Whose Knowledge Makes a City Smart? Exploring Conceptions of the Role of Knowledge in Urban Policy in Indore, India

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light the need for greater participation of urban informal settlement dwellers in urban development. How this participation is envisioned, however, is influenced by how policy paradigms view such populations in relation to knowledge. How valuable is what they know? How relevant is their perspective to shaping policies? To explore these questions, this chapter analyses the limitations of the ways in which smart urbanism views the knowledge of the masses, using historical institutionalism as a perspective to trace the evolution of urban policy and its assumptions about knowledge in the context of Indore. It draws on a study undertaken by the Bahá'í Chair for Studies in Development to make visible how people resolve development issues through applying their own spiritual convictions and conceptions of wellbeing. It then discusses the implications this has for the way people’s knowledge is viewed in policy.