Justice of uneven urbanisation: Notes on Developing Colombo

First published in The Island newspaper on November 8, 2017, 10:01 pm

By Nanelle Jayawardene

A few weeks ago, I landed in Bandaranaike International Airport, with the solitary intention of conducting fieldwork research to exalt a thesis project at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.Making my way out of the airport, preoccupied with the elemental impetus of snapping a series of pictures capturing Colombo’s ludic urban life, its chaotic web of narrow corridors and channels, which was certain to appease the goût of my Western pedagogue, I was met with a series of proud, oversized posters depicting the Western Province Megapolis Plan- put up by the Ministry of Megapolis and Western Development. They were stunningly glossy 3D-visuals of an urbane Colombo-to-be, festooned with a chain of sparkling glazed structures surrounding Beira Lake, street levels patinated with lavish boutique outlets and squares reanimated with business men and women in sleek suits, clutching multiple shopping bags. The roadways were refreshingly clean, dotted with luxury cars- a polar opposite to the present unwavering gridlock, clogging the city. As I continued to despairingly marvel at the quixotic fantasy that these posters attempted to create with an element of dubiousness, I was interrupted by an airport porter offering to assist me with my luggage (for a small fee, of course). Promptly diverting from his proposition, I inquired his thoughts on the developmental initiatives that these posters promised. At first, with a tired smile he attempted to eschew the subject, alluding to a sense of indifference and a level of irrelevance that all this bear in the day-to-day goings on of his life. Upon realising that I was new to the present socio-economic climate of the country and even more ignorant of these proposed developments, he expressed with a credulous optimism, yet in an unallied and impersonal tone, a vote of support for such an urbanity, that offers world-class provisions and salubrious living conditions. This, which I couldn’t help but consider ingenuousness was instantly put at rest by the level of scepticism with which he expressed a lack of conviction in these developments to truly benefit anyone but the well-connected upper-class. His remarks, all well founded,were noted here as it precisely resonates with the broad consensus of people of Sri Lanka.

As a universal phenomenon, every social process is unevenly developed in space- and as such, the concept of urbanization too lays thicker in certain geographies than others. In Sri Lanka, like elsewhere in the world, this has made way to an array of spatial hierarchies that are governed by some invisible socio-economic and political hieroglyphic, which are also a resultant of the same uneven urbanization. This is spatial injustice. The inexorable trajectory of Colombo’s spatial injustice having long been camouflaged with impressions of a post-war resurgence is finally unveiled by the likes of above mentioned visuals for its discriminatory territorialisation of space. On a psychogeographic milieu, Colombo has always villainously maintained a strong anatomy of spatial boundaries entrenched in a certain tacit social and cultural code. This in itself was the common war that majority of city dwellers, buried deep in a corner of a slum, somewhere in Slave Island for example, had to routinely battle in order to claim employment, education, political and cultural demands, and above all the right to the city.Consequently, it is crucial to discern that these new and mighty city-wide plans, like their predecessors,precipitous, ill-considered and superficial in their approach, yet hidden behind righteous rhetoric of‘democratizing the city’, ‘equality’,‘empowerment’ and ‘right to the city’, are in fact feigned pseudonyms for fortifying the already existing psychological spatial boundaries into tangible demarcations that paralyse all but a small percentage’s urban rights and claim on the city. Mistaking the process of restructuring geographies to conform exclusively to a bourgeois taste, to be the same as renovating and improving territories, in Sri Lankan popular media,these proposed city re-orientations and zonal based partitioning, from plans of Colombo Business Zone, Port City, Aero City to Science and Technology City in Malabe are yet to be discussed and scrutinized from an assertive spatial standpoint, one that highlights the explanatory power of the consequential geographies of justice.As such, any discourse on spatial injustice, its corollary,these consequential geographies of squatter settlements, slums and soulless high-rise public housing,is extremely lukewarm.Meanwhile, the general public, eagerly awaiting some degree of fortuity and providence, applaud the slightest glimpse of a new elegant high-rise apartment complex, luxury hotel development backed by foreign investors and city-beautification projects(all at the cost of eviction and city fragmentation), despite their constant and inescapable struggle over geography, which is a direct outcome of the same misguided developmental initiatives.

Just as none of us is beyond geography, none of us is completely free from struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and canons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993

Simply put, Colombo, like many other cities is extremely fragmented. These inane, zonal proposals, which in no doubt is born out of a political praxis that is driven by a crisis-generated restructuring of economy will perturbingly lead to a more systematic and legitimized mass-production of unjust geographies, that is only going to intensify inequality. The same way Kurunduwatta is a fief of the wealthy and affluent nobility, Sri Lanka’s own Chelsea if you will, suburbs such as Maradana, Maligawatte and Dematagoda are associated with the labouring classes, gangs and related illicit activities. This social and spatial territorialization, is both the cause and result of an inescapable cycle of spatial injustice. For city planning students and practitioners, colouring in these ‘characteristics’ and ‘zones’ on a map may induce delusions of order, structure and harmony. However, reality of such authoritarian planning is anything but that: an assured receipt of both social and spatial cataclysm. Meetotamulla incident is a perfect example of this, and perhaps the most striking piece of consequential geography of recent past. Planned or unplanned, over the cause of time, an entire quarter was pervasively and apathetically turned into a mammoth-scaled wasteland, unconcerned and regardless of its detrimental effects on residents and their living conditions. The many revolts staged by downtrodden inhabitants at various occasions, crying out about their urban rights, despotism and the insufferable degree of spatial injustice, had been insouciantly brushed off under the metaphorical rug by authorities, until the whole nation was faced with the inevitability, a great calamity that lost many lives.

If the policy makers are indeed truly concerned about pursuing a more ‘democratic’ and ‘empowered’ city (as such words were so casually embossed into ‘Vision 2025- A Country Enriched’), the cry for the right to the city (a self-assembled, inborn ideal rather than some distant Lefebvrian premise) must be addressed head on to create an alternative urban life that is less alienated,less preoccupied with pushing for zonal boundaries and attempting to forcefully designate social and cultural impetus, but (to burrow some of Lefebvre ideas) more conflictual and dialectal, open to becoming, to encounters (both fearful and pleasurable), and to constantly seek the unknowable ludic novelty.On the other hand, within the present discourse of controversial autonomy handed over to foreign agencies to plan, execute and possess developmental initiatives in Colombo, it is not only important to scrutinize such facile zonal-based reorganization, but to push for some form of legislature that will restrain walling off certain geographies of the city, where economy, power, governing authority and decision-making selectively and exclusively seem to linger. Apart from this what is also becoming clearer, is that the conventional planning practice, the right arm of bourgeois, must be significantly democratized and herald community participation to be at the centre of its decision-making process.This would certainly mean restructuring neighbourhoods with a great spatial and social consciousness as oppose to dancing to the beat of the new bias towards a so-called flexible, information-based, capitalist economy. To this extent, designing technologies to support grassroots community organisations’ involvement in city planning must be at the forefront of any developmental policies.

I have recorded here some of my initial reactions to the upcoming impetuous developments, that seemingly continue to operate to benefit just a small percentage of urbane, while selling fallacious fantasies to the greater public, who will only be further marginalized by those very initiatives. In doing so, I have frisked around a pastiche of theoretical ideas, some original, some borrowed from the likes of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Edward Said and Edward Soja. This is warranted as the intention of this writing, rather than discussing the critical profundities and systems of concepts of these theories, is to catalysea discussion contesting current policies of city and spatial planning, inclinations towards mega-constructions and reorganization of economy. It is also the intention of this writing to call on Sri Lankan geographers, social scientists, architects and planners to establish a more patent discourse on urban rights, spatial justice and regional democracy, to enrich such a dialogue with a more apposite outlook from a specifically Sri Lankan viewpoint to counterpart the rather Western perspectives of Sojas and Harveys.