Environment and Planning A 2008, volume 40, pages 57 ^ 73
doi:10.1068/a3987
The planners' city: the construction of a town planning perception of Colombo Nihal Perera
Department of Urban Planning, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47304, USA; e-mail: nperera@bsu.edu Received 10 March 2006; in revised form 6 November 2006
Abstract. The cities that administrators administer, planners plan, and scholars examine are perceptions that represent the absolute city `that is out there'. This paper narrates how a new perception of the city based on British town planning, modified within the Empire, was established in Colombo, the former capital of Sri Lanka. It focuses on the interpretation and representation of physical realities in Colombo using the norms imported through the Housing Ordinance of 1915 and later the town planning discourse. The ordinance problematized the living environments of the poor residents, requiring solutions that were not available in Colombo. Instead of solving these, the colonial/imperial planner Patrick Geddes, and the others who followed him, carried town planning to Colombo and kept rewriting its history. The new perception of the city focused the attention of the authorities on a capitalist city, which was lain over the colonial city, marginalizing the poor. In this way the colonial planners taught the Ceylonese urban authorities and planners how to perceive and act on the city from a town planning vantage point. The discourse was not directly imposed or imported, but negotiated between many agencies including the (British) municipal authorities of Colombo, the colonial government, colonial/imperial planners, the newspapers, and other stakeholders. Many changes to this perception were introduced in Sri Lanka after independence, but they do not represent any substantial cultural questioning of this discourse. This is the contribution of this study.
Colombo, the former capital of Sri Lanka (Ceylon before 1972), is principally a colonial product. From the early 16th century it had been the capital of colonial Ceylon under the Portuguese, Dutch, and British for four centuries.(1) It was built and restructured according to contemporary European urban norms and standards. The colonial community also evolved with this colonial port city, both changing it and adapting to it. Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, the Housing Ordinance of 1915 introduced a new problem in Colombo: the municipal authorities began to view low-income neighborhoods as problems, as environments infested by urban problems such as `bad housing' and `overcrowding' (Perera, 2005). In this paper I will demonstrate that the transformation which began with problematizing poor neighborhoods led to the construction of a new perception of the city based on a town planning discourse developed in Britain and the Empire. Town planning was not the only alternative, but the historical outcome of a series of negotiations highlighted in the following pages. In this paper I use town planning to separate the discourse by that name developed in Britain and modified in the coloniesรถcreating a third discourseรถfrom other types of building, organization, and definition of space carried out by the colonial authorities and the indigenes. Also, by `perception' I refer to an observer's mental image of the city, including its social and cultural construction, differentiating it from the conception of new spaces or plans for a city and spatial practices which transform existing spaces to accommodate social and cultural processes. This is an adaptation of Henri Lefebvre's triad (see Perera, 1998). (1) For the broader context of this argument see Perera (1998). In regard to Colombo see Brohier (1984), Dharmasena (1980), Hulugalle (1965).
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Understanding the city is central to the practice of urban planning and management. Yet, the city that each person talks about, functions within, and acts upon is a representation. A re-presentation is neither an authentic copy of the original, nor a natural depiction of th `absolute' city, `the one that is out there'. The city is known, managed, and transformed through images and statements which together create the larger discourse. The city begins to make sense to the observer and takes its material form through individualized cognitive frameworks of the culture, with its own baggage including the premises, assumptions, biases, beliefs, interpretations, and narratives. Seymour Mandelbaum (1985) argues that cities are not (given) systems, but mental constructs; people designate particular systems as cities. As a person talks about the city, so she or he creates and shapes it on her or his own terms. Hence, the city is not one. ``the discursivity of the city is indelibly multiple and heterogeneous, and the discursive regimes across which the city has been constituted do not coincide'' (Tagg, 1996, page 180). It differs from one observer to the next, depending on the time and place from which it is observed, the worldview within which it is perceived, the knowledge applied, and the language employed to build it. In John Tagg's words (1996, page 180, emphasis in the original): ``we might note the languages in which the city is taken to be knownรถthe languages of economics, sociology, statistics, surveys, case studies, demographics, cartography, photography, `empirical documentation': languages not only for describing the city, but languages of the city; languages that emerged with the city in the nineteenth century and through which the city emerged; languages embedded in the techniques and technologies of disciplinarity, ... and in which the city and its flows were constituted as knowable, graspable, harnessable and controllable.'' Although they may be well informed, the administrators', planners', and scholars' cities are also perceptions constructed through the identification and definition of particular social structures, processes, and their territory as urban. In regard to planning education, Susan Fainstein (2005) argues that the distinction between urban theory and planning theory is not intellectually viable. In contrast to general observers, including those who live in cities, and most scholars, the administrators' and planners' cities (perceptions) are strongly influenced by urban conceptions. They tend to have a notion of what a `good' city is, and that influences how they perceive the city. Patsy Healey (2003) highlights that concepts such as `good' and `just' are also constructed. Although they apply informed views, the city authorities and planners do not have privileged vantage points. Highlighting the potential gaps and incongruences between the planners' conceptions and the lived city, Robert Beauregard (1993, page 7) stresses that, ``If the discourse is not credible, then the practical advice is likely to be ignored or viewed with great skepticism.'' An attempt to bring perceived, conceived, and lived cities closer together is evident in the recent interest in planning `as storytelling' (Forester, 1999; LeBaron, 2002; Sandercock, 2004). Despite the apparent coherence between the absolute city and its images, there are intellectual gaps between the representations and the represented. The correlation between these is constructed through various interpretations. Models are significant building blocks of urban perceptions. Tropes are representations of the `physical' city that constitute the way in which observers understand and explain it. The construction and institutionalization of these is what E W Burgess and his colleagues undertook in the 1920s by making a concentric zone diagram symbolizing an abstract microscopic view of urban succession. Approaching from a different (second) angle, scholars of urban political economy consider that a society is made up of social classes, and the conflict between these defines the particular class society. The city is the stage upon which opposite classes clash and enact the class struggle. This is a synecdoche which
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presupposes a totality for the part. Taking a third approach, many cultural studies scholars attempt an ironic distancing from the project of science and the trope of synecdoche, both of which take a metaphoric, objective/scientific mode of description (for a broader discussion see Duncan, 1996). Land-use and zoning maps that planners prepare are also re-presentations of the city built through abstract categories of land uses and zones; while land-use maps are more of a perception, zoning maps are a conception. Each of these models attempts to provide a representation as close as possible to the absolute city from its perspective. The hegemonizing of selected representations involves social power, the capacity of some subjects to intervene in a given situation, to impose their will on others by the potential or actual use of violence, and to transform them (Castells, 1989; Giddens, 1987). John Logan and Harvey Molotch (1987) demonstrate the power of the `growth discourse' in the USA, particularly how `city leaders' have depicted growth as development and privileged exchange value over use value. The members of `growth coalitions' who have turned cities into `growth machines' have portrayed themselves as genuine promoters of development and a higher quality of living for average citizens. In her investigation of the meaning of gated communities, Setha Low (2003, page 116) highlights the power of fear of crime: ``even with a 27 percent decline in violent crime rates [in New York city] between 1993 and 1998, there was only a modest reduction in fear and worry.'' It is thus important to investigate the social power involved in the construction and hegemonizing of selected urban perceptions, representations, and discourses, which marginalize others. In ``Exporting planning'', Anthony D King (1980) argues that modern planning in postcolonial states is a European product and that colonialism was the vehicle of transfer. I build on this argument, but investigate the development in the 1910s and 1920s of a new perception of Colombo based on a town-planning discourse developed in Britain. Making a more grounded, place-specific study, I shift the vantage point of inquiry to Colombo. As Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait (2003) highlight, the transfer of planning ideas is complex. Diversifying the agencies involved and the colonizer and the colonized binary, this study examines the voices of the intermediaries. They include the (British) municipal authorities of Colombo, the colonial government, colonial/imperial planners, the newspapers, and the Ceylonese elites. Although the new development in Colombo was an instance when understandings that were developed in Britain and the Empire became hegemonized over the prevalent colonial and elite understandings of the city, the British views were not directly imposed on Ceylon. The paper investigates the process of negotiation between the above actors. The study is situated in the area of colonial/postcolonial urbanism. Building on early studies which engage in social and cultural analysis (for example, McGee, 1971; Redfield and Singer, 1954) and approaching from a number of theoretical perspectives, scholars of colonial urbanism have, from the mid-1970s, begun to expose the political and social power involved in the historical construction of social space and the connections between colonial policies and spatial subjectivity (Al-Sayyad, 1992; Crinson, 1996; Home, 1997; King, 1976; 1990; Kusno, 2000; Metcalf, 1989; Mitchell, 1991; Rabinow, 1989; Ross and Telkamp, 1985; Saueressig-Schreuder, 1986; Wright, 1991). Scholars have not only exposed the Euro-American vantage point that most studies in colonial and postcolonial urbanism have adopted, but also attempted to acknowledge agency of the indigenes (see Berking et al, 2006; Bishop et al, 2003; Goh, 2002; Hershkovitz, 1993; Hosagrahar, 2005; Nasr and Volait, 2003; Perera, 2002; Yeoh, 1996; Zhang, 2001). Contributing to this developing field of study, I approach the issue from a social production of space standpoint and a Ceylonese vantage point.
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From urban problems to town planning The living environments of the urban poor that the Colombo municipality identified as problems in the 1910s and the basic conditions and information it used to make this `discovery' existed by the end of the 19th century. The agency that developed this perception, the Colombo Municipal Council, had been established in 1865. The demolition of the fort walls in 1869 had eliminated the physical containment of the growth of larger British and Lankan settlements into each others' areas. The expansion of British colonial engagement in the city from the original colonial fort area to a larger municipal area in the 1860s to 1880s had brought the areas that were later viewed as problems under the direct purview of city authorities. The collection of census data across the Empire from the 1870s had made the quantitative data necessary for the identification and measurement of these problems available. As I have argued elsewhere (Perera, 2005), it was the Housing Ordinance of 1915 which provided the framework within which to identify the residential environments of the poor as problems (Government of Ceylon, 1915). This gave rise to a new class-based view of Colombo in which low-income areas began to be seen as problems. Urban problems were not new to Colombo. Before 1910, however, the municipality focused on public health and engineering and not on overcrowding and physical responses to social problems. It was reactive, responding to what it identified as problems. In the 1910s it was a norm, or a conception, of a good city that provided a new perception of the city. The definitions, particularly of `inhabited room', `habitable room', and `public building', were based on the British Municipal Councils Ordinance, Number 6 of 1910 (Ceylon Observer 1915). The ordinance required that every inhabited room receive a minimum amount of light and air: to have a minimum floor space of 36 square feet and 136 cubic feet of air space per person and not to exceed 50 persons to the acre. The new vision is evident in the language the authorities used: the problems of poverty, disease, overcrowding, bad housing, and the absence of sanitation. The attention had shifted to the low-income population, particularly to how bad were their housing and living environments. In 1916, less than a year after the enactment of the ordinance, the Kochchikade area, near the harbor, was declared insanitary under the ordinance (figure 1). In this way the municipality employed its new discovery as a fact and made it necessary for it to intervene. Kochchikade and other low-income areas were thus made visible through this discourse, but simply to make them invisible. The incompatibility of the ordinance with the extant institutional and legal frameworks within which it was expected to take effect soon became evident. Prior to the enactment of the ordinance, a committee appointed by the municipality to look at incompatibilities opted to respect the principles of the bill, based on the UK ordinance (Ceylon Observer 1915). Contradicting its own complaints about overcrowding, for example, the committee reduced the overcrowding standards that the municipality had been trying to enforce. Later, in 1920, the chairman of the Board of Improvements observed that, ``with its numerous amendments [the ordinance] is not an effective instrument. It needs revision, if not re-modelling. ... [Otherwise] the Board will reach a legal impasse at every hand's turn as it and the Municipal Council already know by experience'' (Municipality of Colombo, 1923, page 18). Yet, instead of adapting the ordinance to ground conditions (the lived spaces), the authorities opted for two alternative courses of action. First, the municipality began amending the legal and institutional infrastructure to suit it. It borrowed other laws such as the Land Acquisition Ordinance to fulfill the goals of the housing ordinance (Municipality of Colombo, 1926, page 9). Second, the authorities began to see the need for town planning:
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Figure 1. City of Colombo 1911.
``The Housing Ordinance of 1915, by laying down the necessary restrictions on buildings ... has ... seriously hampered building, because the Ordinance is largely negative, preventive value; but is totally incomplete without its logical and necessary corollary, town planning. ... The Public Authority which makes such regulations must lay out the city at the same time'' (Municipality of Colombo, 1923, page 17). As Matthew Edney (1999) argues in regard to cartography, the discourse within which the ordinance lay is a science of domination; it established boundaries and secured norms, treating questionable social conventions as unquestionable social facts. In this way, the municipality opted to perfect the perception introduced by the ordinance by adopting town planning.
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The case for town planning The municipality was ambiguous and hesitant to embrace town planning, especially due to the lack of financial resources. As town planning was new, its potential cost was largely a speculation. Although the voices of the poor are not recorded, the upper strata of the civil society, both the colonial community and the Ceylonese elite, were represented in the debate from 1915 by the two major newspapers, the Ceylon Observer and The Ceylon Daily News (Daily News). The former, which started as a `free' newspaper by the colonial community in 1834, had a history of taking anticolonial positions in the 19th centuryรถunder previous owners. It took the position that the municipality could not afford town planning and should concentrate on the more urgent issue of housing for low-income earners. The Daily News, which was new, owned by the Ceylonese newspaper magnate, D R Wijewardena, stressed the need to introduce town planning. The Housing Ordinance had introduced new urban problems that could not be `solved' within the knowledge that existed in Colombo. Moreover, the ordinance had imported aspects of a perception of the city developed within the town-planning discourse in Britain. These opened the way for town planning to be imported and the case was strong. On his way to India in 1919 colonial town planner H V Lanchester told the press in Colombo that ``the conditions of the city of Colombo are better than those of Indian cities, about three-fourths of which were slums [sic]'' (Daily News 1919a). Yet the Daily News was insistent on the need for planning: ``Colombo seem to have outgrown the Dutch ideal and is developing on a line hitherto unrecognized'' (1919a). The municipal leaders and the newspapers feared the `unrecognized' environments of the poor which had been turned into a problem by the Housing Ordinance. The authorities were determined to refamiliarize these neighborhoods for the colonial community and the Ceylonese elite. The Daily News continued to apply pressure on the government to invite Patrick Geddes, who was in India at that time. It complained about sprawl and the possibility of Matara (72 miles south of Colombo) becoming a suburb of Colombo, as Wellawatta (3 miles south) had just become. It also attacked the lethargy of the government to embrace town planning and insisted that the municipality should engage the services of a town planning expert. Intensifying the discussion, the Daily News (1919b) also advertised a conference on ``the housing question'' held in London. It was looking to London for ideas. These arguments also highlight the fact that the discussion had moved away from the original issue of living conditions of the poor to more comfortable town planning and new ideas from Britain. The municipality was uncertain about its ability to afford town planning. Asking where to begin, the Chairman of the Municipal Council, T Reid (October 1919 ^ July 1924) wrote in 1920: ``In Colombo, a large percentage of the population live in a state of comparative poverty. The port is an infected port; plague is endemic, and phthisis, enteric, and other serious diseases prevail to an undesirable extent. The standard of health and municipal administration are higher than they are in most Oriental cities; but they are low enough to warrant the application of the truism that one must live before one tries to live well. Applying this rule, it is not apparent that the Board should start on ornamental schemes. It has to deal with the most elementary needs, the crudest necessities of the city life before it can aspire to expensive amenities'' (Municipality of Colombo, 1923, page 16). Going beyond whether to adopt town planning or not, a third group raised the issues of low incomes, high rents, and real estate values; looking beyond the physical environment, it continued to politicize the issue of poverty. The Ceylon Observer
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pointed out that the debate was overlooking the housing issue. In the editorial on 21 January 1920, it highlighted the importance of looking beyond financial difficulties and doing something about the housing problem' (Ceylon Observer 1920a). In this way, it highlighted the significance of housing the poor and kept shifting the responsibility back to the government. It stressed that ``The need for Colombo at the present time is house construction, not beautiful bungalows laid out in picturesque surroundings with a wealth of greenery and scenic beauty. The houses must be cheap, in view of the high cost of living'' (Ceylon Observer 1920b, page 323). The municipality believed that, in the short run, bad houses are better than no houses, a situation that was worsened by the controls introduced by the ordinance. Denham (in Dharmasena, 1980) argues that between 1891 and 1911 the supply of housing in the city as a whole was far from satisfactory and it was worse in the Pettah DistrictรถColombo's wholesale district adjacent to the Fort area and the port. The increase in the number of houses in Pettah was to some extent due to the subdivision of tenements and the inclusion of temporary `sheds' and boutiques in the census reports as housing. Denham projects that from 1880 to 1900 the rents of tenements rose by about 50% while in the next decade (1901 ^ 11) they rose by about 60%. The municipality appealed to large-scale employers to follow the example of plantations in providing housing for their own labor force. Although this did not solve the problem, the public sector responded by building several housing schemes (Dharmasena, 1980). In the meantime, the inhabitants of these neighborhoods were creating their own solutionsรถlived spacesรถto the problem of housing as they saw it. Marginal groups can always read and write different meanings into spaces through creating new spaces as well as redefining existing spaces, making these a part of their ongoing negotiations with authorities and other groups (see Goh, 2002; Holston, 1989; Hosagrahar, 2005; Law, 2002; Perera, 2002; Turner, 1991; Yeoh, 1996; Zhang, 2001). The more immediate response of the low-income people to their housing issue was quite ordinary. As Linda Hershkovitz highlights, in regard to the Tiananmen Square incident, the appropriation of space as a ``platform from which to communicate alternative or oppositional political messages is part of the social process that continually produces and transforms social space. No matter how temporary the appropriation, or how permanently its traces are eradicated, the very fact of its existence, the memories and associations it evokes permanently changes the face of the place in which it occurred'' (1993, page 416). The tenants who found it difficult to pay the increased rents increased the number of residents in the chummery (apartments shared by males in the colonial city). In the case of family dwellings, the residents invited another family to live. This was particularly the case in the docklands area (Denham in Dharmasena, 1980, page 131). The increase in numbers of occupants in existing buildings and increase in the building of self-built housing created a hybrid environment that is not recognizable within the planning discourse built with clean and authentic categories. Reid's report of 1920 questions the municipality's ability to resolve the urban problems: ``The housing problem in the city is the result of lack of land for extension in North and Central Colombo and the growth of population. All classes are short of houses and the inevitable rise in rents has taken place, and will continue, unless the supply of buildings can be made to meet the demand'' (Municipality of Colombo, 1923, page 17). Despite the housing deficit, the municipality continued to impose standards and embraced town planning. Later, in 1927, a municipal report highlighted that the labor was ``becoming more self-conscious and regards higher wages as the panacea of all its ills'' (Municipality of Colombo, 1926, page 9). The social issue of poverty and lack of housing was later taken up by socialists in the 1930s.
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The Geddes proposals The government invited Geddes in 1919 and he arrived in Colombo in 1920. To the surprise of the local authorities and the newspapers, Geddes saw a `successful' city in Colombo: its port was the third largest in the Empire and the fifth largest in the world (Hulugalle, 1965). As is evident in this observation, as a colonial planner who has been working across the Empire including in India, Palestine, Aden, and Cyprus, his context was `global'. Although the ``people largely crowd inward towards the bazaars'' in India, he said, the Ceylonese ``seem to preserve their rural spirit'' (Geddes, 1921, page 6). Yet, none of the these observations would prevent him from planning; his thinking was driven by the urban conception. Most crucially, Geddes helped the municipality to develop a new conception of the city which privileged the capitalist processes and upper classes. According to him, ``the harbour ... must necessarily always be the chief center of commercial life'' and the roads leading to it needed to be opened up (Municipality of Colombo, 1923, page 17). In this way, displacing its original problem concerning the living environments of low-income inhabitants, he drew the attention to the colonial ^ capitalist city, its larger organization, and the political and economic core. The impact of this discourse is evident in Reid's view in 1923: ``[The current] state of affairs does not result merely in traffic congestion and street accidents. It makes it impossible to serve the city properly with public conveyances, such as trams or buses. ... One of the Board's first tasks in solving the housing problem will be the opening up of main arteries of traffic by widening existing routes or by devising new routes ... . If this were done, the housing problem, or at least the bungalow and middle class house problems, would be solved to a large extent very soon'' (Municipality of Colombo, 1923, pages 17 ^ 18). He thus shifted his attention to bungalows, middle-class houses, and arteries. According to the municipal engineer's report of 1924, the opening up of main arteries was vigorously carried out in 1922 ^ 23 and the new Colpetty (Kollupitiya) road was also widened (Municipality of Colombo, 1924). As often noted in the phrase `conservative surgery', (see Meller, 1990), Geddes adopted a cautious approach to changing the extant spatial organizations. In Colombo, he opposed the demolition of housing of the poor in Kochchikade. He warned the board not to follow destructive methods adopted by Indian Improvement Trusts and not to look for immediate profits (Daily News 1920a), but to look for indirect returns in the way of public health (Daily News 1920b). He was more comfortable in co-opting poor neighborhoods into the dominant paradigm through `conservative surgery'. Despite noting that large-scale slum clearance would be harmful, and should not be carried out on too sweeping a scale, Geddes recommended the gradual execution of metropolitan legislation in the colonial city (Hulugalle, 1965, pages 171 ^ 172). The approach was conservative, but the objectives were driven by planning and guided by imported norms. The planning discourse thus could not solve the problem of poor housing conditions, but maintained it in the margins. Geddes's concept was grand and the suggestions were broad. The proposal included the topics of public health, the principal health, the principal slum, Kochchikade, San Sebastian, Queen's House, the new town hall, a public library, Galle Face, Victoria Park, the new art gallery, the horticultural garden, Kelaniya River, and the harbor (Daily News 1920a). There is a section on ``the Principal Slum'', but the discourse was no longer about overcrowding. He further reinforced the colonial perceptions of the city by identifying the colonial areas as beautiful: the colonial residential area of Cinnamon Gardens, the adjoining elite areas, and the railway tracks. Even the railway lines were more familiar to him than the local low-income areas. He continued to stress the
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significance of formal areas and of making the city beautiful, and drew a comprehensive town plan for it (Municipality of Colombo, 1924). In regard to the newspapers, just before the arrival of Geddes, the Daily News encouraged planning and the invitation of Geddes. When the municipality decided to invite Geddes in 1919, the Daily News showed its enthusiasm: it reported that ``it is now decided to appoint'' Geddes as the local town-planning expert and published a report on ``Municipal Enterprise: The Needs of a City'', which highlighted the activities of municipalities in France, Germany, and England (1919c). Representing the Ceylonese elite, the newspaper was looking up to the West. The Ceylon Observer was, however, lukewarm. It argued for the prioritization of the immediate issue of housing and viewed planning as a drain on municipal resources. After his arrival, the newspaper was critical of Geddes for being uninformed about local conditions, particularly that the municipality could not afford big projects within its budget. In regard to his report, it noted that Geddes wrote ``an interesting enough report as predicted ... but it ... contains little of actual practical value'' (Ceylon Observer 1920d). In its editorial ``City beautiful'', the newspaper asked where the money would come from (1920c). Geddes was further criticized for suggesting the purchase of 165 acres for a wet dock in Mutuwal, adjacent to the port (1920e). Experts coming from Britain and the municipality seeking expert opinions were not new in Colombo. Yet, the invitees were not urban planners (of Geddes kind), nor did they have the expertise to intervene inรถor to ignoreรถthe neighborhoods of the poor. They were technical experts who focused on roads, pipes, and telephone lines. In 1898, the well-known London engineer James Mansergh was invited to give advice on insanitary conditions. His focus was on drainage and he developed a water carriage system plan for the city (Ridgeway, 1903). The municipality also carried out some projects in response to various problems; for example, it built the Labugama and Maligakanda reservoirs for drinking water supply, which are still in use, and was also concerned about the electricity supply (Municipality of Colombo, 1920). Town-planning ideas were also discussed before the 1910s. The Municipal Engineer R Skeleton advocated building regulations as early as 1890; in 1897, Chairman W Davidson suggested the Hausmannization of congested parts of the city, and the laying down of building lines in every street, to which all future buildings would be required to conform,(2) in 1898 a Municipal Committee on overcrowding urged the need for greater control over buildings (Municipality of Colombo, 1924). The discussion of overcrowding and Haussmanization indicates that problems and debates somewhat similar to those identified by the municipality in the 1910s existed at the turn of the century but, despite some exceptions such as the 1898 report, the municipality largely responded (reacted) to problems. With the introduction of the Housing Ordinance, the problems were constructed within a framework of a good city, and town planning opted to create a whole new future for the city, but within a town-planning history developed in Britain and the British Empire. Hence, the principal concerns, goals, and objectives of the municipality clearly became different after 1915. In this way Geddes guided the development and urban perception in a new direction. Instead of `theorizing' the local situation, which had been attempted by the authorities, within their colonial third culture, a town-planning `theory' was applied to the situation. Noah Hysler-Rubin (2005) argues that Geddes had a fully developed urban model by the time he had first left for India in 1914. This made the authorities view planning as the panacea of urban ills. (2) Haussmannization refers to a massive transformation carried out in Paris in the mid-19th century.
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Geddes (1921, page 9) was flexible and identified potential incompatibilities: ``garden village principles and methodsรถwhich are already naturally in the tradition of Colombo and Ceylon, and only need a little developmentรถare now distinctly adopted and established, and strictly maintained by the Municipality and Board; and this will, no doubt, require some emendation and strengthening of their present housing by-laws. The British town planning limit of 50 persons to the acre is not as yet easy to apply here.'' In regard to evictions, Geddes (1921, page 37) suggested that the municipality: ``put a stop to the old procedure of destruction before rebuilding, and to proceed to rebuild before we begin to destroy. The law at present claims impartially to defend the life and property of all men; but it is not adequately doing either, until it protects the poorest citizen from eviction from his home, however insanitary or however needed for public purposes, until some reasonable accommodation can be offered him elsewhere. But at present the law operates usually on the other side, and the poor man is evicted accordingly.'' Yet, the power of the discourse is evident in that he too opted to plan the city and even to apply density figures close to those employed by British town planners in order to avoid height and crowding of buildings as in Bombay (Geddes, 1921, page 9). In sum, the issues raised by the introduction of the Housing Ordinance could not be solved within any knowledge possessed by the municipality or the colonial community, let alone by the Ceylonese. The issues belonged to a different imagination of the city and were based on the kind of disorder in the city the authorities saw within the language and the perception provided in the ordinance. Hence, the municipality was compelled to invite someone who knew about these issues, and they opted to invite a town planner who had also developed within the discourse. The planner completed the familiarization of the city within the British colonial discourse. Exporting planning perceptions The language in which the above problems were perceived, codified, and represented was derived from town-planning discourses developed in Britain over the previous half a century. Town-planning ideas and ideology were constructed and developed in a particular location, by particular social groups, within a particular culture, in response to particular conditions รถthat is, the problems caused by the industrial city. Yet, planning was seen as a `science' of making particular decisions, and (Western) science is considered culturally neutral, contextless, abstract, and can, therefore, be generalized. At the same time, but in a different place, the colonial Governor of Nigeria, Lord Lugard (1900 ^ 19), instructed his officers that, whether in the development of material resources or the eradication of disease, ``the British role was to bring to colonies all the so-called gains of civilization by applied science, with as little interference as possible with native customs and modes of thought'' (Lugard, 1919, page 9, in Home, 1983, page 166). As it was produced in the center of the Empire, the town-planning discourse was generalized and exported to colonies, and globalized through colonialism, subordinating any alternative form of knowledge that might have existed in those societies, and erasing most of the diversity created by such discourses. The premise necessary for this exporting is that the world is objectively knowable, and the knowledge so obtained is generalizable and exportable (see Apffel-Marglin, 1996). The generalizable knowledge was viewed as superior to the local knowledge of the colonial authorities in Colombo, which was locally produced and not generalizable. According to Stephen Marglin (1990, page 24), the knowledge system of management in the West is characterized
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``not only by impersonality, by its insistence on logical deduction from self-evident axioms as the only basis of knowledge, but also by its emphasis on analysis, its claim that knowledge must be articulate in order to exist, its pretense to universality, its cerebral nature, its orientation to theory and empirical verification of theory, and its odd mixture of egalitarianism within knowledge community and hierarchical superiority vis-aŠ-vis outsiders.'' Tariq Banuri (1990) argues that the intellectual dominance of the `Western model' derives not from its inherent and unequivocal superiority but, rather, from the political dominance of those who believe in its superiority and who have been able to devote attention and resources to legitimize modernization as Westernization. It was precisely within the metropolitan and colonial discourses that had the least to do with Colombo that the planning discourse in Colombo was constructed. In Ceylon, the British experts saw what they knew: problems similar to those in industrial cities in Britain and an opportunity to plan and provide a future that was proposed in Britain. Instead of the immediate problems of `overcrowding' and the incompatibility of the Housing Ordinance and the ground realities, Geddes emphasized the significance of larger development and beautification of the city. As Edward Said (1978, page 11) argues, ``no production of knowledge ... can ever ignore or disclaim its author's involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances.'' As Dora Epstein (1998) asserts, planners view the city as a threatening other that needs to be made safe rather than focusing on the city's positive and pleasurable associations. At the same time, this discourse created a space for what Leonie Sandercock (1998) calls the heroic planner. Geddes built his ideas and proposals on the same discourse that had caused the municipality to identify certain environments in Colombo as urban and housing problems. In this way the urban debate which began with the Housing Ordinance hegemonized town planning, making it the natural way to understand and discipline Colombo. At this level, despite local negotiations, planning within the Empire was a practice carried out across the boundaries of the colonies. Colonialism was invariably the vehicle by which both the idea and the practice of urban planning were exported to many non-European countries. King (2003, pages 167 ^ 186) argues that ``the reason for the persistence of colonial space and form is to be found in colonial regulation and bylaws and the internationalization of colonial values by planners.'' The export of town planning ordinances was not limited to Ceylon, but was a wide-ranging process that included the Calcutta Improvement Trust Act, the Bombay Town Planning Act, and the Madras Planning Act enacted in 1909, 1915, and 1920. The overlay of the metropole's urban perceptions in colonies through the new town planning discourse is further evident in the extension of similar legislation to Rangoon, Singapore, and Lagos in 1920, 1927, and 1928 (Home, 1990). The issue of the relevance of this British discourse in socially, politically, economically, and culturally different Ceylon was never raised. The housing ordinance, which provided the framework to employ the vital statistics of industrial metropolitan societies as a point of reference to measure the status of health and housing of the Ceylonese population, constructed the city as the threatening other, generating the need to bring the city back to order. There was no one in Colombo who could respond to the problems. It was this need in Colombo and other colonial cities that provided environments for the rise of colonial planners such as Patrick Geddes, Clifford Holliday, and Patrick Abercrombie, and the internationalization of the planning profession across the Empire, but within a town-planning discourse. From a knowledge standpoint, colonial cities were Orientalized through their absorption into the metropolitan discourse of town planning. Bernard Cohen (1996)
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emphasizes that the British believed they could explore and conquer the epistemological space through translation. In regard to planning, too, colonial authorities and experts `translated' urban conditions into knowledge by means of exported ordinances. They employed a combination of, in Cohen's terms, historiographic, observational, survey, enumerative, and investigative modalities in constructing this complex discourse. From the standpoint of Colombo, the planning discourse is premised upon exteriority. Colombo was thus reinterpreted through British middle-class values, making it transparent and known to the West. It is the Orient (the image) which speaks, describes, and renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. This transforms Colombo from a subject to an object within the grand narrative of town planning. Hegemonizing this understanding is more profound than physically building a city by foreign powers; this violates the epistemic structure of the Ceylonese and its colonial administrators. Socially, this perception also promoted the view that there are physical solutions to urban ills and poverty. Within the town-planning discourse, it was not poverty and its causes that were not acceptable, but the way the poor live in their environments and the problems they caused to (middle-class) city life. This is not different to some authorities and planners associating the disorder of the city with uncontrolled female sexuality, which was seen as rectifiable through the controlling of women's access to public urban spaces (see Wirka, 1998). In Colombo it focused on getting rid of the poor housing and neighborhoods by cleansing them through slum clearance programs or by incorporating these into the middle-class city by making them adhere to its norms, which is currently called `gentrification'. This class focus did not eradicate racial differentiation in the colonial city, but a class ideology from Britain was overlain on the more race-conscious colonial urban segregation. In regard to `swimming baths', Geddes highlighted those local practices in which ``people of different races and castes will not bathe together (1921, page 16). Instead of being egalitarian, or focusing on local differences caused by caste and religion, he reinforced racial difference: ``True; even in Europe there are always first and second class baths; and here it is easy to adopt this, with one bath at higher charge marked `Tourists', which Europeans may also frequent'' (page 14). As Said (1978, page 14) points out, a ``specialist argument can work quite effectively to block the larger and ... the more intellectually serious perspective.'' Despite its politics, town planning is presented as technological and aesthetic statements rather than political ones. This was both an alternative to politics and, as Abidin Kusno (2000) put it, a politics of the apolitical. Such ideas were in circulation in Europe in the early 20th century. For example, Le Corbusier believed that good architecture could prevent social revolution. In this way the discourse brushed aside the issue of poverty, which was later picked up by the socialists. This was the opposite of what happened in Britain, where those who were concerned with poverty made significant contributions to the development of planning. In this planning view, there is no room for the places produced by cultural variation (Duncan and Ley, 1997 [1993]). Regardless of the problems, Geddes proposed to develop the `garden city' he saw in Colombo on a much grander scale. His plan was for an area larger than what the municipal boundaries contained, identified as Greater Colombo, beautified by the incorporation of Beira Lake, the banks of which were then used by warehouses. Geddes (1921) thus argued that there is a need for a permanent town-planning office. As this would approach the city from a town-planning perception, in addition to the cities they built the colonials also left their perceptions of these.
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Institutionalizing town planning In proposing a plan for Greater Colombo in the 1920s, Geddes ignored the jurisdiction of the municipal council. The proposal for the development of Greater Colombo created the need for a planning institution with a jurisdiction over a larger area than the municipality. The local authorities became concerned about the possibility of the municipality becoming subjected to a larger regional authority. This made them temporarily detach from the Geddes Plan. Over two decades later in 1947 the colonial government set up a separate department, the Town Planning Department, under its control (see Government of Ceylon, 1946; Kurukulasooriya, 1997). In this way, town planning came to stay in Ceylon. Politicians, town managers, and planners alike viewed this hegemonic discourse apolitically, from a `public good' standpoint. Until the 1970s town planning had shown very little creativity outside of this hegemonic discourse. In 1940, another British expert, Holliday, claimed that a ``quarter of the entire population of Colombo is living in slum areas and another [quarter] in houses under environments which fell below accepted modern standards'' (Hulugalle, 1965, page 172). He also recommended procedures, rules, objectives, and methods within the same discourse of town planning, and these were later incorporated into the Town and Country Planning Ordinance (Number 13) of 1946 (Economic Review 1977). One by one, the heroic imperial planners rewrote the planning history of Ceylon within the town-planning discourse developed in Britain. They followed the colonial `historians' who, one after another, rewrote the Lankan history (see Perera, 1998). The authors of this discourse defamiliarized any indigenous notions of planning and rehistoricized it within the British planning history, absorbing Sri Lanka's future planning into a British planning tradition. This perception of the city was carried on after independence by postcolonial politicians and urban planners. This urban perception did not go unchallenged. The socialists, who organized into a political party (Lanka Sama Samaja Party) in 1935, concentrated on the political aspects of poverty, a loose end within the larger urban discourse. The socialists and (later) communists not only had a political base รถboth electoral and trade unionรถin Colombo, but also actively protested against the so-called slum-clearance programs. Instead, they stood for legitimizing the rights of the `slum dweller', renters' rights, and rent control. With the nationalists gaining power in 1956, the political leaders of Ceylon began to show caution over continuing these colonial urban perceptions. Yet, despite extending sympathy towards the urban poor, the changes in political perceptions after 1956 do not represent any cultural examination of the postcolonial planning perceptions. The dominance of the town-planning discourse is evident in the Mayor V A Sugathadasa submitting in 1956 a plan for slum clearanceรถaccompanied by a housing scheme (Hulugalle, 1965). Raising suspicion over the hitherto hegemonic discourse, in 1962, the Municipal Commissioner reported that ``Despite the number of pronouncements ... shanties are increasing in number. Regulations empowering [their] demolition ... has in practice been an ineffective instrument in solving the problem'' (page 173). Much larger changes were introduced in the 1970s, but they do not represent any cultural questioning of this discourse. Conclusions This is a story of how a planners' city developed within the British town-planning discourse became established and hegemonized in Colombo and Sri Lanka. Town planning was developed in Britain in response to the problems caused by the industrial city and was later modified within the context of the Empire. Yet, in early-20th-century Colombo, it was an imported discourse which largely incorporated local conditions within
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its framework to create a representation of the city. This town-planning perception was never directly imposed by the metropole on the colony. The importing of the perceptionöwith nonstructural adaptationsöwas negotiated between the municipal authorities of Colombo, the colonial government, colonial/imperial planners, the newspapers, and other stakeholders. The Housing Ordinance introduced in 1915 turned the living environments of the poor into problems, making it necessary for the municipality to intervene in these. The debate surrounding this issue led to the invitation of the global ^ colonial planner Geddes who opted to plan the city. Through this process, a town-planning perception of Colombo was developed and institutionalized in Ceylon. Town planning was not simply a way to solve urban ills, but also a way to understand the city and codify its environments within the then developing capitalist perceptions of the industrial city in Britain. This discourse, modified within the empire, was laid over the colonial perceptions in Colombo. Within this perception the city was viewed as a threatening and lacking other that needs some order, discipline, and help. This perception went beyond turning the low-income people into the Other; it marginalized the politics of poverty. What town planning produced in Colombo was an exterioröOrientalistöview which tells the story of the city to the West and the Westernized elite in a way it can and wants to understand it. Beginning with Geddes, the heroic colonial town planners, one by one, updated the discourse, adding what was developed in Britain and within the Empire. Along with it, they taught the Ceylonese authorities and planners how to perceive the city as they did, within a British (colonial) planning history and perspective, absorbing and transforming these Ceylonese and the next generations into subjects within the grand planning narrative. Since cities are tangible repositories of culture that live for a long time, the impact of this discourse has been long lasting. In this way, they reproduced the dependency on the metropole even after political independence. In sum, this process violated the epistemic structure of the locals, most immediately those of the municipal authorities, amounting to epistemic violence. Despite extending sympathy to the urban poor, the changes in political perceptions after 1956 do not represent any cultural questioning of this planning discourse. The planning perception is still dominant in Sri Lanka, and planners continue to look to the West to improve their perception and approach. This is apparent in the recent discussion of sprawl, sustainability, and New Urbanism concepts, which are not locally produced in response to particular conditions. The paper demonstrates that it is the planner's city öa perceptionöthat enables planners to understand, examine, and modify the city, or a part of it. The planners and urban authorities do not have a privileged (value-free) vantage point from which to view the city, nor are their positions superior. The cities that administrators administer, planners plan, and scholars examine are perceptions that represent the absolute city `that is out there'. Many of today's planning-related problems, among successes, are a reflection not so much of lack of planning but of perception: the social, political, and cultural incompatibility of the particular type of planning employed, and the lack of empathy towards the subjects. This is precisely what makes the investigation of planning and other perceptions so important for the understanding of cities. References Al-Sayyad N (Ed.), 1992 Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise (Avebury, Aldershot, Hants) Apffel-Marglin F, 1996, ``Introduction: rationality and the world'', in Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue Eds F Apffel-Marglin, S A Marglin (Clarendon Press, Oxford) pp 1 ^ 39
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