An evaluation framework with five criteria is used to appraise smart city indices. The Cities in Motion Index from IESE business schools has the best performance. Context-sensitive measurement should be emphasized to ensure fair assessment. Two smart city concepts (big data policy, sustainable smartness) are suggested. Nine categories in terms of hard and soft domains for smart city index are proposed.

Local citizens’ perceptions of their own cities are often neglected when assessing cities’ performance. Using the perceived international image and collective pride in Hong Kong as the entry point, this article aims to discover the relationship between citizens’ trust in public authorities and urban technologies. Four angles of investigation are developed: the impact of cities’ promotion of their international image on local pride; the attitudinal and demographic characteristics of proud citizens; the linkage of local pride with public trust, and digital trust. This article uses data from a Hong Kong-based territory-wide survey in 2021 to conduct the analysis. The result suggests that public trust is an elemental factor having a positive relationship with collective pride and digital trust in Hong Kong. This article also identifies the group of citizens with the least pride. Regaining the citizen's trust is the best remedy for facilitating smart city development.

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.

This paper examines the role of focus groups in mixed-methods research, focusing on trust dynamics within the smart city. It takes the Asian metropolis of Hong Kong as its empirical case. It successfully validates focus groups as a research method across three dimensions. Firstly, focus groups facilitate the comparison of in-depth discussions across various demographic groups; secondly, focus groups enable collective deliberation to uncover hidden relationships; and, thirdly, when correctly employed, focus groups can bridge qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (surveys) research to enhance triangulation. In this study, the findings of focus groups substantiate the data trust paradox identified in previous surveys and interviews: high public support for technology in a low-trust environment, with explicit privacy concerns related to data management. The focus group results reinforce distinct insights in relation to birth origins and political identities, reconfirming differential trust among demographic groups. This paper demonstrates tailored focus groups as an effective approach to unraveling the trust dynamics in smart city strategies.