ABSTRACT
The Sri Lankan commercial capital Colombo is a multi-religious city within a predominantly Sinhala Buddhist state. Through examples of certain religious edifices (hereafter structures) and practices, this chapter highlights the critical importance of a politics of recognition when it comes to identifying religious structures and their impact on the urban space in a city and country where much of the post-independence era has been marred by ethnic and religious conflict. A politics of recognition, as I call it, entails the capacity to acknowledge religious institutions and their communities and to explore the actual extent to which these entities can co-exist. Critical to such a process is a willingness to have one's common sense understanding of what is meant by religion challenged and possibly expanded. This is an issue for planners and developers just as much as for the general population, because urban planning and development are themselves so entangled – ideologically, socially and politically – that the act of recognition of religious structures must proceed through careful social and historical analysis and without the baggage of a priori notions regarding what a religious structure or practice comprises and how it might relate to other social institutions more routinely imagined as secular. At the heart of this is the understanding of how a religious structure elicits a spatial configuration and thereby interacts with other structures religious and otherwise. It is one thing, I suggest, for a planning or heritage consultant to map the city and note where the structures are; but quite another thing to understand how these structures interact and continue to create new meanings as well as new tensions and conflicts. Recognizing an Islamic bank, for example, is much easier than recognizing the religion in other banking systems whose seemingly secular existence is taken-for-granted as the normal order of things where the Islamic bank is deemed to be exceptional.
