In this guest post, Dr Asha L. Abeyasekera explains the results of her project “Home as Hope: Reimagining Colombo as Utopia with the Urban Working-Class Poor in Sri Lanka“, funded by a USF Knowledge Mobilisation Award in April 2024.
In July and August 2024, I designed and conducted a series of six workshops with members from a low-income working-class community living in the heart of Sri Lanka’s capital city. Titled Colombo is my Dream City: My Home, Our Village, Our City – the workshops engaged with four representative groups – men, women, youth, and the elderly – to collectively build a Community Manifesto on Housing and Urban Planning. The workshops were attended by 95 community members aged between 15 and 82 years.
Methodologically, the workshops were a bold experiment. Using utopian thinking and imaginative play, the workshops were designed to inspire the city’s most marginalised residents to reimagine Colombo as an inclusive city. A community manifesto functions as a vision statement, a statement of principles, and a call to action. By asking people to evaluate the gap between their vision and their current reality, a manifesto can challenge assumptions, foster commitment, and provoke change.
But policy discussions are usually serious, can be dull, and often centre on the possible and the practical. The workshops focused on the impossible. By asking participants to imagine unlimited resources and a people-focused policy environment, the workshops opened up a creative space for imagining an ideal city, providing an opportunity for the community to freely articulate their needs and aspirations.
A bold experiment in Utopian Thinking was also necessary to address the problem of despair and resignation.
The residents of Kompanna Veediya – one of the oldest working-class neighbourhoods in Colombo, whose history dates back to Dutch colonial rule of the island – had accepted forced evictions and relocations from their ancestral homes as fait accompli. Ever since the Urban Regeneration Programme (URP) in Sri Lanka was launched in 2010, both policy and mainstream debates about its impact on low-income working-class residents of Colombo have largely accepted that their forced eviction and relocation to the outskirts of Sri Lanka’s capital city are an unavoidable outcome of development. The neoliberal capitalist logic here is that urban land – particularly in central Colombo – is too “valuable” to be occupied by low-income communities, and, instead, must be “liberated” for profitable development projects such as luxury real estate, office towers, shopping complexes, and tourist attractions.
The design of the first set of workshops had four components.
We – my two research associates and I – started the workshop by inviting participants to choose a worktable – tables set up with an array of stationery, including pencils, rulers, crayons, pencil colours, and felt pens – where participants could sit in small groups. We introduced the idea of Utopia by sharing visuals of existing Utopian Cities – Auroville (South India), Acrosanti (Arizona), and Palma Nova (Spain) – drawing their attention to the design principles that defined what community meant for those who designed and lived in them.
The first activity – My Dream Home – invited community members to imagine and draw their dream home, naming its spaces and features. We told them that there were no land or budgetary constraints. As they were completing their drawings, we walked around asking them to explain what they had imagined. This individual activity was central for identifying the key principles of how the community imagined ‘healthy and liveable homes’.
The second activity – Our Community – asked them to imagine their ideal neighbourhood. We shared photos of ‘playful cities’ that have incorporated the urban play framework in their design or been featured in ‘Placemaking through Play: Designing for Urban Enjoyment’ to inspire them. We had, prior to the workshop, taken photographs of key places in Kompanna Veediya, including a park, malls, hotels, and a flyover created by the Urban Regeneration Programmes, as well as older spaces like street markets, a makeshift playground, and street corners. Each group had to choose one photograph and redesign the space. This activity resulted in innovative and sustainable ideas for urban development that not only benefitted the community but also incorporated commercial enterprises and tourism. The activity also became the foundation for identifying the principles of a ‘caring community’.
The final activity – My City –commenced with a presentation of Scottish urbanist Patrick Geddes’ Garden City concept for Colombo in the early 20th century. Participants were then given three flash cards and asked to write out two things they would like in their ideal city, and one thing they would change about Colombo. We mapped their reflections thematically onto large sheets of paper, identifying the key principles of an ‘inclusive city’.
The first workshops helped me identify the overarching principles of the community manifesto – (i) healthy and liveable homes, (ii) a caring community, (iii) an inclusive city – and describe their key features. The workshops also helped me identify specific policy asks, rather than general ones, which would be critical for an advocacy campaign.
The design of the second set of workshops had two components:
The first was a feedback session on the draft community manifesto. Using translations of the manifesto (in Sinhala and Tamil) the community worked in small groups to edit the document.
The second session asked participants to dramatise advocacy scenarios by staging mini-dramas. The session was intended to prep community members for meetings with politicians, presentations to policymakers, and press conferences with the media. This resulted in a raucous and hilarious session where groups enacted scenarios where they tried to advocate for social housing using the manifesto. The session ended with a serious reflection on how important it was to be prepared with specific asks on the rare occasions the community is consulted.
The community unequivocally accepted the Manifesto as reflecting their voices, policy demands, needs, and aspirations. Many commented that the Manifesto was poetic and passionate, capturing their emotions and feelings – “it was like listening to our voices [….] not a boring policy document.”
The final community manifesto – Colombo is our Home: Reimagining Colombo as Utopia – an Alternative to Relocation – attests to the success of utopian thinking and imaginative play in the form of drawings and dramas for policy discussions with marginalised communities. The methodology helped me draft a policy document that centred the voices of the community.
The Manifesto inspired a community member to start a youth group – @RiseSlaveIsland (Instagram), and the leaders who represent various ‘wards’ within this large community to form a collective – the Kompanna Veediya Collective – with the aim of working together in advocating for community wellbeing. In the past year, the leaders have used the Manifesto to initiate conversations with the Colombo Municipal Council, local government representatives, and the corporate sector, and articulate specific needs.
The workshops inspired hope, collective action, and pragmatic solutions.
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Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my research associates Vraie Cally Balthazaar, Dr Kaushalya Ariyarathne, Hasanah Cegu, and Ramla Wahab-Salman for their assistance with facilitating the workshops and translating the Community Manifesto. My gratitude to the community leaders – Aisha Azardeen, Ayesha Rilwan, Farah Faizer, Reema Yuysoof, and Manash Badurdeen – for coordinating the workshops.