Urban Studies: Understanding Diversity And Inequality

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Letter of motivation Urban Studies: Understanding Diversity and Inequality “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights”. David Harvey Building healthy cities is the challenge of the current era. It is a human right to live in cities that are creating human happiness and equal access to resources. As a Research …show more content…

In the 21st century, planning and public health are reconnecting to address the new health challenges of urbanization and globalization — from racial and ethnic disparities to land use sprawl to providing basic services to the millions of urban poor around the world living in informal slum settlements. It is fundamental to reconnect the fields of planning and public health to address these and other 21st-century urban health challenges. Other centers of excellence within the Sociology field at the Erasmus University have caught my attention, for instance, DRIFT (Dutch Research Institute For Transitions), which is creating leading alternative thinking. I am sure the program in Urban Studies: Understanding Diversity and Inequality will give me the tools to think critically and apply knowledge to pressing problems using interdisciplinary research and practice methods and experiential …show more content…

Studying Public health in the renowned department of the Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, side by side with internationally known names of Political and Social Epidemiology, as J. Mackenbach, I am strongly motivated to start this Master of Urban Studies at the Erasmus University. With already a good background in qualitative and quantitative research, good knowledge of research methods and statistics (as I am involved in a Master program and in research projects), I possess a good basis for starting this new path. It would be an honor for me to study with excellent professors in the field of Sociology and Urban Studies. Furthermore, I am very pleased to live in Rotterdam, and the Netherlands in general, as a very special example of social innovation and urban experiments, trying to implement and create better spaces for its own people and leading in their interest of creating an equal society. My special interest is in green spaces and green cities and their effect on health. Especially how green can lead to both a process of gentrification or equality in quality of life. I am currently involved in a project at the Epidemiology Department of Erasmus MC, looking into the effect of quality of life and health outcomes and the inequalities per socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics, such as

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