• The essential question without a clear answer

This question is asked not to start a narrow professional debate but as a matter of public concern. It is a question that every citizen might sense while walking through our streets, town centres, neighbourhoods, and expanding urban edges, even if they rarely put it into words. We experience the city every day, yet, we rarely stop to ask: who is actually shaping it?

This question matters because the way that our cities are planned and built influences much more than just buildings and roads. It shapes daily urban life, public health, mobility, environmental quality, neighbourhood character, investor confidence, and the type of society that we are becoming. If a country seeks genuine investment, civic trust, and sustainable development, its cities must demonstrate more than just construction activity. They need to show direction, discipline, fairness, and a clear public purpose.

At first glance, the answer seems clear. We have town planners, urban development agencies, local councils, mayors, councillors, engineers, architects, developers, consultants, and politicians. Each plays a part. Each uses the familiar language of development, improvement, investment, service delivery, and public benefit. Sri Lanka also has laws, regulations, procedures, plans, and agencies designed to guide urban development and protect the public interest.

But, when we honestly examine the true condition of our cities, the answer becomes much less clear. Decisions are made. Developments continue. Buildings rise. Roads are widened. Land is divided. Wetlands vanish. Walls, glass façades, paving, tarmac, congestion, dust, rubbish, polluted air, heat, and occasional patches of greenery become the everyday urban experience. The city changes all the time, but, the reasoning behind those changes is often hard to follow.

So, who is really doing this? Is it the planner who draws up the plan? The politician who shifts priorities? The developer who advances the proposal? The approving authority that grants exceptions? The consultant who justifies what should never have been justified? Or, is it a system so fragmented, negotiated, and morally drained that the city is no longer genuinely planned, but simply allowed to unfold?

For the ordinary citizen, this question might not come up in technical terms. People may not describe their frustrations as failures of zoning, infrastructure coordination, environmental regulation, development control, or political accountability. But, they do feel the effects. They experience them through traffic jams, blocked drains, unsafe streets, vanishing public space, extreme heat, poor air quality, flooding, and neighbourhoods losing their character.

Cities are not harmed only by poor plans. They are harmed gradually through the quiet accumulation of approvals, exemptions, compromises, silences, and professional justifications that slowly turn public space into private gain. A city rarely loses direction in a single dramatic moment. It drifts when institutions operate independently, when laws do not reflect policy goals, when regulations become bargaining tools, and when no one accepts responsibility for the overall outcome.

This is why the real question is not just whether a building has approval, whether a setback has been measured, or whether a file has passed through the correct desk. The deeper question is whether each decision helps build the city that we say we want.

Certainly, officials, authorities, and elected representatives often claim that they act in the best interests of citizens. But, the tougher question is: who truly benefits from how the system operates? Is it residents, pedestrians, kids, seniors, small businesses, future generations, and regular city users? Or, is it those with access, influence, capital, and the ability to steer the system to their advantage?

This is not merely about individual blame. It is about governance. It is about whether urban policy, urban law, infrastructure planning, environmental responsibility, development control, and professional ethics are moving in the same direction, or pulling the city apart.

The fragmented state of planning

At the heart of the problem lies fragmentation.

Planning responsibilities are distributed among central agencies, provincial and local authorities, sectoral departments, statutory bodies, and specialised institutions. Each entity has its own mandate, procedures, priorities, and limitations. This division of responsibilities is generally appropriate. In a democratic system, public policy should not be controlled by a single authority. Different levels of government must have clearly defined roles, powers, and duties.

But, the separation of authority should not become the separation of purpose.

For a city to function effectively, hierarchy, coordination, and accountability are essential. Hierarchy does not just mean power; it involves understanding who is responsible for what, who has the authority to act, and how separate decisions are unified. Without this clarity, governance becomes muddled. Some institutions dominate, others are marginalised, and the city itself suffers as a result.

In Sri Lanka, the issue is not just that many institutions are involved in planning, but that they often operate without proper coordination, shared goals, or mutual accountability. Central agencies may have broad authority, but, they often lack local sensitivity. Local authorities might understand local realities but frequently lack the power, resources, or technical capacity to influence outcomes effectively.

The result is a planning system where no single actor has a complete view of the city as a whole. What is missing is coherence. Without it, planning becomes fragmented decision-making. And, fragmented decision-making cannot create a humane, clear, and sustainable city.

From planning to processing

For many people today, planning simply means “development control”. It is understood through planning applications, approvals, zoning checks, plot ratios, setbacks, compliance reports, and regulatory procedures. These tools matter. But, they are not planning itself.

Planning, in its true sense, is about direction. It involves defining a vision for the city and developing the strategies, institutions, spatial frameworks, and civic commitments needed to achieve better outcomes for the society. It should ask: What kind of city are we trying to build? What public good are we trying to protect? What future are we preparing for? Too often however, planning no longer defines the urban vision. It handles applications. It no longer directs development. It assesses proposals. It no longer influences outcomes. It responds to them.

Over time, this transforms the profession itself. Planning shifts from being about imagination, judgement, ethics, and public purpose to focusing more on administration. Planners become processors of files, signatories of approvals, managers of checklists, and servants of procedural efficiency. The system may become faster, but, not wiser. It may become more technically organised, but, not more socially responsible.

This also raises a significant question for planning education. Are we training planners who can develop strategies, or technicians who can just operate tools? Technology, modelling, Geographic Information System, computational design, data analysis, and regulatory techniques are useful. But, they are tools, not the core of planning. The key skill still lies in understanding the society, interpreting the place, negotiating values, exercising judgement, and shaping urban futures in the public interest.

To enable the challenging task of city-making, we require planners who can think strategically, ethically, spatially, and politically. We need professionals capable of managing complexity, not just processing applications. These planners must recognise that numbers, maps, models, and software are tools that serve a broader civic obligation.

The subtle but dangerous shift isthe change of the central question from “What kind of city are we building?” to “Can this proposal be processed?”And when planning is reduced to process, it loses its authority to lead.

The missing centre

What our cities lack today is not another layer of control, another set of regulations, or another powerful institution acting alone. What they lack is a clear centre of planning direction.

A city needs an organising intelligence: a place where vision, policy, regulation, infrastructure, environmental responsibility, development control, community interest, and professional judgement are brought together. Without that centre, planning becomes scattered across agencies, personalities, procedures, and competing priorities. Decisions may still be made. Projects may still be approved. Buildings may still rise. But, the city loses the discipline of shared purpose.

A functioning planning system must be built on several core commitments. Plans should genuinely guide decisions, regulations need to be clear, fair, and applied consistently, institutions should coordinate rather than compete, professional judgement must be respected rather than overridden, and the public interest must be actively defended in practice, not just mentioned in speeches.

This centre is not about centralising all power. It is about restoring coherence. It is about ensuring that major decisions contribute to a larger understanding of what the city is, what it must protect, and what it must become.

Without such direction, the city will not stand still. Land will be subdivided, towers will rise, roads will be widened, wetlands will shrink, and neighbourhoods will be transformed. But, change without direction is not progress. It is drift.

And a city that drifts long enough eventually loses the very qualities that made it worth planning for in the first place.

Reclaiming planning as leadership

If planning is to regain its rightful role, it must move beyond routine administration and reassert itself as a form of public leadership.

Planning is not merely the processing of applications, the checking of setbacks, or the mechanical application of regulations. It is the discipline through which a city decides how it should grow, what it must protect, where investment should go, and how public and private interests should be balanced.

This does not mean giving unlimited power to planners or concentrating every decision in one authority. It means strengthening the planning system so that decisions are guided by a coherent vision rather than by pressure, negotiation, convenience, or influence.

Strategic plans must set a clear direction. Institutions must work in alignment rather than isolation. Decisions must be transparent, accountable, and capable of public explanation. Professional expertise must be embedded in leadership, not reduced to a technical afterthought. Most importantly, planning must recover the courage to make judgements. It must be able to say not only what is legally permissible, but what is appropriate for the place, the community, the environment, and the long-term future of the city.

If a planning system asks, “Can this be approved?”, it cannot be a strong system. But, if it asks, “Should this be approved, and does it help build the city that we claim to want?”, it tells you of the maturity and wisdom.

That is the leadership that our cities now need: planning with direction, courage, integrity, and a clear commitment to the public good.

The role of the society

This is not only an institutional failure. It is also a societal one.

Planning weakens when the public remains silent, distant, or resigned. When citizens do not engage, the space for influence narrows and becomes more dangerous. Decisions are then shaped by those who are most active, most organised, most connected, or most capable of applying pressure. The quiet majority may live with the consequences, but, they are too often absent from the process that creates them.

A robust planning system therefore needs more than capable institutions. It also requires an alert and involved society. Residents, professionals, businesses, community leaders, and civic organisations must ask questions, seek explanations, challenge poor reasoning, and take part in shaping the city's future.

Public engagement is not just a ceremonial consultation after decisions have been made. It is an essential part of maintaining honesty in planning. Without active civic pressure, even the most well-designed systems can drift. Plans may be ignored, regulations bent, discretion expanded, and public interests quietly sidelined.

A city cannot be protected by institutions alone if the society has stopped watching. Civic silence becomes permission. When people stop asking who is shaping the city, others will answer that question on their behalf.

Looking ahead

Planning fails when it depends too heavily on numbers, neglects infrastructure, ignores lived experience, weakens environmental responsibility, and treats transport as an afterthought. These are not minor technical errors. They are symptoms of a deeper failure: the absence of clear responsibility for shaping our urban future.

Without clarity of governance, every reform becomes fragile. Better regulations will mean little if no one has the courage to enforce them. Stronger plans will remain paper promises if institutions do not follow them. Professional expertise will continue to lose authority if political pressure, administrative habit, private influence, professional silence, and civic resignation are allowed to shape decisions.

Planning is not merely a collection of tools, policies, procedures, and approvals. It is about direction. It is about who has the authority, competence, integrity, and public mandate to guide change in the long-term interest of the city. Our cities will continue to change; that is unavoidable. The real question is whether that change will be guided by public purpose or captured by fragmented power, private ambition, and political convenience.

If we cannot clearly answer who is planning our city, we should not be surprised when it appears planned on paper but feels increasingly uncertain on the ground.

A city without a planning conscience may still produce buildings, roads, and projects. But ,it will not produce trust, coherence, or dignity. And, in the end, a city that no one truly plans is a city that everyone is forced to endure.

(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.)