As developing India faces rapid urbanization, the provision of sufficient infrastructure facilities to the informal settlers remains a major challenge. Pune is a second tier city in the state of Maharashtra which is transforming itself into a metropolitan city. The research is an attempt to better understand the existence of slums, explore and suggest empowerment opportunities to improve the living conditions of an informal settlement dweller. It questions the scope and limitations of the architectural profession specific to the responsibilities of architects towards the impoverished people within the society. This study argues and advocates the need to understand and respond accordingly to the needs of the people who lack access to resources. As an attempt to better understand this perspective, the study takes a closer look at the works and philosophies of Dr. Wes Janz, Dr. Nihal Perera, Prof. Hector LaSala, Lebbeus Woods, Ar. Pratima Joshi, Prof. Nabeel Hamdi, and Robert Neuwirth. Also the research explains the efforts of several non profit organizations like School on Wheels (Indianapolis), Second Helpings (Indianapolis), Hamara Footpath (Mumbai, India), and MicroPlace which work towards providing better living conditions to disadvantaged people. The study concludes with a proposal for a Non Governmental Organization in Pune, India that will provide the slum dwellers access to education, the internet, and monetary resources which will lead towards their enablement. / Paradigm shift -- The naked truth -- Generations of social exile -- Do we really know slums? -- Existence of Pune slums -- Architectural education in India -- Implications of development -- Agents of change -- Are we well equipped as professionals? -- Exploring various forms of empowerment -- Proposal for an NGO. / Department of Architecture

In India poor sanitation accounts for 1,600 daily deaths of children under the age of five (Dasra, 2012). The societal and environmental conditions in India and many other developing countries have continuously stood as barriers to facilitating changes in sanitation behavior. Efforts made to improve hygiene have continuously faced opposing forces including major gaps between the supply and demand of sanitation. This paper will focus on one pilot program conducted in Chennai, India over the summer of 2014. This program was designed to teach school children safe sanitation and hygienic habits by providing a guiding tool to teachers. The study analyzed qualitative observational data collected over the seven-week pilot program period to identify the barriers to implementation experienced in this case study. The results indicate that the school administration was the greatest barrier to implementation in this case study. The results also highlight the contextual sensitivity of each of the barriers and their relationships to one another. The findings suggest that depending on the context of implementation of a health, hygiene, and sanitation program these barriers may be re-ordered in hierarchy to work towards achieving sustainable programs.

This [Temple] is an illegal construction, a typical case of land-grabbing. People do this to get power and earn money. This is not the right type of temple [...] 99% of the temples are constructed illegally [...]. The people don’t build houses but temples because they know that in this case no one can do anything against it and they can simultaneously earn money with it. Behind the shrine they can build their house in peace. All this happens because people are uneducated.'1 This statement by a top bureaucrat in the Bhopal administration summarises a widely felt sentiment among urban planners in India. For many bureaucrats, temples are nuisances, traffic obstructions, acts of landgrabbing, or means of political assertion that contribute to inter-religious tensions. By contrast, builders, trustees or worshippers defend temples as spaces of divine manifestation, as responding to religious needs and providing space for religious festivals and community activity. In this article, I use the case study of the establishment of a controversial goddess temple in Bhopal to shed light on a fundamental rift between two ideal-type approaches to the city – as a secular place and as religious territory. This is an abiding theme of my research on urban temples, which was undertaken in Bhopal, the capital city of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, over a total of twenty months between 1995 and 2001.2