The Planners' City: The Construction of a Town Planning Perception of Colombo

Abstract

The cities that administrators administer, planners plan, and scholars examine are perceptions that represent the absolute city ‘that is out there’. This paper narrates how a new perception of the city based on British town planning, modified within the Empire, was established in Colombo, the former capital of Sri Lanka. It focuses on the interpretation and representation of physical realities in Colombo using the norms imported through the Housing Ordinance of 1915 and later the town planning discourse. The ordinance problematic the living environments of the poor residents, requiring solutions that were not available in Colombo. Instead of solving these, the colonial/imperial planner Patrick Geddes, and the others who followed him, carried town planning to Colombo and kept rewriting its history. The new perception of the city focused the attention of the authorities on a capitalist city, which was lain over the colonial city, marginalizing the poor. In this way the colonial planners taught the Ceylonese urban authorities and planners how to perceive and act on the city from a town planning vantage point. The discourse was not directly imposed or imported, but negotiated between many agencies including the (British) municipal authorities of Colombo, the colonial government, colonial/imperial planners, the newspapers, and other stakeholders. Many changes to this perception were introduced in Sri Lanka after independence, but they do not represent any substantial cultural questioning of this discourse. This is the contribution of this study.