Colombo’s facelift and the one-way road to Chinatown at Galle Face

by Rajan Philips

The facelift operations in Colombo are impressive. The environmental police, cleanup crews and garbage collectors are keeping the streets clean. Pavement bricklayers and traffic police are busy on Galle Road as long sections of Colombo’s main thoroughfare are being turned into a one-way street and the pavement is being widened in some parts of the roadway. Newspapers are abuzz with the juicier news of land deals and glitzy development projects. The target of all deals is Galle Face and all of them appear to show a Chinese connection, as China seems to be taking India’s utmost isle on a good-as-long-as-it-lasts merry-go-round in the global circus.

There is no question that Colombo deserves a facelift and that it sets the tone and the template for repeats in all of the island’s provincial capitals. Sri Lanka’s investments and engineering have been dominated since independence by irrigation, power and state-led industrial corporations. The report card will show high grades for irrigation, mixed results in power and total failure in state industries. It will also register gross negligence of the railways, roads and urban infrastructure. Set against this record, the current facelifts in Colombo are exciting.

Resigned optimism

People see the determined and not so hidden hand of the Ministry of Defence in the ongoing operation facelift. It might be inappropriate to have legal drafting under defence, but it is worth letting that ministry to do whatever it takes to make Colombo – city beautiful and city functional. "Soldiers cannot think", Krishna Menon used to tell his Generals. But they can execute. Colombo needs a doer - seems to be the mood of resigned optimism.

Urban infrastructure and development are also treacherous terrains. Our major and minor irrigation and power projects were typically located among lower population and property concentrations. So the freedom and flexibility for designing and building were very generous. Not so in a mature urban setting with heavy population concentration and a fine-grained property fabric. Colombo is not a huge city as cities go, but it is Sri Lanka’s biggest and involves proportionate challenges.

Colombo has been growing rapidly for the last thirty years, far more than it did in the first thirty years of independence. The orderly colonial streetscapes and expansive properties of the old landowning classes are giving way to a chaotic but vibrant assortment of buildings and uses for the new rich, the up and coming, and the commercial classes. There is evidence of wealth – may be either real (earned) or fictitious (credit) – everywhere as well as its uneven distribution. Those who can are spending conspicuously, even if not deliberately to show.

The downside to this growth is its mismatch with the City’s urban infrastructure capacity. New cars are arriving at the port faster than they can move on the roads. Public transportation is woefully inadequate. Water cuts and power cuts are seasonal facts of life. There is more air conditioning than through ventilation. For years, garbage became Colombo’s scourge. And when it rains, it pours and the City floats to a halt in water. The facelift operations can deal with some of these problems on the surface but not in a comprehensively transformative way.

The bigger mismatch is between the market pressures for high rise and glitzy developments and the City’s institutional capacities to deal with them as part of an overall City Plan. Sri Lanka, and Colombo, cannot insulate themselves from market forces whether with Chinese connections or not. In fact, it would be a folly to do so. That is the lesson from the 1960s and 1970s. But after opening the doors to market forces, we have not learnt to cope with them in positive and productive ways.

Galle Face deals

The fishy financial aspects of the controversial deals involving the Galle Face lands and the luxury city project on reclaimed sea are only part of the problem. Media exposures and Dr. Harsha de Silva’s persistent probing have brought upon these projects the degree of scrutiny they deserve. The environmental concerns raised by professionals and citizens have also helped to prevent the projects from being fast-tracked at the presidential or cabinet level without appropriate studies, reviews and public consultations.

The logical place for reviewing, assessing and approving development proposals, big or small, Chinese or anyone else’s, should be the Colombo Municipality. There is no other institutional alternative for urban governance and for mediating between market forces and public interest. It has all the authority and competence on paper, but only on paper. The elected mayor and council are no more than a political football for the operators of the two main political parties. It hardly has the resources to exercise any of its powers and functions. It is also poorly staffed in terms of professional competence in the many areas of hard and soft urban infrastructure that are the main responsibilities of a municipality.

But the revamping of the municipality of Colombo is an unlikely prospect, certainly in the short term. The best chance for it to happen even in the long term is for a movement of civic minded people to coalesce around an urban reform agenda and run for municipal office independent of the established political parties. In the interim, those who have already started questioning the Galle Face deals should not only insist on full disclosures of their financial aspects but also make sure that the financial arrangements provide for identifying and addressing the impacts of the proposed developments on the City’s infrastructure. In fact, they should ask for more.

Everyone knows that the island got its road and rail infrastructure as an appendage of the colonial plantation system. What many may not know is that the City of Colombo received its water, sanitary and electricity services as an extension of the provision of these services to meet the needs of the Colombo port operations. These colonial models of piggybacking urban and transportation infrastructure extensions on specific economic development initiatives were unfortunately not applied after independence. Two areas where they could have been applied were the development of state industrial corporations in the 1960s, and the development of tourism centres from the 1970s. That is all now water under the old bridges.

As Colombo is now being set up for disciplined facelifts and to roll out the red carpet for charming Chinese projects, it would also make smart sense to technically assess what impacts these projects will have on Colombo’s roads, parking, water supply, sanitary, power and garbage among others, and to make sure that these projects pay fully to accommodate these impacts. No private developer will undertake a development project without a solid pro forma and assurance of profit. Equally, it is the responsibility of the government to demonstrate that private development projects are paying their due share for the public infrastructure they need. It should not be a one-way road to new Chinatowns at Galle Face or elsewhere.