Rajiva Wijesinha, whose favoured title is “Easy Essential Reforms: Planning Buildings for people” … in an article presented in the Ceylon Daily News, September 2026
One of my principal complaints, in the days when I was supposed to advise on reconciliation, was that those in authority thought the way to people’s hearts was through cement. This doubtless was because, as my father once memorably suggested thirty years ago – to be hauled up before parliament for lese majeste in suggesting that ministers wanted to deal in construction to make money– buildings mean commissions.
In the North then buildings came up apace, with no concern for their effective use – as with the Vocational Training Centre built in Mullaitivu – nor indeed for promoting employment for people of the area. Those I criticized, but the sheer enormity of the abuse only became clear to me when I had business at the Hambantota District Secretariat and realized that the Rajapaksa government had put up massive structures which meant much wasted space. There were large landings that turned into wide corridors, characterless without any resting spaces.
The full implications of this bleakness however only came home to me when I read a fascinating book called Breathing Space: Towards Regeneration of Public Activity in the Space Between Buildings. It was by Prasanna Pitigala Liyanage, who teaches in the Department of Integrated Design at the University of Moratuwa, a department I believe he helped set up.
But I had known Prasanna long before his current eminence, for he was one of the Cultural Affairs Trainees we employed at the British Council, a scheme I set up to provide gainful occupation to students at a loss in the dreadful days of the late eighties when violence was brewing and entrance to universities was delayed. We restricted the training period to three months, but we gave Prasanna a retainer after that for he was a whiz at designing the monthly bulletin the Council produced, when it was the most active cultural centre in the country.
I think we chose well, for as I later put it all our Cats were Swans, several becoming leading figures in English Departments at various universities. Prasanna was not initially as fluent in English as the other Cats, for he had been a scholarship boy at Royal, but he was swift to learn and his book is written in excellent English.
I had first come across him through the Drama Workshops Richard de Zoysa had conducted at Royal, for he later integrated his students with those attending our Drama Workshops at the Council, led by the brilliant English trainer Scott Richards. I still recall those boys taking over the workshop productions, and in particular a skit on J R Jayewardene driving his cabinet along, presented through a farmer and his bullocks. My father for ages afterwards would recall the genius of the farmer, a good friend of Prasanna called Madura.
I had wanted Madura to replace Prasanna, for he too was clearly a genius, but he did not take up the offer. I think he was involved then in JVP activity, and a year later he was arrested, released, and then taken in again and then he disappeared. It was after that, and perhaps because of that, that Richard himself was later taken away and killed.
Prasanna went on to university when things settled down, and did brilliantly, but obviously he has continued to think about social issues. Breathing Space is a startling reminder about how a few changes in the way we think and we plan can increase social interactions and hence social cohesion.
His basic theme is put succinctly in the introduction –
The presence of people, whether walking, talking, trading, praying, or resting, is what animates space and gives it meaning. Where activity is absent, space decays.
His ideas are illustrated throughout the book with examples from Kandy, but he discusses other areas too, and encapsulated briefly what I had thought about Hambantota but could not have recorded so clearly, nor indeed deployed such elegant prose –
Wide roads, dispersed buildings, controlled precincts: clarity without stickiness, scale without use. The new administrative quarter gleams but rarely hums. Pedestrians have nowhere to cross; vendors hover at the edge, denied a front-back spill-over. With little shade or water, optional activity retreats indoors and by afternoon the heat drives the city into silence. Hambantota shows the danger of building before demand, of a plan too complete to evolve.
The prose is not just elegant, it is thought-provoking. That last phrase sums up Prasanna’s basic point, or one of them, that plans must evolve according to usage, it is people who give buildings life, not bare structures that do not facilitate human activity and interaction.
I should note, in case this praise sounds indiscriminate, that the book could have done with more editing, for there is repetition, sometimes even of whole paragraphs. But those I think are details, in comparison with the passion Prasanna conveys, and also the basic truth that people are turned inward when they have no outside space, and human contact is limited.
Oddly enough I had sensed something similar in books I have read recently on entirely different subjects. The thrillers of Ian Rankin for instance, set in a developing Edinburgh where soulless structures house alienated souls, are full of long empty threatening corridors. His descriptions of wasted spaces chime in with Prasanna’s exhortation to fill such spaces with simple structures that will promote sociability, benches, simple infrastructure for vendors, mural art on walls – and to broadbase ownership by giving communities a stake in such spaces.
Prasanna does not look at places in cold climates, but draws positive pictures of developments in tropical countries and also in Sri Lanka. He mentions how pavements were broadened in the Pettah and space extended for vendors; he talks of how residents in the Galle Fort were encouraged to participate in maintenance through grants and community workshops; and in Jaffna he tells us underused buildings were retained as open-air pavilions, for youth activities, teaching, and rituals. And, a constant theme in his writing, he refers to the preservation and planting of trees in Anuradhapura.
Other constant themes are better paving to facilitate walking; better drainage to ensure roads are always usable; corridors along shopfronts to allow for productive pauses; open verandahs and where possible courtyards to encourage neighbourhood interactions. Prasanna draws on initiatives in Georgetown in Malaysia and Ahmedabad in Gujerat and Yogyakarta in Indonesia to suggest similar initiatives in Kandy.
In the last resort, decisions about cities will be taken by local authorities and the Urban Development Authority in Sri Lanka. But government should formulate a policy about such decisions, and perhaps start mandatory workshops, conducted by Prasanna and other sensitive designers to familiarize decision makers with the principles which should govern their planning. And of course this book, translated also into Sinhala and Tamil, should be compulsory reading for decision makers in the field of urban planning, and indeed for those commissioning buildings in both the private and the public sectors.
They could also, as I suggested some time back, ask all District Secretaries to prepare schedules of unused buildings in their districts, and having checked with the ministries to which they belong suggest renovation on the principles Prasanna has suggested, paying particular attention to his suggestions of local involvement in decoration and management. He makes much of festivals, but there could also be local festivities that bring people together, and also encourage creativity.
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