While people in cities across the Global North are unable to access affordable housing, their comrades in the Global South are dispossessed of houses that they and their families have lived in for generations. In South Asia, under the banner of development, people have been evicted from their houses to make space for exhibitions centers, transport projects (such as roads) or infrastructure. As a result of the Common Wealth Games in 2010, Delhi started to evict people in 2004 and research estimates it to be 200,000 households. In Lahore, a metro train project which opened in 2020 displaced 200 people who then had to repurchase land, move into rented homes or squeeze into the homes of extended families. Colombo in a bid to become a ‘World Class City’ has pursued a similar trajectory.
Former Secretary of the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, Gotabaya Rajapaksa referred to the idea of Colombo as a World-Class City in 2012. Under his vision, the project consisted of the Urban Regeneration Project (URP) and the Metropolitan Development Plan. Under the URP, the government tried to transform Colombo into a uniform cityscape of apartment blocks, public transport and green spaces. To realize this vision, the urban poor, employed in the informal sector and housed in ad-hoc settlements had to be dispossessed from their lands. To compensate them, the government relocated them into high-rise apartments outside of the main metropolis. Workers, at the moment, have limited other options—land is too overpriced to buy and property developers have focused solely on a rental market for the upper and middle classes. As a result, they are stuck in “vertical slums” that have been hit by crisis-after-crisis: first, the pandemic. Then, the economic crisis. And, finally the austerity stipulated by the IMF.
Colombo as a Case Study
“They gave us the keys to these apartments but locked us permanently in poverty,” Rani. M, 38, told me. “In Apple Watte I paid no fees, but when we came here, nearly half my earnings were used to pay fees.” Rani used to work in an apparel factory but is currently a stay-home-mother. She is a victim of the URP, because her family had to leave their house in Apple Watte, and move to Muwadora Uyana, a high-rise apartment, in 2015. The fees she talks about here are monthly payments made to the Urban Development Authority (UDA) to receive a deed to her apartment.
In Colombo, there are four main types of wattes, according to a survey published by the Sevantha Urban Resources Center: severely underserved settlements, underserved settlements, upgraded and fully-upgraded settlements. Wattes are not just residential clusters in various states of development, they are cosmopolitan neighbourhoods that co-share public facilities, resources and life together. Many residents have found the transition from the watte to the apartment to be a challenge.
Rani, for instance, feels like she has no privacy because of the unit’s paper-thin walls: “We hear everything: couples fighting, children crying and even neighbors in the toilet. Back in the watte, we had privacy and we had separate community toilets outdoors.” Communal facilities like the lifts are also in states of disrepair—they are either broken or stained by urine or betel spittle. “The lifts are death traps. Three of them have been broken for months. When I was pregnant, I climbed nine floors when the lift was broken,” she said. Water from the taps are also discoloured, and if payments for any utility bill is not paid, they are disconnected to hold residents hostage.
“Only the rich get development,” Rani said and pointed to the Lotus Tower across the river. This area used to house the Johnson Watte, which sits right in the middle of Colombo city, cushioned by the Beira Lake on one end; and roads and railroads on the other end. To clear the land up for the project, the government led by former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, evicted the original residents of the land. The building, planned as a landmark emblem of his family’s authority, dominates over the settlements and apartments. Nevertheless, the project has proved to be a costly project with limited returns for the debt-ridden economy, overburdened taxpayers and dispossessed former residents. “Can you see those lights? That is the World Class City,” she said, as she breast-fed her child. “We are the dirty secret they stacked in a concrete block and forgot about.”
Nadeeka, a 34 year old resident of the Sahaspura Flats, built by the Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga (CBK) government in 2001 echoed this sentiment. “Colombo rolls out red carpets for foreign investors but kicks dust in our faces. We're just beggars stacked behind their ivory towers.”
Over the past decade, a number of researchers have documented the incompatibility of Colombo's urban poor and high-rise apartments. As the “Built on Sand” report released by a think-tank focused on spatial justice and equitable cities, Colombo Urban Lab (CUL), observed: “Despite promises of better housing, the built environment of the high-rises fall short of being liveable. It seems little to no attention has been given to how people lived their lives in the watte, when designing these vertical living spaces.”
But, this has not always been the case. Sri Lanka, in the past, was a model for social housing. The radical land reforms initiated in the 1970s and landmark housing schemes in the 1980s-1990s, improved the material conditions of citizens, aided their social mobility and transformed them into important voter bases.
Colombo’s History: Colonial period
In the colonial period, demand for housing in Colombo began because of the population-boom linked to the construction of the railroads in the 1860s and the Colombo Port in 1888. Workers from rural areas, South India and the Malay peninsular built ad-hoc settlements near railroads, marshy areas and abandoned paddy land. As lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Peradeniya, Alikhan Mohideen explained: “people settled in Maradana, Mattakkuliya, Dematagoda and Kotahena. These are the people who should have the right to this city.”
In the early 1900s, a number of problems hit the city. In her essay, “Planning Colombo”, historian Ramla Wahab-Salman described the many diseases that spread across the streets. Spanish flu spread from ports from 1918-1919 and Malaria cases from fleas and shore-rats hit the city’s suburbs in the early 1920s. In response to this, Governor Henry Manning invited the urban planner, Patrick Geddes to stop over at Ceylon. His plan, published in 1921, envisioned Colombo as the Garden City of the East. It included gardens, parks and tree-lined streets to improve air and visual quality. Waterways, including the Beira Lake, were meant to become both a functional and recreational feature of the city. Rather than focus on just development, he recommended planning around the needs of all classes, not just the elite.
But, the Colombo Municipal Council never adopted or implemented Geddes’ urban plan fully. Vague remnants can be seen in upmarket areas like Cinnamon Gardens, but the marriage of gardens, urban areas and people never truly manifested.
Colombo’s History: Post-Independence
Once the country gained independence in 1948, the government made key decisions around land and housing access, first in the Central Province and then in the Northern and Eastern provinces. At this point in time, the country had a rural, agricultural economy rather than an urban, industrial economy.
With the Ceylon Citizenship Act 1948, the government disenfranchised the Malaiyaha Tamil community and they lost access to citizenship, land and housing. Even today, they live en-masse in line-rooms in tea-plantations and have limited access to taps, toilets and drains. The superintendents of these plantations control all aspects of their life: they are barred from even cultivating crops in spare plots of land. This act entrenched the community in the Central Province and limited their migration to urban areas like Colombo. Their access to housing is tied to their role as indentured labourers and their tenure security is linked to their productivity.
Then in the Northern and Eastern provinces, the government introduced land colonization schemes in the Dry Zone for Sinhalese peasants displaced by the Colonial government. One example is the Gal Oya scheme in 1952. As a paper published by Jonathan Spencer and Harini Amarasuriya in 2015 said: “[Colombo’s] relatively small size is a result of a post-independence population movement in which the rural poor sought a better future in migration, but rather than migrate to the cities, they moved to less densely populated rural areas in the dry zone of the north and east. Official planning for the first 40 years of the country’s history focused on a vision of rural rather than urban modernity and on the socioeconomic potential of these apparently “empty” areas of the island’s dry zone.”
Under these schemes, residents received a plot of land for cultivation and a house to live in. While the house could be passed to children and family members, the government stipulated that the land could not be sold.
The presence of Sinhala settlers in the Tamil homeland created racial tensions in the area and led to the country’s first racial riots, the Gal Oya riots of 1956. The coupling of land occupation and oppressive reforms such as the Sinhala-only act 1956, standardization of education 1971 and continued pogroms on Tamil people led to a Civil War in 1983. While the conflict ended in 2009, the government continues to occupy and control the land in the area. As a result, cities in the North and the East have neither industrialized nor urbanized yet.
Colombo’s History: United Front, 1970-1977
Before the 1970s, the government provided housing only to civil servants. Examples of this include: Anderson Flats and Bambalapitiya Flats. Under the United Front government in 1971 formed by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and leftist parties like the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and Communist Party (CP), the government introduced a number of policies that tried to radically reform the housing sector.
The Minister of Housing, Pieter Keueneman, inspired by the Self-Help Housing scheme in Cuba called Microbrigade, launched the Aided Self-Help scheme for the poor in Sri Lanka. Here, the government provided land, materials and services and the residents funded or acted as labor to construct the house.
In her recently published book, “Feeling at Home”, Marxist-Feminist, Alva Gotby criticizes landlordism as an exploitative form of profit extraction in the UK. As a solution, she proposes that houses from the private sector are occupied and distributed for public use—in 1970s Ceylon, Keueneman’s reforms did just this. The Condominium Property Act. 12 of 1970 transferred deeds from the hands of landlords to renters. Widespread land reform transferred land in urban and rural areas to the state for public distribution. The Ceiling of House Property Law 1973 limited the number of houses that could be held by a member of a family or an individual and the Land Reform Law 1972 limited the amount of rural land held by an individual. Five years after the introduction of the Ceiling on Housing Property Law; 12,357 out of 17,253 units were shelved under the Commissioner of National Housing. Of these, occupants received freehold land titles for 5,365 units and the rest of the units operated as government-run residential quarters.
A paper by Asha Abeysekera and Vagisha Gunasekera in 2022 argued that the equitable distribution of private land from the rich to the poor laid the basis for Ranasinghe Premadasa’s, much-lauded, housing schemes in the 1980s: “Property ownership was pivotal in motivating the poor to build their own houses. Private property that was acquired by the State at this time was subsequently redistributed to the poor during the Million Housing Programme.”
Colombo’s History: UNP, 1978-1993
In 1977, Sri Lanka elected the center-right UNP and opened up its economy. This hit urban and rural industries such as textile mills and artisan handlooms. Workers migrated en-masse to urban areas or moved to the Middle East in search of jobs.
Urban areas like Colombo became attractive to the rich and the poor. Workers such as farmers and fisherpeople, relocated to find jobs in the informal sector born out of the import-export economy initiated by neoliberal policies. “Colombo central became a beehive for informal sector activity,” Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Colombo, Siri Hettige said. This led to the expansion of squatter settlements, particularly near canals and railroads. Professionals such as doctors, entrepreneurs and academics also moved to the city to access services such as private hospitals and international schools. As a result, the demand for urban property, such as apartments and condominiums, exploded and property prices increased.
Sub-urbanization also started in the 1980s as the urban population grew in Colombo and its surrounding suburbs. Hettige described Colombo’s expansion as the layout of several “concentric circles” that became the Colombo metropolitan region. This included suburbs such as Mount Lavinia and Maharagama and the outer-suburbs in the then-periphery such as Homagama and Negombo.
It is in response to this population boom, that Minister of Housing, Ranasinghe Premadasa introduced his three housing schemes. Unlike Keueneman’s policy of redistribution, Premadasa’s policies acted as part-and-parcel of the country’s development trajectory. He set up key institutions, still in-use today, such as the Urban Development Authority (UDA) in 1978 and the National Housing Development Authority (NHDA) in 1979.
Premadasa’s first project, the Hundred Thousand Housing scheme, was inspired by John Turner’s housing philosophy. Turner, influenced by squatter settlements in South America, developed the idea of ‘self-help’ meaning that residents created a vision for the house and in doing so retained their autonomy over the space.
Abeysekera and Gunasekera’s paper identified some of the main successes and problems in this scheme. The project finished in the targeted time, distributed houses in the chosen areas, defined the state’s role in housing its citizens and spotlighted housing as a political priority. It had its shortcomings. Residents had limited choice about site selection and materials. The highly-centralized bureaucracy led to misallocation and delays. Residents experienced displacement, as their houses were built at a distance from the city and had limited grid connectivity.
Abeysekera and Gunasekera state, the project focused on: “the production of new houses, and therefore the provision of community-related facilities received low priority. Inspections of HTHP projects revealed poorly maintained public wells, unfinished roads, and other inadequate fixtures.”
Building on the lessons from this project, Premadasa expanded his vision for housing. He used his next project, the Million Houses project, to cement his legacy and bid for leadership in the UNP. It came into fruition in the midst of a liquidity crisis, the continued neoliberalization of the economy that forced cuts to social services and the redistribution of funds for the Civil War. Unlike its predecessor funded by the annual budget, this scheme used a mixture of funds such as contributions from international aid, income from a Housing Lottery and a market-based structure of self-financing. When the NHDA calculated the total cost of the houses built or improved on, residents had spent 3-4 times more than expected, for resources and labor. Some of the houses exceeded the state’s expenditure in the Hundred Thousand Houses Programme.
“The government did not provide houses for free. People had access to low-cost housing and low-interest loans which enabled them to build a house and become actively involved in it. The value of the Million Houses methodology is that it had community participation and introduced community contracts, a novelty at that time.” Founder and director of Colombo Urban Lab, Iromi Perera said. As research confirms, residents are motivated to build houses if the state supported rather than provided houses for them.
The in-situ programme provided residents services to support their vision of housing and help them mould their neighbourhoods to their liking. It transformed ad-hoc, make-do settlements into robust, sustainable communities full of solid houses and grid connectivity to taps, toilets, electricity lines and drains. Residents also received permits for the houses they lived in which confirmed their tenure security and helped them access schools, jobs and social protection benefits. Residents also could vote and many of these areas are important vote banks, acting as a litmus test of voter satisfaction or dissatisfaction in elections.
“One of the reasons Colombo is not like any other city in South Asia or the Global South with sprawling slums and shanties is because of projects like the One Million Housing projects. It is unprecedented to have this level of grid connectivity and housing that is permanent, if not for state intervention and the confidence which tenure security provided people to invest their own money and incrementally upgrade over time.” Iromi said.
Based on this model, Premadasa expanded it into the 1.5 million Houses programme that ran from 1990-1995. With the assasination of Premadasa in 1993, his revolutionary housing model ended.
“That is the problem with policies which are associated with certain personalities, rather than the state or an institution. There was no motivation to keep the programme going after Premadasa was killed. What you see subsequently was that there was never any kind of proper attempt to follow through with those methodologies and those techniques in the participatory planning. It has very much been top-down since then,” said lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of York, Asha Abeysekera.
Colombo’s History: People’s Alliance, 1994-2004
Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga’s (CBK) government from 1994-2005 reformulated housing policies to increase private sector involvement and reduce state intervention and resident participation. In the 1980s, the World Bank started to promote urban land liberalization in the Global South. The IMF, in turn, promoted this policy in their structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 1990s that other financial institutions like the ADB relentlessly echoed. While Premadasa’s model had a market-led model, it still prioritized the needs of its residents. This changed under the CBK-led government, as speculative capital came to be prioritized.
“Private capital needs land as a resource. They need coastal areas for tourism, farmland for industrial agriculture and urban land for upscale development. Poor people, be it farmers, fishermen and the urban poor, lived on this land. They had to be removed from it to fulfil the needs of private capital,” land rights activist, Sandun Thudugala said.
In 1998, the Presidential Task Force on Housing and Urban Development initiated market-based redevelopment and relocation schemes to meet the demands for housing. They set up Real Estate Exchange Limited (REEL) to oversee development and the Sustainable Township Program (STP) to relocate families that had no deeds to clear up the land. As Sandun explained: “the state became an arm of private capital [in this era].”
One of the key projects of this time was the Sahaspura Housing Complex. This initiated the model of relocating residents from robust neighbourhoods to vertical apartments—a defining feature of the highly criticized URP. A study in 2013 described the translation of problems such as vandalism, substance abuse and organized crime in settlements into apartments. The schemes also failed to maintain and clean facilities such as lifts.
“With Sahaspura, people received the apartments for free, could access play-areas and had space for shops in 2-3 different sizes. But, it also failed to consider dispossession and the importance of location for livelihood into consideration,” Iromi said. “It was not the URP model where everything was small and uniform across the building. But, it instituted a built environment which is not conducive to informality or irregular income.”
Nevertheless, a model that suited the needs of speculative capital—that put profit before people—had been instituted and this evolved into the de-facto model of social housing under the Mahinda Rajapaksa presidency.
Colombo’s History: Urban Regeneration Project (URP)
The URP, made up one component of the Rajapaksa’s vision for a World Class City, initiated to signal the end of the Civil War and the start of urban regeneration. The model included a dual process of beautification and dispossession led by the military. From 2010-2014, the UDA came under the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, and the military could be seen in renovation projects and in forced evictions. As Jonathan Spencer and Harini Amarasuriya said in a paper published in 2015: “we try to capture the temporal properties of a particular moment in the history of the city when speculative capital and military force combined in an attempt to bypass the well-worn channels of urban politics.”
Walls and fences around the city disappeared to create the illusion of openness. The state either demolished abandoned buildings or renovated them into malls like Independence Arcade. Military lands that currently house Shangri-La and the ITC were sold. Street stalls from pedestrian spaces disappeared. In a nutshell, the government cleaned up the city’s disarray and disorder.
The government also demolished entire communities in areas such as Kompanya Veediya in Colombo 2. As Nira Wickramasinghe, in her book, “Sri Lanka in the Modern Age”, said: “The issue is unfortunately not only about imposing a nostalgia-infused aesthetic but also ridding the city of a certain class of citizens that do not fit in with its new image.” The URP dispossessed poor people to clear up land for luxury condominiums and mixed developments. As Iromi said in a local paper, the state’s policy focused on a “slum-free Colombo, not a poverty-free Colombo.”
The URP had three phases: Phase I, II and III. These projects have been costly to the state, taxpayers and relocated residents. The funding for Phase I came from the state, public debenture in the local capital market and loans. It operated on the assumption that land liberalized for private development could be sold and used to finance the URP. But, this did not pan out as predicted. Much of the liberated land is still vacant. As the “Built on Sand” report noted, the state’s investment, initial debenture and loans in Phase I had cost the country over USD 700 billion since 2012.
The beneficiaries of these apartments have to pay monthly fees to receive a deed, no matter the status of the land previously. Shanthi De Silva, 60, believes that the URP model increases rather than decreases poverty. In the past, she lived next to the railroads and found utilities to be affordable. They did not have monthly payments or utility bills. “We pay UDA fees here. They seized our land and built these apartments for us in exchange. Why do we have to pay fees?” she asked. In July 2024, under the Urumaya programme, former President Ranil Wickremesinghe handed out over 1000 deeds claiming to be freehold deeds to the apartments, but as Colombo Urban Lab noted, these deeds appeared to be a symbolic gesture rather than legitimate rights for residents.
Forced evictions of residents by the military is also a defining feature of the URP. A resident from a study revealed they had no use for the money provided for relocation. They already had an income of LKR 200,000-300,000 per month and a daughter based overseas. “This is my home. I am not leaving,” he said. The Colombo Urban Lab described the evictions as sudden and ad-hoc. UDA officials started spraying numbers or pasting stickers on residents’ properties, and left them in limbo. They received documents but did not have time to read them or consult a professional. Many of these documents did not have a translation into the local languages of Sinhala or Tamil.
A resident mother from a study said the authorities started demolishing her house once her husband left for his job in the morning. When he returned, they asked for two extra days to move, but the authorities refused: “I was very cross and yelled at the officer who came with the removal order. My youngest son who was only a few months old at the time was covered in dust.”
Many of the victims of the URP model were beneficiaries of Premadasa’s projects. The URP model destroyed the ecosystem of life, labor and love that they had built.
“People came from wattes or settlements in which they had lived together for generations, seeing each other's houses and families grow over time. A windfall, a bonus, or a promotion meant a new coat of paint, new furniture, and savings towards renovations or additions to the house. People can trace lifetimes of hard work and aspiration even in the physical construction of their homes, which have been built incrementally, sometimes over generations,” an essay featuring researchers, Abeysekera and Perera stated.
Generations of families lived in one house so the policy of one unit per household did not translate into practice. As research confirms, only the poorest of underserved settlements experienced better housing. Others had multi-storied houses which housed modern toilets and multiple rooms for domestic activities, and the apartments did not meet their standard of living.
Many of the apartments stood kilometers from the resident’s original place of residence. Many of them had jobs in the area, close to the area or relied on support from neighbours and friends from the area. This is particularly the case for child and elder care.
The houses, from Phase I in particular, had sub-par facilities like toilets and drainage. A resident from a study said: “Within six months of our coming here, the toilets overflowed…Sewage water from all the housing complexes [..] is brought to one pit close to our complex. Obviously the pit lacks capacity to keep sewage water from such a lot of houses. We have a drainage pit right in front of our house. That too overflows.”
The URP had no social spaces such as common rooms, clubs, prayer rooms or open spaces for people to socialize in. Experts like Mohideen believe that the anti-social structure of the houses could lead to social unrest in the future: “The architecture focuses on the building but they do not focus on social life. If there is no social life, there are no model citizens for the future.”
Wattes have a social fabric entrenched in it. Women, in high-rise apartments, have to dry clothes in small balconies to prevent theft. In the past, they interacted outside their houses, be it, sitting on porches, cleaning the road or participating in festivals. This facilitated the sharing of domestic and care labor as residents relied on each other to keep an eye on laundry or share childcare and eldercare duties. The communalization of domestic labor as proposed by Marxist-Feminist thinkers like Alexandra Kollontai, Silvia Frederici and Angela Davis, is a cornerstone of feminist liberation.
Wattes also have local societies for youth, sports and cultural activities. As the vertical nature of an apartment is inconducive to social relations these societies have not been transported into the apartment complexes. As Kamal, 41, a tuk-tuk driver from Laksanda Flats told me: “It is hard to maintain the community center or social interactions because the flats are divided into blocks and floors. Residents rarely gather socially. We had a society back in 2018 and mostly raised money (LKR 100 per family each month) for communal purposes, like funeral costs and painting public spaces. The lack of participation led to the collections reducing and eventually the society died out.”
Phase III of the URP is on-going. Colombo Urban Lab identified a number of problems, such as: contracts issued without calls for competitive bids first, money overspent on opening ceremonies, delayed payments for contractors leading to additional interest payments, underestimated lease payments and delays in construction and procurement.
Vertical Slums in Times of Crisis
The incompatibility of urban poor and the URP model have been displayed in the three crises that engulfed the country in the past years: the pandemic, the economic crisis and IMF-stipulated austerity.
Rajendra Dilshan (27) and his family moved from Madampitiya to Henamulla Urban Housing Scheme. During the pandemic, the flats felt like a prison because his partner, baby and aging mother, were all cooped up in a single unit. Like Rajendra, Maha Lakshmi relocated to the same housing complex. She complained of domestic violence during the pandemic. “Women could not escape their tiny flats. We also had no access to food.”
Right after the pandemic ended, the economic crisis started in 2022. The country experienced serious shortages of essentials like gas, fuel and medicine. The prices of staple foods skyrocketed overnight. Nadeeka, 34, a stay-at-home mother, from Sahaspura Flat spoke about her husband’s sugar levels spiking and having to choose between his insulin or their electricity bill.
Then came austerity. This includes the introduction of the Value Added Tax (VAT) to boost revenue, removal of subsidies and utility price hikes. A World Bank report in 2024 noted that poverty had increased from 11.3 percent in 2019 to 25.9 percent in 2023. Women’s lives, in particular, have been impacted and have led to job and food insecurity.
Some of the problems residents face in the midst of the crisis have accumulated and intensified. The pandemic, for instance, led to the utility bills crisis. During this period, residents could not leave their house even for jobs and they did not have to pay their utility bills. But, once the country opened up, they received bills for payments that had accumulated over time. Many of the residents had lost their jobs and had already tapped into their savings to afford basic needs. During the economic crisis in 2022, the electricity tariff hikes of 75% piled onto bills that had already doubled or tripled. Water disconnection notices appeared on community boards as a threat. Water is, in fact, disconnected for the non-payment of other utilities. The Colombo Urban Lab labelled this: the “weaponization of the grid”.
“With the URP, the UDA has a lot of control over the tenants. In a watte, no one will cut off the water because the electricity has not been paid. In the URP, this is what the UDA does in the flats—whether it's non-payment of electricity or housing payments, they cut off the water connection—the UDA has control over all resources. This is the reason we call it ‘weaponization of the grid’, where they are forcing people to make payments, even if they can’t afford it. It is a really unfair way of doing things but people are hostage to this situation,” Iromi said.
The URP model traps people in poverty. But, it appears to have become the de-facto model for social housing. In 2024, the recently elected NPP government proposed the URP model of high-rise apartments, as a solution to the housing demands of the Malaiyaha Tamil community.
Women from this community are part of the tea industry, one of Sri Lanka’s major sources of export. In times of crisis like the pandemic and the economic crisis, the money from this industry acted as one of the only sources of foreign exchange into the country. Research proves that resettlement in a house outside of the plantations leads to social mobility, but resettlement from a line-room into a vertical apartment is likely to entrench them further in poverty. After a number of collectives and activists criticized the solution, the government eventually abandoned it.
Future
Keuneman-era reforms and Premadasa-era reforms made housing easier to access. These reforms transformed the material conditions of beneficiaries, aided in their social mobility and made them active citizens. In comparison, models introduced by the Rajapaksas such as the URP-model are a recipe-for-disaster. It rolled back the strides communities made over decades in and for the city, and situated them in vertical slums outside the city. The prioritization of speculative finance, the key rationale behind their dispossession, have had limited returns and have added to the country’s external debt burden—there is next to no return for the government, the city of Colombo and taxpayers across the island. The model’s vulnerability in times of crisis like the pandemic, the economic crisis and austerity are only a start as future crises hit the city. The model, that concentrates dissatisfaction and unrest from one level to the next until it is stacked vertically, is likely to destabilize the city’s social cohesion and political stability.
The state has three factors to consider. The first is land value. The Land Valuation Indicator noted a 9.9 percent increase in residential land value in Colombo in 2024. A private company spent LKR 4.5 billion on a property—the largest land transaction in the city’s history to build luxury apartments. A study in 2020 looked at housing affordability in 211 cities in 27 developing countries in Asia and concluded that housing is too costly for the majority of citizens in urban areas. Workers across East Asia, for example, have squeezed into subdivided units like the Coffin Homes of Hong Kong and Goshitels in South Korea. Will this be the fate of the poor in Colombo too?
The second is overpopulation. The recently released Census for Population and Housing 2024 cited Western Province as the most densely populated province, accounting for 28.1 percent of the total population. Colombo and Gampaha district had the most people, amounting to almost 5 million. As Mohideen observed: “We need to control in-migration to Colombo. In the census released in 2024, around 20 percent of internal migrants end their journey in Colombo. Without controlling this movement, we cannot control the housing issues in the city.”
The third factor is climate risks. Colombo is at risk of extreme heat, air pollution and extreme flooding.
Local think-tanks, like Advocata Institute, portend to have solutions. In a report released in 2024, they recommended: the end of state intervention into housing and the need to create an environment for private enterprises, the removal of Keueneman-era reform because it limited housing supply and the availability of loans for the urban poor.
“Housing forms one of the most important assets for households and is also a major motivation for saving. The lack of alternative sources of savings in the economy increases the demand for housing as a store of wealth and enables households to borrow against that collateral to develop their income earning potential.” the report also said.
Who is this recommendation meant to benefit? If enacted, it transforms housing from an entitlement into an asset.
Those that already have investments in housing, are the first to benefit, as they have the capital to purchase more houses and hike prices for sales. Over time, inequality is likely to increase as rich investors accumulate properties at the expense of everyone else, including the middle classes. At the moment, households across the island are in severe debt—urban households are in-debt for basic consumption needs like food. Workers, as a result, have a limited capacity to finance debts and are at major risk of foreclosure.
This recommendation could also transform the interests of the state to serve the interests of only investors and remove any facade of benevolence. In a scenario such as this, the state could abandon the promise to provide alternate houses to citizens dispossessed of their lands from projects like the URP and shift the responsibility of replacement housing on to individuals.
George Bush promoted this very recommendation to help every American access to a house and created a housing bubble. In 2008, the bubble burst and led to foreclosures, bankruptcy and homelessness. Housing speculation is already in play and this has inflated land prices and rent in urban areas like Colombo. Working class and middle class people have already been pushed to the periphery of the city and have long commutes to the city center. If credit tightens or the economy declines, this bubble could explode. Workers, in the informal sector, are likely to be hit the first and the hardest because of austerity, poor incomes and limited social protection. A dire situation like this could also consume people’s savings, empty bank balance sheets and kickstart a recession.
Advocata needs to study the 2008 financial crisis carefully before recommending failed solutions to a vulnerable and precarious economy like Sri Lanka’s.
Workers are the lifeblood of Colombo. They plant, transport and cook food. They construct buildings, roads and parks. They clean houses, schools and offices. They fix electricity and phone lines. They drive trains, buses and tuk-tuks. But, they also play an important political role. They are part of trade unions and social movements—they protested to save retirement funds in 2011, participated en-masse in the protests in 2022 (particularly on May 9 as they rushed to save protestors from state-sponsored violence) and voted in elections for a better future in 2024. Without their presence, labor and political backing, the city loses its soul.
It is here that Premadasa’s vision comes into play—his schemes trusted citizens and decentralized urban planning and decision-making into their hands. In 2024, residents of Colombo's Kompanya Veediya, made a manifesto called “Colombo is Our Home: (Re)Imagining Colombo as Utopia”, envisioning the city around a: healthy home, caring community and inclusive city. Their utopia consists of natural light, fresh air, the space for privacy but also the capacity to build healthy relationships and a plot of land to garden. They hoped to socialize in a community library, community hall, sit on public benches and explore parks in a ‘Green City’. Wetlands are a crucial part of Colombo and the city hosts a number of them in the suburbs. Parrots in the sky, monkeys on electricity lines, pelicans on poles and peacocks on roofs are a commonality. The manifesto evokes elements of an urban plan envisioned by Patrick Geddes in the 1920s. Rather than rely on an orientalist’s ‘designs’ for the city, it appears there is a call for it from the residents of the city to marry together nature and urban development to make better lives possible.
This piece was made possible with translation support from Henry Mitchel