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Colombo: A garden city no more?
View(s):By Dr Sarath Mataraarachchi
Over a century ago, the renowned British town planner Patrick Geddes identified Colombo as the “Garden City of the East”. He recognised Colombo’s unique spatial intelligence and envisioned it as a place where settlement, water, vegetation, climate, and social life work together as an interconnected system. This understanding reflected the city’s urban wisdom and its close bond with nature, both of which boost its resilience and liveability. Even the City of Colombo Development Plan 2022–2031 draws inspiration from Geddes’ Garden City philosophy.
Despite this legacy, Colombo today appears to be drifting away from the very values that once defined it. The broader vision of the garden city has been reduced to a set of generic regulations that ignore ecology, liveability, and long-term sustainability, even contradicting the fundamental concept on which the current Colombo development plan is developed.
Across Colombo, the garden city vision is rapidly diminishing. Once central to the city’s identity and urban layout, the garden now exists more in rhetoric than in actual planning. The push for medium- and high-density development in most parts of the city is often justified as modern, efficient, and growth-driven.
Cities must change, and density isn’t the real issue. The problem is density without climate awareness, ecological balance, or respect for place. What’s emerging is a kind of urban amnesia. Despite claims of building a denser garden city, the reality is a city gradually losing its ecological soul and its capacity to support life with dignity, resilience, and humanity.
From garden city to heat-trapped gridlock
The consequences of this transformation are already unfolding before our eyes. Streets once shaded by trees now radiate oppressive heat from impervious surfaces created by shiny buildings, tarmacs, parking areas, and purposeless paved areas. Natural breezeways that carry cool air through the city are increasingly at risk of being blocked by concrete-and-glass walls, trapping heat and polluted air within the urban fabric. Rainwater that once soaked gently into the ground now rushes across hardened surfaces, overwhelming drains and flooding neighbourhoods. The living landscape that once cooled the city, absorbed water, filtered air, and supported everyday life is being systematically erased and replaced by an urban environment that stores heat, accelerates runoff, intensifies congestion, and disconnects communities. Yet, according to regulations and approvals, everything appears compliant and “successful” on paper.
A true garden city is never about low-density romanticism but is essentially about environmental intelligence. It recognises that cities function best when buildings, water, vegetation, climate, and public life work together as one interconnected system. It preserves porosity, protects wind corridors, sustains shade networks, and respects ecological relationships.
Urban planning reduced to arbitrary regulation
The question that arises is whether urban planning, which should be a moral and strategic duty undertaken for the public good, has increasingly been reduced to a narrow technical task dominated by numbers, formulas, and procedural compliance. Planning is not meant to facilitate private gain at public cost; its true purpose is to protect and advance the public good. What is increasingly visible across the city raises serious concerns about whether planning decisions are being shaped more by discretion, negotiation, and manipulation between applicants and approving authorities camouflaged in compliance than by the plan’s strategic intent.
There seemed to be a clear contradiction at the core of our urban vision. On paper, developments seem perfect. They meet regulations, go through approval processes, and gain support from multiple authorities. But once built, many projects overwhelm streets; block sunlight and airflow; worsen traffic jams; contribute to the urban heat island effect; raise air pollution; strain drainage and infrastructure; and damage neighbourhood character and overall liveability. Has the system shifted focus from critical professional judgement to merely defending compliance?
Perhaps the greatest irony is that, although development control appears to be growing more stringent and bureaucratic, those affected by planning often feel left out. Residents and communities do not see planning as a democratic process conducted with them but as something imposed upon them, which gradually undermines public trust in both institutions and the planning profession itself. Planning is intended to protect people and the environment, but today it is choked by its own grip, undermining the very spirit it is meant to defend.
Pivoting towards a more sustainable planning future
We must move beyond the narrow question of “Does this development comply?” and instead ask, “Does this urban outcome genuinely work for this place, its climate, its infrastructure, and its people?” Planning must shift from fragmented decision-making to integrated thinking, from mechanical regulation to ethical responsibility, and from administrative convenience to long-term urban stewardship.
This requires moving away from the isolated logic of plot-by-plot development towards a broader precinct-based planning approach.
Successful cities are not created through disconnected individual projects but through neighbourhoods planned as integrated systems with shared infrastructure, public space, mobility, ecological networks, and social connectivity. Such a transformation cannot occur behind institutional walls or through opaque negotiations. It demands transparency, public accountability, and meaningful civic participation. Residents, commuters, professionals, businesses, and community leaders must all become part of shaping the city they inhabit.
Cities seldom lose their identity suddenly. They do so gradually, through countless choices that prioritise short-term gains over long-term wisdom, resilience, and the public good. Colombo was once celebrated as the “Garden City of the East” for fostering a rare harmony among nature, settlement, and urban life. The question we must face now is clear but urgent: are we still safeguarding that legacy, or quietly destroying it through our own decisions?
(The writer is a multidisciplinary urban planner, educator, and sustainable urbanism practitioner with over three decades of experience across Sri Lanka, Australia, the Pacific Island countries, and the United Kingdom.)
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