People are leaving their homes with the promise of a highrise apartment only to face unexpected payments and be labelled disruptions to urban development, according to an article by Ashanee Kottage, Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Smart Future (CSF).
Kottage stated, “Armed soldiers removed residents, sometimes overnight and without warning or compensation.” Of the families displaced, Colombo Urban Lab research across 24 sites in 2024 found 400-500-square-foot flats crowded with families, having little safe space.
Relocation also imposed high costs. A Rs100,000 upfront payment, loan dependence, and monthly fees push families into debt. They were labelled defaulters.
Kottage suggests criminalisation in Sri Lanka is not only about arrests. Through schemes such as the Urban Regeneration Project (URP), a scheme to clear inner-city settlements and rehouse low-income families in high-rise blocks, she says, “the state reimagines poverty as illegality, informality as disorder, and difference as deviance.”
Residents signed documents under duress, language rights were ignored, and the military helped to evict lawful occupants. By 2018, the URP cost over $447 million, more than the Mattala airport, without transparent feasibility studies.
Kottage said the settlements, “house over 68,000 families across 9% of the city’s land.”
The settlements also represent long-established neighbourhoods rather than temporary residences. She refers to a 2023 survey of Colombo, which found that 98% of these residents were in situ, more than 80% had permanent housing, 99% were connected to the electricity grid, and over 90% of households had lived there for more than 30 years.
Rather than addressing poverty as a structural issue rooted in inequality, the state responds by penalising behaviour such as street vending, loitering, or public sleeping, effectively punishing people for being poor.
Kottage cites the most recent example, where at Galle Face Green, long-standing isso wadey vendors were removed in February 2024, not for hygiene breaches but for spoiling the view near luxury hotels, after already being shifted under the Slave Island relocation drive to remake Colombo as a world-recognised city.
The URP was due for review in November 2025. Framed as a way to modernise Colombo and free central land for commercial projects, it has quietly shifted where and how the city’s poorest residents live.