Grad School Application Essay

While it may be easier to persuade yourself that Boo’s published stories are works of fiction, her writings of the slums that surround the luxury hotels of Mumbai’s airport are very, very real. Katherine Boo’s book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers – Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” does not attempt to solve problems or be an expert on social policy; instead, Boo provides the reader with an objective window into the battles between extremities of wealth and poverty. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” then, exposes the paucity and corruption prevalent within India.

The book Concepts of Urban Design by David Gosling and Barry Maitland has stated that, “History provides a large number of traditional urban forms which have survived the passage of time and which work to a greater or lesser degree. (Gosling & Maitland, 1984).” This statement provides some evidence to show that even professionals in the planning world recognise and base some urban designs on ‘traditional urban forms’. Examples of this range from

In the novel Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Indian paupers live in Annawadi slum, a place where is descried as “a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of a country that holds one third of the planet’s poor.” (Boo, 3) Poverty–a lack of wealth and basic needs–influences every single part of people’s lives and stories, just likes to stalk people documented in the book like a nightmare. In Annawadi slum, poverty is nearly unavoidable and inescapable. There is no running water, no relief services, and the people do not take care of what they have, because they can barely afford to take care of themselves. This harsh circumstance reveals the fact that further advances in human welfare for the poor are now often threatened by a belief in the West

As a first generation Indian-American, I am no stranger to being a part of a distinct community while observing two unique cultures. Traveling to India exposed me to a dynamic population with rich diversity comprising of numerous languages and differing religions. Though these individuals may have had differing customs from their neighbors, there were similar ambitions to conquer grinding poverty. This poverty can be clearly noticed by seeing citizens sleeping on floors of a railway station, or the lack of air conditioning in searing hot weather. The frailty and mortality of the human condition was starkly visible in India. As a fellow human, I was humbled not only by the lack of privilege and opportunity of many citizens, but also by their

Poverty and oppression is a serious condition that is prevalent even in today’s modern society. Women and children are exposed to poverty and subjected to a life of injustice. One of the countries where such problems still occur is in India. Despite the country’s modernization, there lies an undercity where the disparity of wealth is transparent. These social problems are thoroughly described in movies and literature such as Slumdog Millionaire and Behind the Beautiful Forevers. In the book Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Catherine Boo, the author describes slum life for a set of individuals and the hardship that their social conditions confined them to. Another movie that gave insight to slum life in India is Slumdog Millionaire

Paul Goldberger, an American architectural critic once quoted, “Urbanism works when it creates the journey as desirable as the destination.”

Urbanization is inevitable, whether we want it or not. Opposers are constantly bickering about the political and moral consequences of gentrification. This topic is indeed mind boggling and complex. However, there is a need to observe this multi-faceted phenomenon in a different angle. Change is the force of diversity, safety and

In his book, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhood and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality, Patrick Sharkey sheds a light on wide range of reasons that contribute to the persistent racial inequality among the American society. He also draws attention to the intergenerational neighborhood effects on mobility level (the ability to move upward, or downward in terms of the economic status, education, and occupation) of the residents of destitute areas. In this extension, I am going to present a study that was done on 14 Bangalore slum communities in India, and highlight the main issues that Sharkey included in his book.

Chandigarh is located near the foothills of the Siwalik range of the Himalayas in northwest India. It covers an area of approximately 114 square kilometers (“About Chandigarh”). Le Corbusier’s design of the capital complex at Chandigarh was constructed with one very clear, overarching goal: to forge “a unique synthesis between ancient and modern cultures”- part progressive, part five thousand years old (101 Gast). Yet, the progressiveness of the formal elements of the complex does not communicate the urbanity and liveliness that Le Corbusier intended. Le Corbusier’s plan called for the complete separation of government buildings from the rest of the city. Chandigarh’s capital complex and “the dispersion of its buildings evoke images of an ancient” urban model like

In the nonfiction book written by Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, the title holds significant meaning. The reason behind this is explored within the first chapter, “Personal Geography,” as it concisely represents why Mehta chose this as the name of his work (3). Through the telling of his history in Bombay as a child and his rediscovery of it coming back as an adult, Mehta sets the stage for an in-depth description of this city and its nature throughout the rest of the book. This transformation from an insider to the culture of the city, to an outsider, to a potential insider is the essence of this first chapter, and overall the inspiration that Mehta uses to write this book. He makes the reader understand that this act of recording all of this information about Bombay is not to only to educate the reader, but also to educate and reacquaint himself with his city. Through immersing himself in the culture and the lifestyle, he finally receives the citizenship that he lost when he was a child and has been desiring since then.

The paper will focus on studying the urbanization in India with analysis of changes over time and history and the conditions of the urban poor as it currently exists. It will explain the approach of low-income housing policy adopted by the government in the five year plans viz. the Rajiv Gandhi Awas Yojana. The paper will also include the impact of this housing scheme on the improvement of slum areas. The idea of ‘slum-free cities’ has dominated the housing policies in India for long. This concept has been adopted in a prototypical manner for all cities and geographies without much compassion for the users, and consideration of the reality of the varying land and housing market conditions. The paper with supporting case studies will analyze the changes required in the current approach of low income housing policy that could be adopted in the prevailing Indian political and economic environment for substantial results.

This dissertation is influenced by the ongoing urban regeneration and urban developments in many of the major cities in India, especially in city of Pune, and its adverse effects on the city townscapes and place identities. City of Pune has a rich education legacy and has been often referred as the ‘Oxford of the East’, a legacy which came into prominence on the establishment of the University of Pune in the year 1949 (Hindustan Times, 2012). The city truly justified itself as the cultural capital of Maharashtra with its strong connections with the work of arts, music, theater and literature (Hindustan Times, 2012). Pune, being an educational hub of India by having one of the India’s oldest University (Maharashtra Tourism, 2013), has now been transformed into a major manufacture and production hub as well as has improved in educational sectors like research institutes for information technology, management, architecture and engineering that attract students and professionals internationally (SCHEMCON, 2015).

This essay will explore the contemporary water crisis in Mumbai, India; a rapidly growing megacity that for decades has struggled to provide adequate access to water for their 20 million residents, and in particular the more than 10 million people living in unsanctioned self-erected slum communities that surround the city proper. Beyond the technical and structural barriers lie ideological and cultural impediments that I will argue are borne in part from an idealized quest for modernity informed by free market capitalism and neoliberal ideology. I will argue that this has created deep cultural and societal rifts that have been exploited by vested economic interests through discursive and political campaigns that seek to delegitimize the right of Mumbai’s citizens to water, and by extension life. The spectre of climate change provides a backdrop for an existential struggle that has been unfolding for decades and appears likely to continue. This essay will examine the circumstances and failures that preceded the 2014 landmark ruling handed down by the High Court of Mumbai which affirmed the inalienable right to water, regardless of legal status of one’s domicile, including attempts to privatize water services in various regions of the city.

The metropolis and the neighbourhood can be linked to the Chicago school of urban sociology, which has developed ethnographic studies based on various ethnic neighbourhoods over several decades. This kind of work focuses on interaction and its density within the city, generating an ecological stereotype of the urban process depending on the conflict and competition between various groups and their growth in terms of spatial and social movement. The city is an area of dense mobility and

Why is it important to try and belong to your built environment? Especially today, when we see that lots of efforts are being taken to try and bridge this gap, especially in the cities in India. Where the development has been haphazard, now it’s too late to go backwards and carefully plan, so the relevance in looking at a careful approach from the beginning holds a lot of interest for me. There are different attempts being made in the cities to now bridge the gap but what does it mean to continuously bridge the gap and not do it as an after thought? This is the attempt that I find most prominent in Auroville, and also the most challenging in its development.