While the notion of the smart city has grown in popularity, the backlash against smart urban infrastructure in the context of changing state-public relations has seldom been examined. This article draws on the case of Hong Kong’s smart lampposts to analyse the emergence of networked dissent against smart urban infrastructure during a period of unrest. Deriving insights from critical data studies, dissentworks theory, and relevant work on networked activism, the article illustrates how a smart urban infrastructure was turned into both a source and a target of popular dissent through digital mediation and politicisation. Drawing on an interpretive analysis of qualitative data collected from multiple digital platforms, the analysis explicates the citizen curation of socio-technic counter-imaginaries that constituted a consent of dissent in the digital realm, and the creation and diffusion of networked action repertoires in response to a changing political opportunity structure. In addition to explicating the words and deeds employed in this networked dissent, this article also discusses the technopolitical repercussions of this dissent for the city’s later attempts at data-based urban governance, which have unfolded at the intersections of urban techno-politics and local contentious politics. Moving beyond the common focus on neoliberal governmentality and its limits, this article reveals the underexplored pitfalls of smart urban infrastructure vis-à-vis the shifting socio-political landscape of Hong Kong, particularly in the digital age.

Cross-border ecological cooperation is always a challenging issue. Ecological cooperation in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has its own uniqueness as it is cross-border cooperation under “One Country, Two Systems”, which is different from multinational cooperation or regional collaboration within one country. This paper analyses the cooperation documents of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, official reports and academic literature, and then summarises the unique pattern of ecological cooperation in the Greater Bay Area under “One Country, Two Systems”. It outlines four characteristics: different priorities in ecological management of each side, case by base cooperation, government-dominated cooperation with low public participation, and huge institutional gap between three sides. This article also identifies several problems and causes: lack of common ecological targets for each side and effective cross-border regulative measures, cumbersome coordination in cross-border cooperation. Finally, four feasible recommendations have been put forwarded: creating new institutional arrangements under the context of “One Country, Two Systems”, establishing the efficient decision-making platform for the inter-city cooperation, introducing the market-based resource allocation, and encouraging public participation in ecological monitoring.