Review on origin and expansion of Colombo Urban Area, Sri Lanka; Planners’ Pers Pective

Sri Lanka is a naturally rich country located in the Indian Ocean and it has a self-sufficient, sophisticated history which runs back in time for over 2000 years. At that time we had urban development which we could be proud of and all those cities were developed in agriculturally rich areas like North Central province. Early in the 16^th century, Sri Lanka faced different colonial influences such as Portuguese, Dutch and British. After that the traditionally developed urban pattern in North Central part gradually shifted to South Western part, which was centralized around Colombo due to the advantages of the natural sea port. In 1978, administrative functions were moved to Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte and then Colombo was designated as the commercial capital of Sri Lanka.

Time to time various physical plans were introduced for development of Colombo but were not successful. Therefore objective of this paper is to review origin and growth of Colombo and historical planning attempts. After all sorts of criticisms, if we look back at the progress of Colombo, it is evident that the main concept of the current planners is to raise the standards of Colombo to suit the title of ‘the Wonder of Asia’.