ABSTRACT
This chapter explores and reflects on the experience in Wanathamulla, considered the main “slum” in Colombo, where the team lived for 14 months. Instead of looking at it as an isolated neighbourhood, we explore it as a translocality connected to other places. Instead of applying mainstream knowledge to make sense of it, the study employs an inside-out perspective and build on the observations and local interpretations, but with the help of experiences in other places, that is, theory. Most crucially, the study acknowledges the people agency, viewing them as agents of change than victims of larger processes. We also employ our own reflections, based on our relationship with the Wanathamulla community and the experience in a broad range of neighbourhoods in many countries. Cities are sources of dreams and aspirations. These sentiments shared by almost everyone from the powerholders and businessmen to the very poor are complemented by outside agencies such as national governments, global development agencies, and foreign investors. Along with the visions of investors and powerholders who are considered the agents of modernisation and globalisation of cities, much has also been written about the poorer citizens’ creation of “slums” and informal environments. Yet the reference is the “Western city”, that is, the modern (globalised) city the rich and the powerful emulate and the developed Western city against which the “slum” is defined (Perera and Tang 2013). From a scholarly standpoint, Lefebvre dug deep into social space and came up with a trinity of spaces and the Marxists introduced political economy to the study of urbanism. These works focus on abstract spaces produced by the state and capital and their implications on people who are viewed as victims. Building on cultural studies, scholars of postcolonial urbanism highlighted the contested nature of space, acknowledging the presence of subjects in the production of space. Paying special attention to the transformative capacity of ordinary people, select scholars have begun to view urbanism from locals’ vantage points. This chapter builds on this discourse.
