For over a decade, Sri Lanka's Urban Development Authority's Urban Regeneration Project has reshaped Colombo’s fabric. As the third phase of the project draws to a close next year, there is a new window of opportunity for a new government to review and change course, to create and implement evidence-based housing policy. Apart from the widely cited critiques of autocratic leadership, poor governance and military force leveled against the project, the genesis of its failure lies in a set of assumptions, mostly about the nature of the urban poor. An interrogation of these assumptions shows that they have not been based on evidence or fact, thus placing the whole project on shaky foundations. 

What fruits and vegetables do working class poor communities consume? What are the drivers behind the choices they make and how do they experience their food environment? Since July 2023, we have been researching these questions in Colombo and Deniyaya. The nutritional landscape of Sri Lanka’s working-class poor is complex, shaped by institutional and systemic challenges that go beyond lack of income or limited access to fresh produce. Real change requires addressing multiple competing costs, conducting inclusive discussions, educating communities on affordable meal preparation, and even reforming land rights policies to enable self-sustained food production.

Development projects, especially those that include housing and public spaces, must mainstream the idea of social infrastructure. Going beyond its physical manifestations like parks or even community centres and look at the social needs of a community, drawing from aspects such as community dynamics that are crucial for creating liveable spaces that contribute to higher levels of social cohesion, and improving the overall well-being of communities.

Colombo Urban Lab's latest report "Built on Sand: A Review of Colombo’s Urban Regeneration Project" does a deep dive into one of Sri Lanka's key post-war infrastructure projects - the Urban Regeneration Project by the Urban Development Authority. This report covers the dispossession and lived realities of the relocated communities in the high-rises, looks at the financing of the URP - including findings of Auditor General's reports, reports from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and other publicly available material, and the status of the 'liberated' lands in Colombo today.

In July 2024, the Colombo Urban Lab team embarked on a series of exploratory sessions in Colombo to reflect on public spaces in the city. Starting at Independence Square, we took routes that went through major public spaces that we recognised as being synonymous with many people’s lives in Colombo. From Viharamahadevi Park to Race Course Mall, we looked at the purpose of each of these public spaces, and how they are used today. These are some of our reflections on what we felt, saw, and heard.

Colombo Urban Lab’s fourth policy brief on the impact of Sri Lanka’s economic crisis on the city's working class poor communities focusses on energy, education and health. These findings are from our ongoing qualitative research with communities in Colombo as well as a household survey conducted in April 2024 with thirty households in a settlement in North Colombo.

Mapping food vendors is an important method to capture availability, accessibility and diversity of food environments. This report details the methodology used to map food vendors in urban sites and explores the reasons behind the development of this methodology. It provides practical insights into the implementation of field-based vendor mapping, discussing both the challenges encountered and the lessons learned.

This infographic provides an overview of the sustainability of neighbourhoods in Colombo. A total of 1,360 settlements in the Colombo Municipality were surveyed in 2023, using 27 indicators for physical infrastructure, tenure and socio-economic conditions, to assess sustainability of neighbourhoods. The findings showed that settlements cannot be characterised as underserved settlements as they have adequate infrastructure provisioning.

On the 7th of March 2024, Centre for a Smart Future and Colombo Urban Lab hosted an event called, “Communicating Crisis”. The event featured a panel discussion on Sri Lanka’s path to a just recovery, anchored to key questions. How do economic indicators compare with people’s lived experiences? How can civil society and the media amplify voices from the ground?

While data and numbers offer helpful insights, the picture it paints is almost always incomplete without an understanding of how those numbers were arrived at—how data is collected, and the sensitivities that enumerators need to be mindful of when conducting large scale surveys. Understanding the methodology of conducting such surveys add an important realistic dimension to policies that are solely data-driven.

This infographic provides an overview of settlements in the City of Colombo. The map shows the distribution of settlements in Colombo, with the most number of settlements concentrated in Colombo North. The data shows that most settlements have upgraded on-site, and that compared to other cities in the Global South, Colombo’s settlements are smaller and fragmented, with no trend of sprawling slums and shanties to be found.

How we talk about the urban poor is situated in a broader context of urban development and competing ideas of what Colombo should and will look like, and such words sanction the exclusion of the urban poor from the city.  It is crucial that our terminology reflects the complexity of ground level realities, particularly when Sri Lanka’s difference is erased and subsumed by other South Asian narratives.