ABSTRACT
Smart-city initiatives are taking place in many different regions. Smart is an adjective which policy-makers are attaching as a label to cities from Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, forming a complex puzzle still in the making. The aim of this chapter is to empirically investigate an actual practise of smart urbanism by using Hong Kong as a case study. First, the chapter illustrates the evolution of Hong Kong’s smart urbanism in relation to the changing economic priorities of the local government. It reveals how policy-makers target the development of different smart technologies as a strategy to galvanize specific economic sectors such as Information and Communication Technology, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. Second, the chapter exposes the uncoordinated planning process through which the smart-city programme of Hong Kong is put into practise, showing that smart covers only small and disconnected segments of the region. In the penultimate section, the analysis focuses on a single smart intervention, the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, where artificial intelligences and anti-ageing biotechnologies are developed, in response to the everchanging economic goals of the government. The chapter ends with a reflection on the sustainability challenges posed by Hong Kong’s smart urbanism. Smart is evolving into artificially intelligent urban technologies, thereby generating new problems while ignoring long-standing social and environmental issues.
