much by the form, as by the interest of the interviewees. By reconstituting chains of meaning in relation to the Smart City, the article interrogates the utility of technology, sustainability and e-governance as working narratives for an uncertain administration. Overall, Smart City appears as a rather hollow narrative, an empty signifier, a general term lacking clear meaning, yet concealing deeper dynamics.
Public perceptions about smart cities: governance and quality-of-life in Hong Kong
Social Indicators Research, 2023
This study analyzes public perceptions about the impact of 'smart cities' programs on governance and quality-of-life. With smart city scholarship focusing primarily on technical and managerial issues, political legitimacy remains relatively underexploredparticularly in non-Western contexts. Drawing on a Hong Kong-based survey of over 800 residents conducted in 2019, this study analyzes the results of probit regressions on dependent variables for governance (participation, transparency, public services, communication, and fairness) and quality-of-life (buildings, energy-environment, mobility-transportation, education, and health). Findings show more optimism about the impact of smart cities on quality-of-life than on governance. Awareness about the smart city concept associates positively with expectations about smart city benefits, but the effect is sensitive to education level and income. This study deepens understandings about the political legitimacy of smart cities, at a time when urban governments are accelerating investments in related technologies. More broadly, it adds contextual nuance to research about state-society relations and, at a practical level, supports policy recommendations to strengthen information and awareness campaigns, better articulate smart city benefits, and openly acknowledge limitations.