Forum for Culture

Class and Space in Colombo: The Colonial Constructions of an Urban Perception

By ci ⋅ April 5, 2008 ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

nihal perera on urban space

The first was Nihal Perera’s (Associate Professor of Urban Planning, Ball State University) illustrated talk in English titled ‘Class and Space in Colombo: The Colonial Constructions of an Urban Perception.’ It was delivered on March 27. This presentation attempted to narrate how the introduction of the Housing Ordinance of 1915 in Colombo led to the establishment of British colonial town planning in Ceylon (Sri Lanka from 1972). Although it was already there, this was the turning point in establishing a planners’ and authority’s perception of the city. It demonstrates that the planners’ and authorities’ cities are perceptions and constructions that enable them to understand, examine, and modify them. The Ordinance imported with it a set of urban problems requiring solutions that were not available in Colombo. The colonial/imperial planners such as Patrick Geddes carried British town planning solutions to the colonies. Planning was viewed by them, and the authorities, as a Western science which could be transferred across cultural boundaries, particularly from the metropole to the colony. This way, the British not only built cities in Ceylon, but also taught the Ceylonese how to understand and maintain them. This town planning discourse was not directly imported, but was 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 planning were introduced in post-colonial Sri Lanka in the 1970s, but they do not represent any substantial cultural unpacking of this discourse.

The discussion that followed centered around the British planning dynamics in colonial Colombo that introduced a notion of a Eurocentric urban perception to the local populace. Michael Collier of the University of Sussex moderated the discussion.