- When being compliant becomes unacceptable
Sri Lanka’s planning system relies far too much on numbers — setbacks, floor area ratios, height limits, and other measurable controls — while paying far too little attention to the lived reality of place. This is not just a minor flaw or an occasional mistake; it points to something much deeper. We are now producing developments that may be fully compliant on paper, yet feel completely wrong in real life. Anyone who walks through our cities can see it. Streets lose their character, neighbourhoods become unrecognisable, and people are left asking planners in frustration: “What on earth have you done to my city, street, and neighbourhood?”
Rules are meant to serve the development plan. They help shape the physical character of a city and, in the right hands, they are the planner’s magic wand — a powerful instrument for creating better urban life. A magic wand can quickly become dangerous if used without wisdom. Like handing a razor blade to a monkey, a powerful tool in careless hands can cause serious and lasting damage. When that happens, society has every right to intervene before more harm is done.
Planning rules are not the purpose of planning; they are only tools. Setbacks, height limits, approvals, and compliance checks are not goals in themselves. They matter only when they help a city grow with purpose, function with dignity, and endure with resilience. Yet, in Sri Lanka, we too often mistake control for vision. Plans are reduced to technical formulas and regulatory checklists, and development control is treated as though it is planning itself. In doing so, we have forgotten something that our own urban civilisation once understood instinctively: cities are not built by numbers alone, but by values, judgment, and a clear sense of what kind of place we want to leave behind.
Millennia ago, in Anuradhapura, urban planning followed a very different logic. Empty space was never viewed as waste. Reservoirs, forests, water bodies, lands, and open spaces were not leftovers between buildings, but the very framework that gave the City life, resilience, and meaning. Watercourses, greenery, and spatial openness fostered comfort, dignity, and ecological balance. The City was designed to enable people to live peacefully and sustainably. Planning was not just technical; it was moral. It reflected responsibility, restraint, and a shared understanding of what a City should provide. Colombo tells a very different story.
Its wetlands have been sacrificed, waterways narrowed, colonial landscapes eroded, and the City now pushes seaward through reclamation, as if urban greatness is measured only by concrete and glass. The garden City is losing its soul. Marshlands, lakes, canals, and fragments of open land remain only as reminders of what once gave Colombo its character.What did water teach us that modern Colombo still refuses to learn?
Perhaps the answer lies in our obsession with rules, while we forget that strategy must come first. Before approvals are stamped and regulations enforced, we must ask the more important question: what kind of city are we trying to build?
Developments meet every regulation, pass all approval processes, and carry every official stamp of legitimacy. Yet, they block sunlight and ventilation, overwhelm neighbourhood streets, overload drainage systems, erase local character, and quietly diminish the quality of urban life. This reveals the great irony of our planning system. Development control is strictly enforced, but the people for whom cities are planned — residents and communities — often feel excluded and dissatisfied. Planning becomes something done to people, not with them. Regulations are too broad, too easily manipulated, and too open to interpretation by those willing to bend them.
In this environment, pseudo-professionals and opportunistic developers thrive, using compliance as a shield rather than a commitment to the public good. Development is controlled, but often for the convenience of capital and private gain, while the city’s identity and soul become negotiable losses. This is no longer an occasional failure. It is becoming the dominant pattern of urban growth. If compliance can still produce bad cities, then, compliance alone is not enough. If a building can follow every rule and still harm the city, the problem is not simply enforcement; it is the absence of purpose behind the rules.
Planning must return to strategy, ethics, and public responsibility. Otherwise, we will continue building cities that are technically compliant, but fundamentally unliveable.
The illusion of objectivity
Planning systems rely heavily on numerical controls because numbers seem objective. Setbacks, floor area ratios, height limits, plot coverage, and separation distances create a sense of clarity, fairness, and certainty. They appear to offer measurable standards for justifying and defending decisions. On paper, this appears rational and transparent.
Yet, it remains an open secret, one that has persisted for decades: planning control in the built environment is rarely as objective as it claims to be. Behind the facade of mathematical accuracy lies a system influenced by subjectivity, negotiation, discretion, and often, manipulation. Even the presumed objectivity of numbers can be misinterpreted, selectively used, and manipulated to benefit specific interests. The result is often neither principled nor consistent.
Questionable approvals quietly pass through the system. Only a few draw attention, usually when aware residents can spot the problem, are wealthy enough to challenge it, and brave enough to face the machinery behind it. Too often, one meets individuals who conveniently wear multiple professional hats depending on the situation: landscape architect, ecologist, environmental scientist, town planner, or whatever title best fits the commercial opportunity. They might hold qualifications in one area, but everyone knows that no single person can convincingly master so many specialised fields. Yet, few question this professional charade.
Meanwhile, public officers, whose duty is to protect the public interest, often remain silent. Conflicts of interest are everywhere. Ethical boundaries are crossed routinely. Favouritism, nepotism, and quiet corruption operate in plain sight. The greatest irony is not simply that these practices exist, but that they have become normal. Everyone sees them, and yet everyone looks away.
Cities are not mathematical abstractions. They are lived environments, complex, layered, social, ecological, and deeply contextual. When planning is reduced to numerical thresholds, it creates a false sense of precision. It answers the narrow question, can this fit? while avoiding the more important one: Should this be here, and in this form?
This illusion of objectivity runs through the entire system of development control. We know that place-making cannot be reduced to equations. A city is not a spreadsheet. It cannot be understood solely through ratios. When powerful interests, distorted expertise, and compromised institutions dominate decision-making, objectivity becomes little more than a convenient label, an administrative fiction used to legitimise predetermined outcomes.
And this illusion comforts many because maintaining it protects privilege. It safeguards profits, secures influence, and guarantees prosperity for those who benefit from keeping the system exactly as it is. This is where the real illusion lies. A building might meet setback and height regulations but still cast shadows on neighbouring homes. It could fulfill frontage standards but overpower the human scale of a street. It might pass a traffic assessment while quietly straining roads, drainage, schools, and public services.
In each of these cases, the comforting belief that the system is working exactly as designed is exposed for what it truly is: an illusion. The system does not fail by accident; it fails because it is often designed to preserve appearances rather than deliver justice.
How rules-based development control produces bad outcomes
Across Colombo, we are seeing more developments that appear to comply with the rules, whether consistently or selectively, yet clearly violate the spirit of planning. What is delivered may be technically permissible on paper, but it damages neighbourhoods, weakens urban life, and erodes public trust.
High-rise buildings suddenly emerge within low-rise residential zones, justified through site amalgamation, skewed interpretations, and selective numerical compliance. These approvals are often backed by unethical professional advice. An increasing number of pseudo-professionals have become experts at manipulating rules, disguising trickery as professional skill. They see planning not as a public duty but as a game to be won for private gain. In doing so, they sell the city’s soul for personal benefit.
Professional ethics are too often missing. Titles are worn like costumes — planner, environmental consultant, urban designer, ecologist - whatever label best serves the transaction. What should be a discipline of public stewardship becomes a form of technical drama, where compliance is manufactured and justified through language designed to confuse rather than clarify.
The consequences are visible everywhere. Streets meant for residential calm are burdened with traffic that they were never designed to carry. Buildings rise that satisfy formal setbacks and height controls, yet destroy privacy, block sunlight, interrupt breezeways, intensify heat, and overwhelm the human scale of the street. Residents are told that everything is compliant, even as the quality of daily life steadily declines around them. The irony is that many of these outcomes are not illegal. They are often entirely permissible — especially when planning authorities are misled, pressured, manipulated, or weakened by poor competence, institutional failure, or corruption. This is the real danger.
The issue is not just that rules are being broken; it is that the rules themselves are often too broad, generic, and disconnected from the local context. They are written in a way that makes interpretation easy to manipulate. They create loopholes big enough for poor development to get through while still looking legal. When development control mainly relies on city-wide numerical standards, it cannot grasp the complexity of urban life. It cannot tell the difference between a delicate historic street and a major growth corridor. It cannot see where gradual change is suitable and where significant transformation might be justified. It cannot respond to cumulative impacts — the quiet damage caused when one “compliant” approval after another gradually destroys a place’s character.
Most importantly, it fails to protect the essential qualities that make cities liveable: sunlight, shade, airflow, walkability, privacy, social connection, and the feeling that a neighbourhood still belongs to its residents. This is how rules-based development control, when not guided by a strategic approach, leads to poor outcomes — not because planning has failed by chance, but because planning has been reduced to a mere calculation rather than a strategic tool.
From regulation to negotiation
Once numerical controls reach their limits, something else inevitably takes over: discretion. No set of numbers, however detailed, can fully resolve the complexity of real cities. Setbacks, height limits, floor area ratios, and separation distances may offer a framework, but, they cannot answer every question of place, context, and human experience. At that point, interpretation begins. What is considered acceptable becomes open to judgment, and judgment quickly turns into negotiation.
What should be a principled planning decision often becomes a matter of influence, access, persuasion, and leverage. The formal rules remain in place, but the real outcomes are shaped elsewhere, through private conversations, professional manoeuvring, institutional pressure, and the unequal power of those who know how to work the system.
Discretion itself is not the issue. Good planning depends on judgment guided by strategy. Cities cannot be managed solely by formulas. The problem arises when discretion is exercised without transparency, ethical discipline, or a true commitment to the public interest. At that point, discretion shifts from professional judgment to selective privilege. This is when public trust begins to decline.
To ordinary citizens, it appears that rules exist, but do not protect. Compliance is possible, yet it does not guarantee quality. Buildings that damage neighbourhoods still receive approval. Objections are discussed, but rarely change outcomes. Decisions are made, but not always for reasons that the public can see or understand.
People begin to suspect, often correctly, that planning is no longer about creating better cities, but about managing permissions. The system feels less like stewardship and more like a transaction, an administrative marketplace where outcomes depend less on principle and more on proximity to power. When that happens, the legitimacy of planning itself begins to weaken. Citizens lose faith not only in individual approvals, but in the very idea that the city is being shaped for the common good. And once trust is lost, rebuilding it becomes far harder than rewriting any regulation.
At the heart of this problem is a missing dimension in our planning system: performance. Planning regulations in Sri Lanka largely control form through numbers but rarely evaluate outcomes. How much sunlight reaches neighbouring homes? What is the wind impact at the street level? How does a development affect traffic, drainage, waste systems, and infrastructure capacity over time? These are not secondary questions. They are central to how cities function.
In many better planning systems, performance-based criteria are increasingly used to assess how developments behave, not just how they measure up. This does not replace rules, it strengthens them. It shifts the focus from compliance to quality.
If we are serious about improving our cities, we must change the question that we ask.
Instead of asking, Does this comply?, we must ask, Does this work, for this place, for these people, in this context?
That requires a shift in mindsetfrom regulation as a checklist to planning as judgment grounded in principles, accountability, and place. It requires stronger place-based frameworks thatguide decisions by local realities, not ad hoc negotiation.
Planning is not about ensuring buildings that meet minimum standards. It is about ensuring that cities function well for everyone. Until our system reflects that purpose, we will continue producing developments that are compliant on paper, but unacceptable in life.
And if we continue to accept that contradiction, then the real problem is not the buildings that we approve, but the cherished and inherited values of City-making from Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, our great Rajarata civilisation, that we have chosen to abandon: values of responsibility, restraint, public good, ecological wisdom, and the moral duty to leave behind cities better than the ones that we inherited.
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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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication