For over a decade, Sri Lanka’s Urban Development Authority’s Urban Regeneration Project has reshaped Colombo’s fabric. The ambitious plan, initiated in 2010, involved relocating the urban poor, numbering roughly 68,000 or 50% of the population to free up 9% of land. While explicitly the brainchild of the then Defence Secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, it continued under the Yahapalanaya government and is currently under its third phase, funded by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). A recent report published by Colombo Urban Lab reviews the project, which has cost over USD 700 million since its inception, arguing that the URP has failed in its objectives. Rather than ushering in a new age of urban renewal and improved standard of living, the URPs expenditure (and debt) has left a legacy of poorer living conditions and precarity for the people it was meant to help.
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.
Assumption 1: Colombo’s poor live illegally on government and private lands, in slums and shanties.
The URP was conceptualised to achieve the goal of a slum-free Colombo, an objective that was popularised in policy documents such as the Mahinda Chinthana, in speeches and media reporting that uncritically parroted assertions about Colombo’s urban poor. There was considerable work done into convincing the public, particularly a voter-base commuting to the city from the suburbs, that the urban poor were living ‘illegally’ on government land. This is despite the fact that the majority of the urban poor reside in upgraded settlements that were created under the Million Houses Programme in the 1980s. This amounted to an exercise in collective amnesia as a highly successful housing project, lauded by international development organisations and seen as an innovative success story, was forgotten. Rather than punish squatters, MHP ran by the logic that people were willing to mobilise resources to invest in houses if they had secure tenure of land. Land regularisation happened with the National Housing Development Authority and Community Development Councils drawing boundaries, blocking out land, surveying – as far as possible it encouraged in situ upgrading rather than relocation. Residents were given leasehold tenure rights over land for 40-30 years. It is estimated that 60-70% of residents in underserved settlements benefitted and gained tenure and upgraded shelter.
Painting urban settlements as illegal and unauthorised was a key strategy in manufacturing consent for mass scale involuntary relocations. By sowing doubt about the tenure status of the urban poor, the state was able to ensure that these evictions were seen as regrettable but legitimate.
Assumption 2: The urban poor will receive better service provisioning, infrastructure and housing in high-rise apartments.
The URP promised facilities and service provisioning that already existed in a majority of settlements. In 2012, 83% of settlements had permanent housing and 97% of settlements had metered electricity. 75% had individually metered water connections (a statistic which in 2023 went up to 97%). Safe in the knowledge that their house would not be torn down, communities and households invested in their houses and neighbourhoods, improving drains, building communal toilets and paving roads.
The second issue with this assumption is that households reported new problems with service provisioning once they moved to high-rise apartments. For example, many reported that the UDA would cut off water connections of households due to non-payment of monthly rental payments as leverage. Households were now trapped in a system where the grid was weaponised against them. In addition, high-rise living requires additional amenities – but these are often absent or inadequate in UDA-run high-rises. Lifts are broken and left unrepaired – in the event of a power-outage there is no generator. Daily tasks such as cooking and laundry become difficult due to design flaws or policing of the building on grounds of aesthetics. Fire extinguishers are often missing or behind a locked compartment. This is to say nothing of the neglect, poor maintenance and other infrastructure issues that have emerged as a consequence of breaking up communities and their social ties.
Assumption 3. The urban poor are residing on commercially lucrative lands which are highly in demand by investors.
The financial model of the URP relied on releasing the land occupied by the urban poor to the private sector. This was the rationale behind the UDA issuing LKR10 billion debentures in 2010 to finance the initial stages of the project. The debentures were backed by the Treasury. Even when communities were relocated and land acquisition finalised, investors failed to rush in. There is no information on whether a commercial assessment of the lands was conducted prior to acquisition. Given the other parallel activities to attract investment in the city at the time, Port City being the obvious example – there was no evidence to suggest a coherent strategy to attract investors to particular lands. While some have been used for infrastructure and real estate projects, many lands are car parks or garbage dumps, while others are simply vacant and fenced off (see Chapter 4 of CUL’s report for more details) .
There was also a misconception that Colombo’s slums were sprawling. Rather, a majority of settlements have fewer than 20 houses and these small fragmented plots of land are often not suitable or desirable for commercial investment. This is especially the case for the minority of settlements residing on canal and railway borders and other land that simply has no commercial value. The sad irony is that the minority of settlements desperate for new housing were not prioritised because they lived on land that nobody wants. It is clear that while the URP disguised a landgrab as a housing project, these investments have failed to generate revenue and justify the cost to the taxpayer.
A renewed vision for housing policy
At a juncture we need to reevaluate the effectiveness of these projects, and why they are not achieving their outcomes. It is also worth examining lessons that were learned from Sri Lanka’s impressive track record of participatory housing. The Million Houses Programme was revolutionary at the time of its implementation 40 years ago, because its assumptions were wildly different. These included the assumptions that people knew what was best for them and that they would live well if they had the resources to do so. In order to deliver these housing outcomes, planners and other experts had to listen to people. This is a far cry from the box ticking consultations practiced by contemporary development advocates, which is more an exercise in informing than including. Importantly, this institutional knowledge can still be found in the older cadre of the NHDA.
The second lesson is thinking about housing as equity instead of development, a distinction made by Abeyasekera and Gunasekera (2023) when comparing Pieter Keuneman’s housing vision with Premadasa’s. This involves freeing our policies from a vague yet seductive notion of development which is about aesthetics rather than improved material conditions. This paradigm has made our cities more unequal, more hostile and more dull as the Global South simply imitates the aesthetic of Dubai or Singapore, ignoring context and vernacular rhythms of life. Reframing housing as equity means respecting tenure security and understanding that people cannot thrive with the constant threat of displacement. This requires treating them as equal members of the city who live and vote and work here and enable its running. This would also enable the relocation of those who actually want better houses and are living in flood-prone or otherwise substandard housing – who are not prioritised because the lands they occupy are too small to be commercially valuable. Furthermore, it leaves ample opportunity for small scale grassroots housing interventions that are climate and context-sensitive.
Lastly there is a need to decouple housing from charismatic leadership, and in this there is a lesson to be learned from the failures of the MHP, which was the explicit political project of Premasada, just as the URP was seen as Gotabaya’s. Housing is political, but leaving it to politicians to drive these projects simply results in myopic and often wasteful efforts that stall after their architects leave their seats of power.
A simple cost-benefit analysis reveals that this model of development has failed to provide adequate and appropriate housing as well as generate revenue. This burden will no doubt be borne by taxpayers in the years to come. The change that needs to occur is not technical but an adjustment of values and the structures that uphold them.
