SRI LANKA ASSOCIATION FOR ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE SECTION C PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 2014: “Search for feasible and sustainable shelter: Sri Lanka’s experience”
– L T Kiringoda is a Chartered Architect, Town Planner and a Chartered Environmentalist. He headed the Directorate of Development Planning of the Urban Development Authority of Sri Lanka, wherein he served for nearly 3-decades. E-mail:ltkirin@hotmail.com- –
Abstract
From the stage of finding shelter under naturally built forms the homo-sapiens have come a long way to make personal choices on shelter. The demand for personal preferences and the failure of mankind to meet the demand have created a problem in finding shelter suitable for them. The problem, though appears easy to be solved, has become a problem with complex political ramifications due to policy makers insisting on feasibility and sustainability of solutions. As a country with a settlement history of over 2500 years, Sri Lanka has been in the forefront of nations providing innovative and practical concepts to solve the housing problem, in spite of international donor agencies beginning to treat housing as market driven and changing the policy on providing donor funds for the housing sector accordingly. Continued state patronage in Sri Lanka on both social and market housing, even after the global policy change, has been pushing housing providers in both state and private sectors to search for more and more feasible and sustainable solutions to the problem of shelter leaving a legacy of policies, programs, strategies and projects.