• What did Colombo lose when water stopped guiding urbanism? 

Preserving empty spaces, the voids that we often dismiss today as unused land available for development, even though they once functioned as the breathing spaces of our cities, is important. If empty space reflected the spatial intelligence of our urban past, then, water was perhaps its greatest teacher.

The forgotten lessons of wetlands, climate, and urban survival

What did water teach us that modern Colombo has gradually forgotten? History itself offers the answer. Colombo was never simply a City beside water. It was a city created by water. Long before colonial fortifications, highways, and reclamation projects reshaped its landscape, Colombo existed as part of a vast interconnected wetland ecology linked to the Kelani River, the coast, canals, marshes, floodplains, and low-lying water landscapes stretching towards Kotte and beyond.

In fact, Colombo and Kotte, were historically part of a single hydrological civilisation. The Kingdom of Kotte was naturally protected by extensive wetlands, marshes, waterways, and difficult terrain that acted as ecological fortifications long before concrete walls and engineered barriers existed. Water was not seen as a nuisance or obstacle to urban life. Instead, it was understood as a form of protection, a means of mobility, a climate regulator, a food source, a drainage system, and ecological infrastructure.

The ancient port settlement of Kolom Thota, or the Port of Kolom, from which Kolamba  developed, arose because of its strategic location at the mouth of the Kelani River. References to Kolamba appear in the early Sinhala linguistic text Sidath Sangarawa, while travellers like Ibn Battuta described Colombo as a prosperous and notable Settlement with substantial houses, active trade, and an important Harbour. Kolamba was near Kelaniya, a City of deep historical and cultural importance in the Sri Lankan civilisation and Buddhist tradition.

The River, the marshes, the canals, the sea, and the wetlands together shaped the very logic of Colombo’s existence. Water enabled the City to breathe, cool itself, transport people and goods, absorb floods, and connect the hinterland to the wider world. There is overwhelming evidence before our eyes that Colombo was never a City built against water, but fundamentally a City built because of water.

Even today, the ecological importance of Colombo’s wetland landscape is recognised worldwide. In 2018, Colombo became the first capital City in the world to be officially recognised as a Wetland City under the Ramsar Convention, acknowledging the City’s unique relationship with wetlands and urban ecology.

Wetlands are not empty wastelands waiting to be filled. They are living infrastructure. Often described as natural sponges, wetlands absorb and retain large volumes of water due to their clay-rich soils, gradually releasing it into rivers, canals, and groundwater systems. They reduce flooding, moderate urban temperatures, support biodiversity, recharge water systems, and create climatic comfort within dense urban environments.

Yet, the tragedy of much of modern urban development is that we increasingly treat water as a technical inconvenience rather than as the organising principle that originally gave birth to the city itself. Marshes are reclaimed, canals are neglected, waterways are polluted, and wetlands are fragmented in pursuit of short-term urban expansion.

Ancient Sri Lankan urbanism understood water as civilisation

In the Rajarata civilisation, water was never treated merely as drainage or engineering infrastructure. It was deeply embedded in the city’s ecology, spirituality, economy, food security, governance, and everyday life. Water shaped not only survival, but also the cultural and spatial intelligence of ancient Sri Lankan urbanism.

Its presence could be seen everywhere, in tanks, canals, lakes, ponds, gardens, streams, and wetlands, all carefully integrated into the making of cities and settlements. Water was connected to ceremony, agriculture, leisure, mobility, industry, and social order. It was not separated from urban life; it was the framework around which urban life was organised.

Earlier, we spoke about the importance of voids and empty spaces in cities. Water teaches us a similar lesson. What appears “empty” is often performing the most important work. The apparent emptiness of water landscapes was never truly empty. Those spaces created porosity, openness, ventilation, climatic comfort, ecological balance, flood absorption, and long-term resilience.

The pinnacle of Sinhala civilisation, Anuradhapura, did not seek to conquer or destroy water. Instead, it carefully orchestrated life around it. That was the brilliance of its urban planning, recognising that nature was not an adversary of the City, but the very foundation upon which civilisation relied.

Colonial Colombo modified water, but did not completely destroy it

When the Portuguese first encountered the Port Settlement of Colombo, historical accounts suggest that they observed only a modest Settlement consisting mainly of thatched dwellings and a mosque, which stood out as one of the few significant structures at the time. Recognising the strategic value of the Harbour and its access to the Kelani River, they established their trading factory near the mouth of the Port through political manoeuvring with the Kingdom of Kotte, and subsequently constructed the fortifications and administrative structures necessary to consolidate military and economic control.

Yet, even during this early colonial phase, there was still some respect for Colombo's natural geography and hydrology. Early maps clearly demonstrate how carefully the Portuguese utilised the City’s wetlands, waterways, and coastal conditions for defence, transport, and access control. Water became part of the fortification system itself, regulating movement in and out of the fortified City while also supporting the transport of goods and people between the hinterland and the Harbour.

The Dutch later expanded this relationship with water through their sophisticated canal-building systems. Their engineering interventions reshaped Colombo, they largely worked with the existing hydrological landscape rather than completely erasing it. The canal network improved trade, drainage, and mobility, and many of these canals still survive today as reminders of an earlier understanding that water was central to the City's functioning.

This period also left behind more complex and painful social histories. Enslaved people mainly brought from Mozambique were settled on a peninsula close together because they retaliated against the poor treatment by the nobility. This peninsula then became known as Slave Island. Its current official name, Kompannavidiya, reflects another layer of colonial history, derived from the Malay military companies that were once stationed there.

Although Colombo’s canals and waterways continue to hold enormous ecological, historical, and urban value, they remain underutilised, poorly maintained, and rarely integrated into a broader strategic vision for the City.

Later, under British rule, Colombo underwent far more aggressive land transformation through reclamation and urban expansion. Although figures such as Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes proposed more sensitive planning approaches for Colombo, much of the subsequent development accelerated the conversion of wetlands and low-lying landscapes into urban land. While important wetland systems still survive and continue to perform vital ecological functions, their present condition is far from satisfactory.

What is observed from the actions of the responsible authorities - Central, Provincial, and Local - is only a growing contradiction. There is a noticeable gap between the rhetoric in development plans and the actual treatment of Colombo’s water systems. The City has an extraordinary network of rivers, canals, marshes, lakes, and coastal landscapes that could significantly boost environmental resilience, climatic comfort, recreation, tourism, and urban identity. Yet, these assets are often neglected, fragmented, or seen simply as leftover spaces waiting for development. In many ways, this stands in stark contrast to earlier urban traditions that saw water not as an obstacle to development, but as one of its fundamental elements.

Modern Colombo: Building against water

Over time, Colombo’s wetlands were gradually filled in the name of urban development and real estate speculation, while canals were reduced to neglected backyards and dumping grounds for solid waste, industrial discharge, poultry farms, piggeries, and even raw sewerage, rather than being treated as valuable urban assets.

At the same time, both luxury developments and low-income high-rise schemes began to form dense vertical walls that increasingly blocked the City’s natural breezeways and disrupted the airflow. As natural drainage paths were obstructed through reclamation, paving, and uncontrolled construction, flooding became more frequent and severe. With the rapid spread of impervious surfaces, rainwater runoff increased dramatically, causing water stagnation and deep puddling even after relatively light rainfall events.

The neglect and destruction of water systems have also intensified Colombo’s urban heat island effect. Wetlands and open water bodies that once moderated temperature, improved ventilation, and created climatic comfort have steadily disappeared or become fragmented.

There is also a troubling social history attached to this transformation. Low-income communities were often pushed towards the City’s most environmentally vulnerable lands,  waterlogged areas, canal reservations, wetland edges, and marginal flood-prone spaces. Informal settlements frequently emerged not because people preferred such locations, but because urban systems left them with little alternative.

Ironically, the language of liberating land for urban regeneration has too often meant the destruction of ecological systems that once protected the City itself. In many ways, we did not modernise Colombo, we hardened it. Or perhaps, more accurately, we mistook reclamation for development.

The false dream of vertical urbanism

There is a dominant urban imagination held by many politicians, sections of the privileged class, and increasingly even segments of the general public, about what constitutes a “developed city.” Much of this imagination is shaped not by a deep understanding of our own geography, climate, ecology, or culture, but by fleeting exposure to highly engineered global cities, particularly places in the Middle East and Singapore, often experienced only in transit while travelling elsewhere.

Over time, this borrowed imagery has evolved into a powerful urban aspiration: the belief that high-rise skylines alone represent progress, modernity, and economic success. The spectacle of towers viewed from locations such as the Port City creates an illusion of arrival into the modern world. We must ask ourselves: modern for whom, and at what cost?

Why do we continue to equate verticality with development, while paying so little attention to the lived realities beneath those skylines? Why do we celebrate dramatic silhouettes in the sky while ignoring the growing thermal discomfort, blocked breezeways, disappearing wetlands, failing drainage systems, and increasing urban floods experienced at the ground level?

Even the rhetoric of a “rhythmic skyline”, frequently repeated in the development discourse, risks becoming little more than a visual ambition detached from the climatic and social reality. A city cannot be judged only by how it appears from a distant aerial photograph or from the waterfront of an elite enclave. Cities are experienced on the street — where people walk, wait for buses, endure heat, encounter flooding, and negotiate everyday life.

The deeper problem is that much of this model of urbanism increasingly privatises urban life rather than democratising it. Towers often create isolated islands of wealth disconnected from surrounding communities, while the public realm, ecological systems, and climatic comfort of the wider city continue to deteriorate.

Colombo is not Dubai, nor should it attempt to become Singapore without understanding the vastly different ecological, institutional, economic, and climatic conditions that shaped those Cities. Colombo is fundamentally a tropical wetland City with its own environmental intelligence and spatial logic. Ignoring that reality in pursuit of imported urban imagery risks producing a City that may look impressive from afar, yet becomes increasingly uncomfortable, unequal, overheated, and ecologically fragile on the ground. Do not be fooled by the glitter, someone from Singapore recently said, that the City of Singapore is rich, but that the people who actually live in it are not.

Conclusion: Recovering exceptional Sri Lankan urbanism

We do not need to spend enormous time and resources searching for imported smart city models or borrowed urban dreams to guide Colombo’s future. Long before sustainability, resilience, and climate adaptation became fashionable planning language, Sri Lanka already possessed a sophisticated ecological intelligence in city-making. Our urban history shows that cities can grow with water, climate, landscape, and nature rather than against them.

Exceptional Sri Lankan urbanism lies in rediscovering this wisdom. The future of Colombo will not be secured by building taller concrete walls, reclaiming more wetlands, or blindly pursuing vertical skylines as symbols of modernity. It will depend on whether we can once again learn to live with water instead of constantly trying to eliminate or control it.

Before Colombo became a skyline, it was a water City. Its canals, marshes, wetlands, and waterways were not obstacles to development, but the very systems that allowed the City to breathe, cool itself, absorb floods, and sustain urban life. Perhaps Colombo’s future resilience depends on becoming a water City once again.

The skyline may impress investors and visitors from a distance, but, cities are ultimately experienced at the ground level, where heat rises, drains fail, floods occur, and people experience either dignity or hardship in their everyday lives.

Encouragingly, the current Government appears to be using the right language around sustainability, resilience, and urban transformation. However, language alone is insufficient. The real challenge now is whether these ideas will be integrated into planning systems, development controls, governance frameworks, and urban projects that genuinely acknowledge the ecological intelligence upon which Colombo was originally founded.

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.  He is the Executive Director of the Colombo Forum 

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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