Trust and the Smart City

Hong Kong, consistently ranked as one of the world’s leading smart cities, is undergoing a period of disruptive change.1 While still shaped fundamentally by the “one country, two systems” arrangement, Hong Kong is increasingly integrated into the political (Liaison Office) and economic (Greater Bay Area, GBA) logics of mainland China (Ho and Tran 2019). The “dynamic zero-Covid approach” has also significantly impeded Hong Kong’s place branding as “Asia’s World City,” with the relocation of corporations to cities that have adopted a back-tonormal outlook, and the exodus of tens of thousands of residents. These counter-winds were captured by a territory-wide survey and a purposive sample of interviewees, selected at a specific point in the recent history of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), namely that of the transformation of the hybrid “one country, two systems” arrangement and the emergency politics of the post-National Security Law era.