The Spatial Configuration as a Strategic Agent in the Growth of Urban Areas

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The Spatial Configuration as a Strategic Agent in the Growth of Urban

Areas: the Case of a Small City in Sri Lanka

Planning Strategy for Sustainability

Jagath Munasinghe1

and Aruna Bandara2

___________________________________________________________________________

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Sustainability has throughout been rhetoric in urban planning around the world for more than three

decades by now despite many ambiguities associated with the term. Further, strategic planning is often

discussed both in planning literature and practice as a pre-empt model towards sustainable development.

Yet, how sustainable and strategic are the urban planning interventions over the past few decades is a

question that emerges in ones mind when the state of affairs related to the physical developments in our

cities are viewed in retrospect. Noticeably, the development trends in most of the South Asian cities

more often than not are unprecedented and quite contradictory to what was envisaged by their

development plans. The main reason behind this situation may be the gaps in the understanding among

planners on the means of strategic interventions, which need to deal with a whole range of complex

elements starting from socio-cultural and political relationships to the sensitive natural systems of the

environment. In order to deal with all of these elements, planners need to comprehend the spatial extent,

which cuts across all of them and formulate the ground for their existence in the urban environments.

Space, is an inevitable, all encompassing factor in all social and temporal relations in human

geographies, be it urban or otherwise (Soja,1989). Space is the machine of configuration of the urban

affairs (Hillier, 1989) and it thus, is the inexplicit substance of urban planning. For this reason alone it

has been an area of interest to many studies in planning, but still demands more and more efforts to be

explored for better understanding. Less of strategies to intervene with spatial dynamics can be quoted as

a valid reason, among many others, for some obvious questions on sustainability of urban projects in the

recent past. The case from a small city in Sri Lanka, presented in this paper is one such example wherethe implied objective of planning was to achieve a sustainable city development by redirecting its future

growth through strategic action projects, but failed to accomplish the said objective.

The planning approaches adopted by Sri Lanka and most of the other South Asian states still show

allegiance to the core values of the early twentieth century British planning systems. They have

throughout been ineffective to address the complexities in South Asian urbanities to the extent problem

solving, not in a metaphorical sense, but in a pragmatic sense of finding way out of a problem or someproblems was the intended purpose of planning (Refer Higgins & Morgan, 2000). This is more than a

comment and equally true for both small towns and bigger cities in the region. In Sri Lanka, most of the

early planning attempts in smaller cities were projects driven by these values that promoted escapism

1 Senior Lecturer, Department of City and Country Planning, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.2 Graduate Student, Department of Urban Engineering, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.


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rather than adaptation as the underlying philosophy. Hence, evading the city from flood disasters,

vehicular traffic congestions and threats to cultural heritage sites were the main reasons for planning.

The case of the small city of Rathanapura, presented in the forthcoming sections, is one of them where

evacuation of city activities into a safer site away from floods was the aim of its first modern planning

project.

Rathnapura is located in a lower plateau among south west hilly areas of the central Sri Lanka and

affected by the spillover of the Kaluganga river that flows through the plateau. In order to avoid the

further growth of the city in the areas prone to floods, the planning authorities in 1970s have adopted the

New Town concept gifted by British planning ideologies of that time. The approach was a strategic

relocation of all administrative activities into a highland away from the plateau with the development of

roads and other physical infrastructure in the new town, expecting the existing commercial and other

activities in the city to follow suit. Although it was not stated in planning proposals, it is clear that the

city activities existed in the flood prone areas were expected to decline and the new areas at the

highlands within a close proximity to the new town were expected to thrive as the emerging city of

Rathnapura. Today, after about three decades from the implementation of the project, the old

Rathnapura is still thriving as the city, irrespective of the damage caused by occasional floods, and the

new town remains as the area exclusive for administrative activities. This study attempts to explore thisdevelopment, which is contrary to what was envisaged in the plan, as a function of spatial configuration

that is decisive in directing the growth of a city. The citys spatial structure both at pre-plan stage andpost-plan stage are analyzed in space syntax method and demonstrate that the planned new city had

strengthened the urban agglomeration potentials of the old city, instead of reducing it, and thus enabled

its further growth avoiding the expected growth towards the new town. The question of how strategic

the planning intervention to achieve the stated objective of the plan is discussed at this point.

2.0 STRATEGIC PLANNING AND ATTEMPTS TO COMPREHEND URBAN SPACE

Strategic planning is a concept that said to have its origin in the military notion of strategy or the

activity of leading or organizing an army as a general in order to win a fight and a war (Needham ,2000). One of its first appearances is found in urban renewal projects in San Francisco in early 1900s

and urban regeneration projects in London docklands. There the strategic planning seems to haveindicated strategic partnerships, which were crucial for the implementation of the projects. Strategic

interventions in urban renewal refer more to community participation and stakeholder involvement than

anything else. However, in the urban planning literature, strategic planning is mostly discussed as a

methodical approach that replaced preceding planning approaches such as urban design planning,

rational comprehensive planning and framework planning (eg: Rydlin1993). Its methodologicalcontents can be more fully understood with the principles of: design urban areas with dynamic and

sustainable long term perspective, dealing with daily policy, trouble shooting and process-supporting

actions with a decision making process involving all possible actors, and empowering people to better

their living conditions and to participate in society (e.g. Patsy Healey, 1997).

Albrechts (2006) presented a few cases from European cities that adopted a shift from the conventional

spatial planning programmes to the identification and implementation of strategic projects, those havethe potential to further the development scenarios envisaged by the planning agencies. Strategic

planning accordingly is: focused upon limited number of strategic key issues and takes a critical view of

the environment in terms of determining strengths and weaknesses in the context of opportunities and

threats caused by the external trends and forces. It identifies and gathers major stakeholder (public and

private) and allows for a broad (multi-level governance) and diverse involvement during the planning

process, design plan-making structure and developing content, image and decision making frameworks

for influencing and managing spatial change. Further, it is concerned with new ideas and the processes

that can propagate them, thus generating ways of understanding, ways of building agreements and ways

of organizing and mobilizing for the purpose of external influence in different areas, in long and short

term, it is focused on decisions, actions, results and monitoring, feedback and revision (Albrechts,

2009). What is important among all these for spatial dynamics is the formulation of urban trajectories

rather than attempting to engrave conventional land use based master plans. Yet, not many scholarly

attempts have been found on the strategic intervention in urban spatial dynamics. Apart from the


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configuration. These works suggest that urban areas are in a process of change throughout, and the

change in the order of their activities, reorganization pattern and the growth can be better understood

and guided by planners by observing the power of the internal force: the Spatial Configuration. Butconventional planning approaches usually understand urban spaces as neutral, static end states that can

be realized through deterministic manipulations. Hence, they rarely account for the dynamic

relationship between the organization of space and the location order of activities, and the spatial

strategies proposed by plans often bear no value in the process.

3.0 THE STUDY AND THE METHOD

As stated earlier, the case presented in this paper is an attempt to explain the unexpected development

pattern of urban activities in Rathnapura city as a function of the changing configuration of its urban

spaces. Space Syntax application is chosen as appropriate for the purpose. According to Space Syntax

theory the spatial units of an urban area; that are streets, squares, etc.; when represented by axial lines in

the technique, show an unequal values of integration in their overall configuration. The spatial units that

show a higher level of integration into the other spatial segments in the overall configuration show more

potential to attract people and thus, become spaces with higher demand for more competitive urban

activities. In the competition for space, the activities that could bid high, succeed and the others get

shifted into spaces with lower level of integration. In the process of growth or planned expansion, theoverall spatial configuration gets changed and the demand pattern for space too changes with that. This

study therefore, examines the state of change in the overall spatial configuration with the introduction of

the new town area to Rathnapura city.

The method of study consisted of three main steps. In the first step, the activity locations of the city are

mapped. For the clarity of the analysis, the activities are categorized into two main groups and under

which, six sub groups, based on their generally implied competitiveness in urban locations and the

nature of the activity (table 3.1). For example, commercial banks, insurance companies, other financial

organizations, showrooms for luxury goods, etc, which are highly competitive in bidding for urban

spaces, are considered as the first sub-group of the commercial activities. The general services

(commercial) such as hair dressers, laundries, tailors, etc.., those compete moderately, are grouped as

the second sub-group of commercial activities. All the retail trading activities are considered as the thirdcategory commercial activities while the wholesale businesses, warehouses, factories and heavy duty

workshops, etc, are identified as fourth sub-group of commercial activities. The residential and

agricultural activities, which are weak in bidding for urban spaces, are identified as sub-groups in the

second main group. These six types of activities act in urban space in different ways, but collectively

they form the overall urban setting. However, due to the absence of recorded information on detail

activity locations at the pre-planned stage of the city, no activity analysis was done for that stage.

In the second step the configurations of the streets and public movement paths of the Ratnapura city is

analyzed both at the pre-planning stage and post-planning stage. Syntactic analysis of the SpaceSyntax method is used for this purpose. The fundamental unit of consideration of Space Syntax methodis the axial connectivity that makes the shortest possible path from one end to another end of the public

space (street, square, alley, etc). Thus, the first task in this step is to reduce the composition of streets,

alleys and all other public spaces in an urban area into a composition of axial lines that incident eitheron one another or many others. The number of minimum axial line connections (shortest possible path)

that a person has to pass through to get into a space from another space decides the level of connectivity

of the first in relation to the second. In this manner, the connectivity of a space into all other spaces in

the urban area can be evaluated by accounting for overall spatial configuration of the area. The level of

connectivity is an indication of the degree to which each space is integrated into the urban area. In order

to apply the method the streets and other public movement paths of the two situations are reduced to

axial-line diagrams, and these diagrams in turn, are analyzed using depth map, which is thecommonly used software for Space Syntax studies. It analyses the level of integration of each axial line

(which represent a spatial unit) at a given radius of consideration. The method emphasizes two levels of

integration of an urban space: local and global (Hillier, 1996). Local integration is indicative of the

structural composition of the public spaces at the locality level and its analysis enables to identify the

locations that are most and least attractive within the immediate context. Hence, when an urban area is

analyzed at the local level, the local centres emerge as the most integrated spaces and more competitive


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land uses are usually concentrated into them. Global integration is the indicator of the attractiveness of

different public spaces at the overall spatial configuration of the city. Only the global integration is

taken into account in this study, as it deals with a change that has happened at the city scale.

Category Activities (Categorized based on the level of the competitiveness for the space)

CommercialCategory 1 High end commercial activities: Commercial Banks, Financial institutions, Showrooms for luxurygoods, etc

CommercialCategory 2 Commercial services: Hair dressers, Tailors, Laundries, etc

CommercialCategory 3 All types of retail activities (excluding the activities in category 1): Groceries, Book shops, Foodboutiques, etc

CommercialCategory 4 Space consuming heavy activities: Factories, Heavy workshops, Warehouses, etc

Residential Individual dwellings (with gardens), Collective dwellings, etc

Agricultural All types of agricultural activities

In the third step, the sensitivity of each activity category to the level of spatial integration of the post-

planning stage of the city is examined. The level of the sensitivity is determined by the average andstandard deviation of the dataset (the integration values of all activities) of each category. The

integration value of the axial line, closest to each activity location is taken as the level of spatial

integration of that location. The outcome of this analysis is compared with the level of integration of the

same spatial units at the pre-planning stage and the conclusions are derived out of this comparison.

4.0 THE SMALL CITY OF RATHNAPURA

The name; Ratnapura implies the City of Gems and the entire region of Ratnapura is well known for

gem mining. Ratnapura has been the administrative centre of Sabaragomuwa Province of Sri Lanka

from 1850s, the times of British colonial rule in the island. The city has grown outward from a nuclei

formed at the intersection of a few major highways of the country. Thus, it has a concentric form and

elongated along main highways (figure 4.1). Located at a plateau in the bank of Kaluganga river, whichcarries the runoff from the areas of highest precipitation of the island, and situated at a lower elevation,

the city is also known also for experiencing major floods almost every year. In certain years extensive

property and human loses were reported due to floods and the entire routine functions of the city gets

held up for a few days during floods. Having considered the severity of the damages caused by the

floods, the government of Sri Lanka in 1970s decided to plan a New Town, in line with the popularly

adopted problem solving methods of the time. The project was commissioned 1977 to the Town &

Country Planning Department, which was the apex physical planning body of the state. The land

selected for the new town was about two kilometers towards the North West of the existing town and at

a higher elevation that never got affected by floods. In planning the new town, the conventional land use

zoning based master plan approach was adopted and major administrative functions were the priority

elements that were given space at higher elevations. The roads and other physical infrastructure

adequate for the growth predicted for next twenty years were in place and the lands in the immediatevicinity were reserved for future developments. New housing schemes were developed to attract people

and a gradual movement of commercial and other urban activities was expected. The expectation was to

redirect the future development of the urban activities of the existing town towards the new town. This

is a strategic approach as the entire town was not built, but only the main administrative activities and

infrastructure was provided expecting the other activities to follow up. The first stages of the New Town

were built in early 1980s. However, to a contrary, the old city has not shifted in the expected direction

and instead it has been growing at a considerable rate centering the old city. The new city does not have

the life of a city as most of the lands are vacant still and becomes dead, after working hours of the

government offices (figure 4.2). At present, all city activities, except a few administration institutions,

are located in the old city, even amidst flood situations. A few major highways that connect Ratnapura

to other regions, public amenities such as the bus terminals, play grounds, etc, and some of the high

level trade and commercial facilities are inundated and inaccessible during the periods of heavy rains,yet comfortably settled in the old city centre.

Table 3.1: Categorization of the urban activities


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spread over a wide area, which had a very low sensitivity to the changes in the spatial integration. These

findings are in line with the findings of previous Space Syntax studies (done at London and Santiago:

Hiller, 1996), that show a clear effect of spatial configuration of a city on the location decisions of

different activities in it.

Minimum Maximum Average Standard Deviation

0.15878 0.17806 0.1749 0.0031


0.130867 0.178515 0.1687 0.0102


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Figure 5.11: Commercial Category 1 Activities - Sensitivity




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6.0 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Ratnapura city has been experiencing an annual flood for hundreds of years. In order to address this

issue, and to facilitate a sustainable future development to the city the planning authority implemented

the New Town development project in 1970s. The intention was to redirect the citys growth towardshigher terrains. The main strategy of the new plan was to relocate all the government administration

activities to the new location and providing the necessary infrastructure. The expected scenario was a

self relocation of the other activities following the administrative activities. Instead of following the

order expected by the plan, the old town is still growing even amidst regular floods. This phenomenon

of reinforcing the existing pattern even amidst strategic planned intervention was the area of interest to

this paper.

Looking at it from an external vantage point it can be studied that there is a push factor, which causes

peoples lives and property losses while there is a pull factor, which provides good accessibility andmutually supportive activities at close proximity. In a free market oriented economy, the business

decisions are taken to maximize their profits. The location decision plays a vital role in this process and

naturally, the private investors compete to acquire the most advantageous space, which obviously is the

space with highest accessibility.

The comparison of the integration maps at two stages show that the level of spatial integration of the

spatial units in the core area of the old city got increased by the planned intervention. According to

Space Syntax logic, the spaces with higher integration have the potential to be more competitive than

the others in attracting people and activities in an urban area. The activity categories studied in this

paper showed a strong allegiance of different activity types into locations with varied levels of spatial

integration. The urban activities such as banks, financial institutions, etc those are considered to be the

highest competitors in urban spaces, were located in most integrated locations in the city. Their

locations indicate the highest average integration values with low standard deviation, which explains

their high sensitivity to the locations highly integrated in the overall composition. At the same time,

activities such as farms and residences are located where there is a low average integration and a very

high standard deviation. This explains their weak sensitivity to the spatial integration in making location

decision. In between these two ends, other urban activities such as retail trading, commercial services,industrial warehouses, etc form a hierarchy in terms of their competitiveness to the advantageous urban

spaces, which is indicated by the average integration and standard deviation values.

In this context, the scenario provided in the development plan may not necessarily be the advantageous

to the urban activities to find best locations. The New town however, has strengthened the potential of

the core area of the old town by increasing the level of its integration to the other parts of the city. In

this case study itself, it clearly illustrates the differences in spatial integration between old city and new

city areas. The spatial integration of the new city area is not par with the average integration level

indicated by the locations with high and medium urban activities. What is questioned here is the

strategic validity of the planning decisions in terms of choosing appropriate spatial scenarios.

Relocation and New Town planning are not invalid as strategies in urban planning, but, in formulating

their applications the planners have to be more sensitive towards the spatial dynamics of urbanactivities, which are not simply amenable to planners control.

7.0 REFERENCES

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The Spatial Configuration as a Strategic Agent in the Growth of Urban Areas

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