Pri's blog

The article in today’s Sunday Times on a recent workshop organized by the Law and Society Trust highlights once again the troubling issue of urban evictions. The most telling sentence in this article  reads  This trend of development tactics that marginalise the urban poor, as noted in the discussion is not challenged, due to the lack of interest by many politicians, the lack of awareness of rights by low-income dwellers but more importantly the apathy of the middle class of Colombo as these changes have minimal adverse effects on their livelihoods  At a subsequent forum on the same issues last week, participants called for stronger involvement of political parties, highlighted the collusion of the World Bank’s Metro Colombo Urban Development Project in the evictions and discussed some good practice examples implemented by the Government of Sri Lanka.  All these ideas are important to take forward, but this blog will focus on the last of these, as it is ...

A couple of days ago some of us were talking about all the changes that were happening in Colombo. As readers of this blog might have noticed, these changes do not happen without some heartache for many of us old residents, though of course the real impact is on those residents who are being displaced or losing their homes and whose voices are not always heard on the likes of this blog.  For them it is much, much worse.  But read more about that here . Our recent conversation was whether the beautification, a component, albeit a small component,  of the Metro Colombo Urban Development Project funded by the World Bank and which is, in essence, a flood control project was being monitored in its implementation, especially its accelerated CHOGM implementation.  We rather cynically observed, that if the new developments had not taken issues of drainage into account, they could result in more flooding, which of course would go contrary to the whole objectives of the p...

Here as promised a gist of what I said at the 6th South Asian Economic Summit's Managing Urbanisation Inclusively   session... The background to the session seemed to suggest that being ‘inclusive’  is about the rural-urban gap, looking at ways in which the rural labourers, left out of the growth that is being generated by the cities, are able to benefit from that growth.   The result of this is a labour force which remains predominantly agricultural and rural, while a small proportion of the population – that which is urban and more highly-skilled  enjoys the benefits of growth and integration with the global economy. What I wanted to point out in this session was that growth within cities is not equal either.  If one begins to talk economics as if people mattered, then one would see that urban development is beginning to transform city space, and relationships between people living in the city, in ways  that privilege some city dwellers an...