Nihal Perera, whose chapter 16 is entitled “From colonial outpost to indigenous kleptocratic city”
ABSTRACT : This chapter maps out the trajectory of the production, reproduction, and transformation of Colombo through colonial, post-colonial, neoliberal, and kleptocratic periods. Created as part of a European-imperial system of cities, Colombo’s identity is tied to larger systems of cities. Using the threshold between the city and outside to look from inside, the chapter approaches the story of Colombo more from indigenous and local people’s vantage points and perspectives, acknowledging and adapting significant local interpretations. The discussion focuses the neoliberal and kleptocratic periods. The neoliberals transformed the city’s form to attract foreign investment, shifting the purpose of planning to finding sites for investors, and enabling growth. Replacing investment for development with growth for investment, the kleptocrats intensified the movement of money and intercepted the circuits at the state level, via the government. They allow individual projects to shape the city. Colombo’s subjects have incrementally transformed it, by living and familiarising it. The layers of society and space created by these processes contest, cooperate, and entangle with each other in the form of cascades, generating new elements.
Figure 16.1 Colombo as part of the Portuguese Indian-ocean space .... Source: Perera (1998), drawn by Ashra Wickramathilaka.
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