The Transformations in Colombo Over the Last 150 Years-by Nihal Perera
Source:Thuppahis
Nihal Perera, whose chapter 16 is entitled “From colonial outpost to indigenous kleptocratic city”
ABSTRACT : This chapter maps out the trajectory of the production, reproduction, and transformation of Colombo through colonial, post-colonial, neoliberal, and kleptocratic periods. Created as part of a European-imperial system of cities, Colombo’s identity is tied to larger systems of cities. Using the threshold between the city and outside to look from inside, the chapter approaches the story of Colombo more from indigenous and local people’s vantage points and perspectives, acknowledging and adapting significant local interpretations. The discussion focuses the neoliberal and kleptocratic periods. The neoliberals transformed the city’s form to attract foreign investment, shifting the purpose of planning to finding sites for investors, and enabling growth. Replacing investment for development with growth for investment, the kleptocrats intensified the movement of money and intercepted the circuits at the state level, via the government. They allow individual projects to shape the city. Colombo’s subjects have incrementally transformed it, by living and familiarising it. The layers of society and space created by these processes contest, cooperate, and entangle with each other in the form of cascades, generating new elements.
Figure 16.1 Colombo as part of the Portuguese Indian-ocean space .... Source: Perera (1998), drawn by Ashra Wickramathilaka.
Introduction: Colombo, the de facto capital of Sri Lanka, is essentially a European-colonial product forced upon the inhabitants of the island and not a creation of their own choice or making (Brohier, 1984; Perera, 1998). Colombo did not historically evolve from Lankan communities. It was this European outpost that created Ceylon (Sri Lanka since 1972) as its hinterland, a socio-spatial system that both depends on and ‘sustains’ the city, displacing Lankan societies. Also, from its inception, Colombo was a global city and had been highly diverse. Hence, its historical production is central to understanding Colombo.
Despite useful contributions, mainstream urban studies offer little help to understand Colombo. Although a European product, it is not a European city which is believed to have evolved through agriculture, industrialisation, and modernisation. Models that privilege the European historical trajectory have othered non-Western cities as ‘primate cities’ that have ‘urbanised without industrialising.’ Such an approach cannot explain urbanisation generated via prominent European colonial port cities (Karasch 1985; Perera 1998). Highlighting the significance of individual contexts, Cartier (2017) and Tang (2017) question the applicability of ‘gentrification’ to explain urban transformation in Hong Kong. More specific to Colombo, ‘Importing Problems’ (Perera 2016) demonstrate how importing a foreign perception, via the housing ordinance of 1915, transformed local realities to fit the framework, turning low-income living-environments into ‘slums.’ The lack of understanding of Colombo and its position in the world and Sri Lanka, i.e., its illegibility, is precisely why the politicians and experts have failed to engage the city impactfully. Understanding Colombo needs its own approach.
Despite the richness and insights it offers, Colombo is not well-studied. There are only two research-based books each addressing aspects of its history: Dharmasena’s (1980) study of the regional significance of the Colombo harbor in the early-twentieth century and Hulugalle’s (1965) history of the Colombo Municipal Council. While Brohier (1984) and Kumarasingha (2022) provide autobiographical accounts of their lived experiences in colonial Pettah and Dematagoda, Kaluarachchi (2013) introduces historical Colombo to the Sinhala reader. These volumes are complemented by, among others, a chapter that describes colonial Colombo in Cave’s (1908) The Book of Ceylon and a few studies by Michael Roberts (1984). My own Society and Space (Perera, 1998) investigates the social production of Colombo in the context of European expansion, the production of Ceylon, and the Sri Lankan responses. Drawing on it, this short chapter maps out Colombo’s roots as founded in its colonial production but focuses on the contemporary city as negotiated by neoliberal and kleptocratic interventions.
More Read
Colonial production, reproduction, restructuring
Modern Colombo was first established by the Portuguese as an outpost in 1517. In the following centuries, it was employed by the Dutch (1656–1796) and the British (1796–1948) to penetrate inland. The British colonised the entire island in 1815. Over time, the outpost was transformed into the administrative centre, the economic centre, and the cultural centre of Ceylon.
Portuguese Colombo belonged to the ‘Portuguese Indian-Ocean space’ (Perera 1998), defined by a series of hierarchically organised ports along the route of Carreira da India, the ship that linked the capital of the ‘Indian’ Empire, Goa with the metropole, Lisbon and Oporto (Figure 16.1). The city was defined by four main institutions that were alien to the Lanka society: the port, the fort, the feitoria, and the church with a large church square at the centre. Used as the locus for looting, gathering, and storing the riches from the surrounding, the feitoria, served as the warehouse, library, office, and residence of the feitor, the powerful royal trading representative and the intelligence officer directly appointed by the king. Offering Portuguese military help to each crowned head, Franciscan missionaries used political conflicts to convert them. The main one was the king of Kotte. The Dutch and the British outposts too were parts of their empires, the British calling it one of the keys that lock the globe.
The British extended roads equipped with military posts and maps and, using a rift in the court, conquered the last kingdom of Kande Uda Rata (Up-Country) in 1815. The territory was created by separating the island from being a part of other colonies such as future India and Indonesia, at the Treaty of Amiens (1802). This territoriality was qualitatively different from former indigenous kingdoms of which the power diminished with the distance from the capital to its frontier. Yet, Colombo established uniform power across the territory, demarcated by a boundary, as in European nation states. Obliterating the identity of Kande, the colony was organised in terms of administrative provinces and revenue districts, subjugated by connecting their capitals physically and administratively to Colombo.
Ceylon was incorporated into the European (capitalist) world economy by the 1840s, by the establishment of a coffee plantation complex (Perera 1998). Located between the European market and the plantations that produced coffee, tea after the 1860s, Colombo established itself as both the control and command centre of the economy in Ceylon and its centre of capitalist accumulation and diffusion. It saw the growth of new institutions such as banks, agency houses, trading companies, and shipping companies.
Since its inception, Colombo has been greater than the capital of Ceylon. All nineteenth and early-twentieth century maps confirm the pre-eminent position of Colombo as a critical fuelling station and port of call linking colonial economies and societies in four continents. Cave (2002, p.1) described the ‘Clapham Junction of the East’ as ‘a spot on which converge the steamships of all nations for coal and the exchange of freight and passengers’. Its architectural and spatial provisions were built in relation to London, Perth, Calcutta, and Cape Town but not to Kandy or Anuradhapura. What Cave (2002, p. 1) calls ‘colossal houses of business befitting the dignity of the port’ is evident in the 400-foott Long Cave Building which housed a large bookstore.
Like European colonial cities in general, Colombo was racially segregated into white and black (indigenous) cities. The fort served as the locus of political power with no comparable social and cultural institutions outside it (King 1976). The 1860–80s saw the full expression of colonial culture, represented in the separation of work (Fort) and residence (Cinnamon Gardens); work (Fort) and vacation (Nuwara Eliya); and capitalist production (plantations) and control and command (Colombo) (Figure 16.2). The disappearance of the need for high security, once the 1848 rebellion was quenched, is evident in the dismantling of the fort in 1859, turning the open field of fire (Galle Face) to a public square, and the emergence of public recreational spaces. Man-pulled vehicles provided the imagery of social power the colonials enjoyed.
The highlight of the transformation was the creation of a residential suburb, Cinnamon Gardens, in Garden City form, long before either of these were recorded by urban scholars. It was a repository of colonial culture which included an Anglican church, the civil hospital, and racecourse (Havelock). Organised around the spacious Circular (later, Victoria) Park, the circular streets were named after the members of royal family: Edinburgh, Albert, and Guildford crescents while the radials bore names of British Governors of Ceylon: Horton and Torrington. The nomenclature was obscure, strange, and ahistorical for the Ceylonese; it was never meant for them.
The colonials not only produced Colombo and Ceylon but also re-worlded the displaced subjects within these. The main repository of ordering the history of the Ceylonese through archaeology and historical artifacts is the Colombo Museum, built in 1877. The symbolical framing of the Ceylonese culture within the most prominent building located in Cinnamon Gardens, with a bronze statue of Governor William Gregory in front, highlights the appropriation of one history and culture by a dominant other (Perera 1998). To this date, busloads of people, especially school children, visit the museum to learn their own heritage.
Indigenous adoption, reproduction, transformation
The indigenes’ responses to colonial Colombo and Ceylon were integral to their colonial production, ranging from adoption to rejection. The bridging of the gap between the subjects and colonial socio-spatial structures occurred through both the westernisation of subjects and their familiarisation with available space (Perera, 1998; 2016). The responses became more pronounced in the late-nineteenth century.
The long-lasting impact of European colonialism was the hegemony of the colonial worldviews and culture achieved among the Ceylonese which naturalised and universalised what the colonial community perceived, produced, and professed. In Franz Fanon’s (1968) words, where confrontation with the colonial order of things had at first disoriented the native, subsequently, the colonial system became a world of which the native was envious. The envious subjects, especially the elite, who grew up in the Low Country under European powers for four and a half centuries, looked for peaceful ways to improve their own positions within colonial economic, political, and administrative structures. Hence, the colonial environment and Colombo did not change while they held power until the mid-1950s.
The elite followed the late-colonial model of living in residential suburbs and ruled the nation that emerged from the colony from the colonial parliament, re-interpreting these institutions, and reinventing their own identities. These choices were part of a broader emulation of late-colonial culture which included eating habits, dress, consumerism, naming practices, and dog breeding (Roberts, 1984). Adjusting to the postcolonial state, the newly elected governments got the blessing of the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth Relic in Kandy. At the same time, the public works department removed the ‘non-essentials’ such as ‘[long] eaves, high valleys, embellishments, broken outlines, and mouldings’ from the houses of low-ranking government servants. Racial inequality built into the colonial urban form was thus reproduced within the postcolonial spheres of status and class.
The ordinary people, most visibly the emergent elite, the Buddhist leaders, migrants, the naturalised, and women, rapidly Ceylonised Colombo, amending it to their own needs and values. Most migrants were attracted to the harbour, the main employer in town; so, working-class tenements and small businesses clustered in Kochchikade and Gintupitiya (Perera, 2016) (Figure 16.2). These neighbourhoods followed the ‘industries’, particularly the railway workshops, warehouses, and printing presses, spreading across Maradana, New Bazaar, Kotahena, and Slave Island. Women feminised the white-male Christian city, making it less unfriendly to them (Perera, 2016).
Figure 16.2 Map of Colombo showing colonial and migrant areas …. Source: Perera (1998), drawn by Ashra Wickramathilaka.
Challenges to the colonial rule from outside—especially Up-Country—were replaced, after the 1848 rebellion, by challenges from religious, nationalist, and socialist movements. Their focus on Colombo reinforced its centrality in Ceylon but as a city contested from within. The location of new key institutions such as printing presses and schools in Colombo and the adaption of old ones in the vicinity made Colombo the locus of the Buddhist establishment in Ceylon. With it, the leaders of Buddhist revival, well addressed by scholars such as Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988) and Malalgoda (1976), contested the colonial public sphere. The location of Lankan institutions capable of challenging the colonial authority brought a power institution to the indigenous side of the city, breaching the basic tenet of the divided city.
Despite the friendly transfer of power to the local elite at independence, it was the active politics of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, created in 1935, that produced the (postcolonial) nation by recruiting the inhabitants on the island into it (Perera, 1998). Beginning with helping those in rural areas affected by the malaria epidemic in 1933, the SamaSamajists welcomed the labour in Colombo and the plantations through workers unions, and the Tamils in the north and the east through politics, so transforming them into subjects of Ceylon, a classic transformation of subalterns into citizens.
The SamaSamajists got national politics to revolve around social justice and equity (Perera 1998). The process reached its peak under the United-Front government (1970–1976) led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, a Sinhala-nationalist (centrist) party founded in 1951. With its victory—with the support of socialists—in 1956, Ceylon entered two-decades (1956–1977) of center-left dominance. Leaders focused on rural development, particularly through providing collective consumption goods such as transportation, education, and medical facilities. If colonialism had not penetrated into villages, the Freedom Party brought the villages into the orbit of Colombo. The rural-focused development supported the distribution of population across the nation, saving Colombo from becoming a primate city like Bangkok (6 million people) which is disproportionally larger than the next which has 3 million.
The renaming of Victoria Park as Viharamahadevi Park, after a highly regarded queen in Sinhala history, is indicative of the many name changes since the 1950s. More substantively, severing all vestiges of colonialism, the United Front installed a new constitution and changed the name of the country to Sri Lanka in 1972. The Supreme Court in Colombo, created in 1801, was made the highest court of appeal after sending appeals to the Privy Council in London was stopped. Thus, Colombo came under Sri-Lankan control.
Housing which makes the largest component of the city also changed from within. The United Front created a separate cabinet ministry for housing and appointed a member of the parliament from Colombo. It also introduced a rent control act, a minimum lot size for building, a maximum floor area for houses at 2,000 sq.ft., and a ceiling on the ownership of housing property to two per family, transforming many tenants of low-income housing into homeowners. Evidently, the government did not perceive ‘planning’ as simply a technical exercise, but as a value-laden political activity.
Building a new airport, uplifting the airline (Air Ceylon), and buying ships, the government renewed the foreign links, guided by its non-aligned orientation. Despite the calmness it showed to the outside observer, Colombo gradually changed in regard to its contents and connections, especially in the early-1970s. The substantive changes caused pressure on the form and physicality of the city. The government embarked on the Colombo Master Plan Project in 1974 to reorganise Colombo.
The neoliberal city
The 1977-government’s responses to the United Front took a neoliberal path. Along with adopting austerity measures, as part of structural adjustments, the government privatised many state institutions, deregulated the economy, made it export-oriented, and broke the backbone of the labour movement by defeating the general strike of 1980. It attempted to change the international orientation from Britain to the USA but failed. It then promised to transform Sri Lanka into a Singapore, looked for foreign models, technology, and money, and embarked on spectacular, large-scale infrastructure projects. It accelerated the main 30-year component of the Mahaweli Project which included building six dams and hydropower projects into six years (1978–1984), creating the largest development project ever in Sri Lanka. The 1970s also saw militancy which escalated into a civil war in the early-1980s, contesting Colombo’s centrality.
Colombo was restructured by separating political and economic spaces, spreading out its functions, and re-incorporating those back into the fold. The government relocated administrative operations to Kotte (southeast of the city limits) and transformed Fort into an economic command centre. These were complemented by locating economic production near the airport and warehousing in Peliyagoda (north of the city limits) but expanded the working definition of Colombo to incorporate the expanded areas.
The government radically transformed urban (re)development. The insecurity, the anxiety, the desire, and the haste were evident in the creation of the Urban Development Authority (UDA) to overcome the legal and bureaucratic obstacles to finding land for investment. Unlike in the West where capital gentrified urban areas, in Sri Lanka, the state initiated and directed such changes. Uncharacteristic of neoliberalism, as evident in the food stamps (1979) and the Mahapola (scholarship) program, the government opted to protect poorer citizens. The Colombo Mater Plan of 1978 acknowledged ‘underserved’ settlements.
In the Fort, the state initiated a business district with the construction of the 32-story Bank of Ceylon headquarters. Excluding Sri-Lankan architects, the state awarded the contract to a Singaporean turnkey firm. Following Singaporean style, the government built overhead pedestrian crossings and created a night bazaar in Pettah. In contrast to Delhi’s attempt to showcase the city (and India) on the world stage, argues Nipesh Narayanan (2020), the Sri Lankan leaders tried to make Colombo visible to the world. The object was to attract foreign investments.
The UDA adopted a pro-growth approach. Declaring ‘special project areas,’ suspending the operation of other building regulations. In place of development controls, it adopted mechanisms such as floor area ratios and maximum plot coverage to promote building over two million sq.ft. of 15-25-story towers in the business district.
Some multi-storeyed buildings sprouted in the 1980s but there was no race to go tall. The bank stood for the state’s intended image until the 43-storied World Trade Center appeared in 1997. Until then, international banks including the Bank of America opened branches, but the visible additions were a few hotels. The modernisation of the Fort area dwarfed the colonial built environment including the parliament building (Figure 16.3).
The new seat of government was built in Sri Jayawardenapura-Kotte, away from the business district. Naming after himself, President Jayawardena opted to defeat the Tamil separatists and re-unify the country from Kotte as King Parakramabahu IV (1411–1466) once did. Commissioning the leading Sri-Lankan architect, Geoffrey Bawa to design the parliament house, the government selected a national representation (Figure 16.3).
Figure 16.3 The Fort area of the 1980s and the new parliament building ….. Source: Nihal Perera.
Creating a conducive environment for export-oriented production, the government established Export Processing Zones (EPZs). The EPZ near the airport was not only a legal safe haven for foreign investments but also physically separated, protecting it from the unionists. Instead of the expected electronic (blue-chip) industry, it attracted garment factories. They provided over 17,000 jobs in 1981, young women claiming the most. The garment industry became the main export earner of Sri Lanka in 1988, replacing the plantations.
Prime Minister Premadasa (1977–1988), who later became the president (1988–1993), attempted to organise a central Buddhist role for Colombo. In 1979, Gangaramaya temple began to hold a colourful annual procession (Nawam Maha Perahera) on the full moon day in February, resembling the one held in Kandy by the Temple of the Tooth Relic.
As Colombo was restructured and repositioned, the nation it presided was politically destabilised, first by the armed uprise staged by Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in 1971. Then, the sovereignty of Sri Lanka was challenged by Tamil-based separatist groups led by the Tamil Tigers of Tamil Eelam which grew into a full-fledged civil war in 1983. The disruptions were reinforced by the JVP-Government killing spree in 1987–1989. Instead of negotiating in Colombo through discussions and voting, the militants invited the authorities to rural areas to negotiate their grievances with arms.
Leading to these, almost all post-colonial political leaders opted to divide the nation—brought together by the SamaSamajists (Perera, 1998). The first independent government denied citizenship to plantation workers who immigrated from India. The Freedom Party using a ‘Sinhala only’ policy came to power in 1956. While the civil war did not end Sinhala-Tamil conflict, it was followed by Sinhala-Muslim antagonism and the bombing of Catholic Churches on the Easter of 2019.
Housing in Colombo changed with the Massive Hundred-Thousand Houses Programme (1977–1983), under which several high-rise apartment complexes including the Liberty Plaza with a mall were built. Instead of the state providing houses, the Million Houses Programme (1983–1989) supported those who built their own housing. It unofficially ended involuntary displacements.
The centrality of Colombo was destabilised by the government itself which destroyed its old opposition: the working-class movement. Until then, all elected governments fell towards the end of their terms due to worker- and student-led strikes in the capital, followed by the rural electorate electing the next government. With the end of working-class movements, Colombo lost its clout from social justice and political power standpoints, transforming it into a ‘neoliberal’ city in Sri Lanka dominated by ethnic identities and the civil war.
The kleptocratic city
At the end of the civil war in 2009, Colombo was subjected to direct transformation. The government shifted its focus to ‘development’ and assigned its command to the (victorious) Secretary to the Ministry of Defense, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the brother of President Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005–2015). Gotabaya embarked on an aggressive construction program, building highways, an airport, a harbour, and cricket stadia in Hambantota, near Rajapaksa’s hometown in southwestern Sri Lanka (Mariyathas et al., 2016). Colombo’s lead project is the massive Port City.
Besides side-lining Rajapaksa-era symbols and providing an environment for more free speech, the in-between government led by President Maithripala Sirisena (2015–2019) added the Megapolis project but did not make much progress. The election of Gotabaya as president in 2019 reinvigorated the change. According to news reportage, his government-initiated projects in Sinharaja (the primary rainforest), brought Muthurajawela (the central wetland) under the UDA, constructed a beach in Mount Lavinia, and planned to restructure the Fort area. Progress has been stalled by the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022-protests against the government.
The Port City is a new luxury-living cum working district built on land reclaimed from the sea. The Chinese-planned project is represented as the premiere residential, retail, and business destination in south Asia that offers unmatched planned-city living by the Indian Ocean (CHEC Port City Colombo, 2019). It comprises over 5.6 million sq.m. of built space that provides ‘world-class’ facilities along with a 100-ha marina bay which is larger than New York’s Central Park. The project is expected to be completed in 2042.
Despite environmentalists’ warnings, the government has not shown sensitivity to environmental impacts of its projects; the Port City plan is not concerned with the sea-level rise. One victim group of the project is the fishing community and fishing-related industry between Kalutara and Negombo, 30 km south and north of Colombo (Chamikara, 2015). Despite drawing on local resources, Port City is planned as an independent district connected to the world via hi-tech. With the new highway connection to the airport people could come from abroad and leave it without ever visiting Colombo or the country.
The Megapolis plan, unveiled in 2019, opts to transform the Western Province into a ‘world-class metropolis’ (Ministry of Megapolis, 2019). It aims to lay a massive infrastructure across the province relying on external resources such as loans and grants. It is rooted in the 1977-idea of greater Colombo, further developed into the CESMA Plan of 2004 named after the subsidiary of Singapore’s Housing and Development Board which prepared the plan.
The Rajapaksa intervention in 2009 provided a feeling of freedom and openness after the war. During the civil war (1983–2009) and the killings of 1987–1989 most institutions and ordinary citizens who could fenced themselves in. Rajapaksa opened up select public areas around Independence Square and Viharamahadevi Park. Yet most new spaces such as jogging tracks, the Arcade Independence Square, and Racecourse created through the refurbishment of old colonial buildings were geared towards the upper income groups. Some such as Diyata Uyana were militarized and the massive Defence Headquarters at Akuregoda is telling. These projects display an ambitious city-beautification effort, in middle-class aesthetics, combined with privatisation and militarisation.
What is being created is complemented by the displacement of low-inme and minority groups. The Megapolis plan proposes the elimination or transformation of 1,499 neighbourhoods occupied by 68,812 families, calling them unfit for human habitation. The object is ‘to release the economic corridors occupied by them,’ i.e., releasing the meagre 9 percent of city’s land occupied by low-income settlements for capital investment, ‘urgently,’ through ‘low-income community regeneration programs,’ i.e., relocating the inhabitants in ‘new’ housing blocks (Ministry of Megapolis, 2019). Although the Megapolis project has hardly progressed, Colombo is growing fast and many projects use it as a guide.
The underlying shift from investments directing development to generating growth that intensifies the cashflow is driven by a kleptocracy. For the first time since the late-1970s, some politicians had begun to acquire wealth through the state. By the Rajapaksa era this trend has grown to the level of intercepting the circuits of property and money such as loans and purchases at the point of the state. In front of this new opportunity, the most skilled politicians and high-level officials gradually coagulated into a single class of powerful elite who employed the government to take control of the state, so establishing authority over its cash flows and accounting systems; stymying the judiciary, the state, and the capitalists; and transforming the difference between main political parties into a complementary enmity. The interest in projects of high-return is evident in the cancelling in 2020 of the LRT project funded by the Japanese at a low interest rate, even after completing the studies. How each kleptocrat becomes rich is not transparent for transparency is not a virtue of this system; I will not speculate either but employ this larger understanding to explain the change.
Enabled by the changes such as the introduction of the district-based electoral system, politicians became less accountable. This was evident when the flabbergasted Minister Ranawaka first refused to accept responsibility for the Meethotamulla garbage-mountain collapse of 2017, killing 32 and victimizing thousands. The lack of care for public good is evident when a new restaurant and its parking lot was allowed to encroach the main public space, Galle Face, in 2013.
Subjecting the state to the government and its militarisation weakened the expert.Increasingly, the politicians decide which projects to implement. They may be lost as Bent Flyvbjerg (1999, p. 234) elegantly demonstrates: while ‘power has a rationality that rationality does not know. Rationality … does not have a power that power does not know’. The kleptocrats attempt to enhance their economic and political gains via making Colombo visible to the world and providing a nationalist image for local consumption. The ‘experts’ are expected to operationalise and rationalise projects.
The external face is economic and profit driven. The state has displaced ‘sub-prime’ uses and low-income settlements from central areas, refurbished colonial structures, and brought claimed land into recirculation. These are organised around lucrative projects, creating an environment of consumption for people with higher spending powers, especially tourists and local upper classes, ignoring the sublime purpose of planning. The recently opened One Galle Face (2021) claims to be the first prestigious shopping mall and ‘Colombo’s first internationally developed and managed integrated lifestyle destination and mixed-use development’. Recent structures, including expensive condominiums, have hardly provided any recognisable form to Colombo except as a concrete jungle; the form follows uncoordinated investments.
The local face combines nationalism and the ruling family. Mahinda elevated himself as the greatest ruler in the 2,600-year Sinhala-Buddhist history, so joining Jayawardena who proudly claimed to be the 205th head of state of Sri Lanka. The Rajapaksa regime used the lotus, representing Sinhala-Buddhism, to dress up various structures across the city, including the Nelum Pokuna auditorium and planted na plants around the Independent Square. The lotus bud was used as the election symbol of Gotabaya in 2020. The process culminated in the Lotus Tower where this Sinhalized-Buddhist-Rajapaksa symbol met Chinese technology, loans and, perhaps, domination.
Conclusion
In sum, the conservatives adapted themselves to colonial Colomo, the center-left governments radically changed its contents, and the neoliberals transformed its form to attract foreign investment. The kleptocratic-regimes intensified the movement of money and intercepted at the state level, through the government. They replaced the investing for development with growth for investment and cashflow, allowing the projects to shape the city.
Despite major efforts to change the city and its hinterland, the post-colonial authorities have made little progress. As its own resistance to change demonstrates, Colombo has an identity that depends on national and global systems of cities and is not a free-floating signifier that can be changed by any random actor. As it is the producer of Ceylon, and intimately connected to it, changing Colombo needs a broader and deeper vision and strategy.
Yet the colonial production is incomplete, nor is the city dualistic, or totally structured. Despite the inefficiencies of the state and the experts, its subjects, who incrementally transform it by living in it (Perera, 2016), have shown a high level of connectivity. The emerging elite, the Buddhist revival, and the migrants, among others, familiarised the city. These and other layers of people’s society and space contest, cooperate, and entangle with the formal city of the authorities, causing cascades that modify and generate new elements.
