Dr Asha L. Abeyasekera
Funding period: 6 May 2024 – 15 April 2025
Type of funding:
Other Grants
This grant was awarded as a follow-up to Urban geographies of home and homemaking in pandemic times: gendered experiences of dispossession and ethical-life claiming in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Home as Hope is a collaboration with Vraie Cally Balthazaar based at LirneAsia to write a community manifesto that aims to create a space for Colombo’s working-class poor to imagine an alternative future where their needs and aspirations are central to urban planning and development.
The project aims to provide an opportunity for urban working-class residents of Colombo, Sri Lanka, to discuss and debate their ideas for an equitable city and collectively produce a ‘Community Manifesto’ that privileges their voices. Building on the findings of GCRF-UKRI funded study on ‘off-grid cities, the manifesto building exercise intends to open up a space of creative play where people are invited to imagine a utopian city. Such a space allows people to reimagine Colombo as a place of possibility that is not limited to the existing policies of the Urban Regeneration Project nor constrained by a political climate permeated by resignation and despair.
The overall benefit to the community is the opportunity to voice their concerns about home and community and produce a vision statement and a statement of principles that clearly articulates how the state and development agencies should engage with them when implementing their plans for the city.