• Why cities need planners to turn competing demands into a workable future?

Towns and cities are never static. They change continuously as people move, land values shift, buildings acquire new uses, infrastructure expands, and new forms of development emerge. The real question is not whether our cities will change but how that change will be managed. Will it be shaped deliberately in the public interest, or through a succession of disconnected decisions, each reasonable on its own yet collectively capable of producing an undesirable urban future? Planning is the means by which these competing and sometimes seemingly incompatible demands are brought together into a coherent and workable whole. Recent examples from our towns and cities show why planning intervention matters.

Proposals to give new uses to former Presidential residences outside Colombo or to Ministerial residences in low-density parts of Colombo may appear to be straightforward attempts to put existing buildings to productive use. Yet, many of these properties are architecturally significant and form part of established residential or heritage environments. Converting them into offices or other intensive uses is therefore not simply a change of function. It can affect traffic, neighbourhood character, infrastructure demand, public access and, if handled insensitively, the architectural integrity and the setting of the buildings themselves.

Current housing developments provide an even clearer example. Across Colombo and its suburbs, high-rise residential development is expanding. Higher densities may be necessary as urban populations grow and land becomes in short supply, density alone is not planning. The important questions are: Who is this housing for? Is it affordable to households experiencing housing stress? Is it connected to employment, transport and services? Can the surrounding infrastructure support it? And what kind of neighbourhoods will it create?

The experience of developments such as Sahaspura in Dematagoda should have encouraged a deeper reassessment of how the Government addresses the housing needs of people struggling to secure decent accommodation in the city. Problems relating to maintenance, management, communal facilities, social well-being and long-term affordability demonstrate that replacing horizontal settlements with vertical buildings does not automatically create better communities. The issue is not high-rise housing itself but the failure to learn from experience. Planning should be a learning process; today’s programmes should not reproduce yesterday’s weaknesses in new forms.

At the same time, the many advertisements for new high-rise apartments suggest that much of the new housing supply is beyond the reach of ordinary urban households. Meanwhile, many key workers who keep Colombo functioning continue to depend on inadequate, overcrowded or employer-provided accommodation. This contradiction exposes a deeper planning problem: housing may be produced in large numbers while the actual housing needs of the city remain inadequately addressed.

These examples reveal a fundamental point, namely that urban development decisions cannot be considered in isolation.

How a town changes?

A town does not wake up one morning and suddenly become a city. Urban change happens gradually, often almost unnoticed. Events such as a house along a main road becoming a shop or office, a large residential garden being replaced by an apartment building, a paddy field or coconut land being subdivided for housing, and a neighbourhood road slowly turning into a busy commercial street are such changes that we have taken for granted. Simultaneously or subsequently, more vehicles arrive, roadside parking increases, trees disappear, drains struggle to cope, land values rise, rents increase, and long-established residents begin to move elsewhere. New businesses, institutions and populations then bring further demands for roads, water, drainage, schools, transport and public space.

These processes are visible but only noticeable if we keep an eye on them or visit these places at intervals long enough to detect change. They occur throughout Sri Lanka. Along the main corridors of Colombo’s suburbs, such as Dehiwala, Mount Lavinia, Nugegoda and Maharagama, formerly residential streets have progressively acquired shops, offices, restaurants, apartments and other higher-intensity uses. Around Kottawa and Homagama, improved transport connections and Expressway access have accelerated subdivision, commercial activity and housing development. In Towns such as Negombo, Galle and Kandy, tourism, commerce, traffic and changing land values increasingly compete with established residential areas, heritage, environmental assets and the everyday needs of local communities.

The changes reflect individual decision-making. Each individual decision may appear small and perfectly reasonable. A family wants to convert the front of its house into a shop. A landowner wants to subdivide a property. A developer sees an opportunity for apartments. A road is widened to relieve congestion. A wetland is filled to create usable land. None of these actions alone appear capable of transforming a town. But together, over 10, 20 or 30 years, they do exactly that.

A town is therefore rarely improved or damaged by a single dramatic decision. More often, it is made and unmade incrementally. It collects one building, one subdivision, one filled wetland, one widened road, one disappearing tree, and one development approval at a time. The cumulative consequences then become obvious in congestion, flooding, the loss of greenery, inadequate infrastructure, disappearing neighbourhood character, or unaffordable land. Once such changes occur, it may be extremely difficult and costly to reverse them.

Towns cannot simply be left alone

A common pattern of urban growth in Sri Lanka is easy to recognise. Urban sprawl spreads outward, often along major roads and transport corridors. Houses gradually become shops, offices, restaurants and workshops; agricultural land, wetlands and other environmentally sensitive areas are converted for development; traffic increases; infrastructure struggles to keep pace; and rising land values push development both upward and further outward. Public spaces, meanwhile, are too often treated as whatever land is left over rather than being deliberately planned as essential parts of the town.

The problem is not growth itself. Towns must change, accommodate new people, support economic activity and respond to changing needs. The real problem is uncoordinated growth, where hundreds of individual decisions accumulate without sufficient consideration of their combined effects on the wider urban area.

No individual landowner can provide a city-wide drainage network. One developer cannot solve congestion or ensure adequate public transport. One household cannot protect an interconnected wetland or ecological system. One business cannot determine where future schools, parks, community facilities or transport corridors should be located. Nor can individual property owners be expected to collectively reserve enough space for the infrastructure that a growing town will need 20 years from now.

These are shared urban responsibilities. They require decisions to be made across property boundaries, sectors and generations. That is why planning becomes necessary.  To anticipate the cumulative consequences of growth, coordinate individual development with public infrastructure and environmental capacity, and ensure that private decisions collectively contribute to a functioning, liveable and sustainable town.

Introducing the fundamental planning dilemma

In many ways, the planner’s distinctive role is to make the impossible possible through the fundamental skill of planning. Yet, planners often speak and write extensively about the Geographic Information Systems, the El Niño effect, flooding and drainage, transport or ecological systems, rather than about planning itself. These are important areas of knowledge and useful tools, but, the profession exists primarily because of its capacity to plan. In order to coordinate, to understand the city as a system, to feel the pulse of its people, and to recognise the interactions that make urban life complex, the presence of a planner is a fundamental necessity. Planning schools, professional institutes and planners themselves should take note of this distinction.

A city must do many apparently contradictory things at once. The city must: accommodate more people while remaining liveable; allow development while protecting environmentally sensitive land; increase density while preserving amenity; attract investment while protecting communities; improve mobility without surrendering the city to cars; provide housing while keeping it affordable; preserve heritage while allowing change; and support private property while protecting the public interest.

No single rule, nor mastery of a tool such as the Geographic Information System, can achieve all this. Planning is the discipline of reconciling these competing demands spatially and over time.

Why planning is more than drawing a land-use map?

This is particularly important in the Sri Lankan context, where the planning practice has often become too closely associated with land-use zoning and development control. The planner is frequently seen as the person who determines where residential, commercial or industrial uses should be located, where a road reservation should run, or whether a proposed development complies with regulations. These functions matter, they represent only part of what planning is meant to do.

Contemporary city-making requires planners to understand the relationships between many systems operating at the same time. A high-rise building in Colombo, Dehiwala or Rajagiriya is not merely a building on a plot of land. It affects traffic, water supply, sewerage, drainage, the electricity demand, public space, microclimate, the neighbourhood character and the capacity of the surrounding infrastructure. A new road or expressway interchange can change land values, attract new development and alter settlement patterns far beyond the road itself. A railway station can become the focus for housing, employment, commerce and public transport integration. A wetland around Colombo is not simply vacant land awaiting development; it is simultaneously an ecological asset, part of the drainage system and an important defence against flooding.

The same applies in provincial towns. A new commercial centre may increase employment but also generate traffic and parking demand. Tourism development in places such as Galle or Kandy may support the local economy while placing pressure on heritage, housing and infrastructure. The subdivision of agricultural land around expanding towns may provide housing opportunities while gradually removing productive land and increasing the cost of extending public services.

Planning must therefore look beyond the coloured zones on a map and understand how one decision changes many other parts of the urban system. Its distinctive strength lies in bringing together knowledge from engineering, architecture, transport, environment, economics, housing and social development and considering their combined consequences for a particular place.

What the planner actually does?

It would clearly be unreasonable to suggest that a planner is the professional who knows everything. No profession can claim such a quality. The planner’s distinctive skill lies elsewhere: in being trained to see connections between different urban systems, different interests and different time horizons, and to understand how decisions made today may reshape a place many years into the future.

In Colombo, this ability is particularly important. An engineer may understand roads, drainage and infrastructure. An architect may focus on buildings and design. An economist may consider investment and land values. An environmental scientist may understand wetlands and ecological systems. A sociologist may focus on communities and social change, and elected representatives may articulate public needs and aspirations. All these perspectives are essential. Planning brings them together in relation to place.

Consider, for example, a major high-rise development in Colombo. The architectural question may concern the quality and form of the building, while the engineering questions relate to access, water, drainage and structural requirements. The planner must also ask what additional traffic it will generate, whether the surrounding infrastructure can cope, how it affects neighbouring properties, whether sufficient public space is available, how it changes the character of the area, and whether similar developments across the neighbourhood will collectively create conditions very different from those that exist today.

The same applies to decisions concerning wetlands, railway stations, road widening, housing redevelopment or the conversion of established residential areas to commercial uses. Each may be handled by several specialist agencies, someone must understand how these separate decisions interact within the wider city.

The planner’s particular skill therefore is not knowing more than every other profession. It is the ability to bring different forms of knowledge together, understand their spatial relationships, reconcile competing interests and anticipate their cumulative consequences. That is what planning should contribute to Colombo: not another specialist opinion in isolation, but a coherent understanding of how many separate decisions come together to shape the city that we will inherit 20 or 30 years from now.

What happens without planning?

The absence of planning does not mean that development stops. In Sri Lanka, quite the opposite often happens. Towns and cities continue to grow, land continues to change hands, buildings are replaced, roads are widened, commercial activity expands, and new housing appears. But when these changes are not guided by a broader planning framework, the strongest immediate interests tend to shape the outcome.

Landowners understandably seek to maximise the value of their properties. Developers seek to maximise the development potential. Motorists demand more road space and parking. Businesses compete for visibility and access. Government agencies pursue roads, drainage, housing, transport or other sectoral projects according to their own mandates. Each of these projects, big and small, based on decisions of many, may appear rational when considered separately.

The difficulty is that towns and cities in Sri Lanka or elsewhere do not function as collections of separate projects. A road-widening scheme may increase traffic and affect surrounding land values. A high-rise development may increase pressure on drainage, roads and public space. The filling of a wetland may create more land available for urban development while increasing the flood risk elsewhere. The conversion of a residential property to commercial use may seem minor, but when repeated many times it can transform the character and functioning of an entire neighbourhood.

The accumulated result can therefore become irrational for the city, even when each individual decision appears reasonable.

That is an important public lesson. Without planning, the city does not stop developing. It simply develops according to the separate ambitions of whoever has the land, money, authority or opportunity to act. Planning is what allows those separate ambitions to be tested against the wider interests of the city, the community and the future.

SL’s planning challenges

The challenges facing Sri Lanka’s towns and cities are no longer confined to Colombo. Development pressure is spreading through towns, provincial centres and settlements along major roads, railway corridors and emerging growth areas. Land values are changing, new housing and commercial development are appearing, traffic is increasing, agricultural and environmentally sensitive land is being converted, and established neighbourhoods are being reshaped.

The critical planning question is therefore not whether these places will change. They already are. The real question is: What do we want these places to become before development decides it for us?

That is the question that Sri Lanka must ask now.

Designing a city is, in many ways, the art of making the impossible possible. The planner must find room for growth without destroying what makes a place liveable. Accommodate investment without surrendering the public interest. Increase density without overwhelming infrastructure. Improve mobility without sacrificing neighbourhoods. Provide housing without making the city unaffordable. And protect the environment while responding to legitimate development needs.

No answer will ever be perfect. Planning is not about producing a flawless city. It is about making informed choices, balancing competing demands and ensuring that today’s decisions do not become tomorrow’s problems.

Without planning, these questions are rarely considered together. Development continues, but the city is shaped piece by piece by separate decisions, immediate pressures and whoever has the greatest capacity to act.

Cities will change whether we plan them or not. Planning gives us the chance to decide what that change should achieve.

And perhaps that is the most important message of all: If we do not plan the future of our towns and cities, we should not be surprised when the future arrives without us.

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 UK

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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication