Browsing by Author "Kariyawasam, SS"

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item: Conference-Full-text
An approach to optimize the location decisions of public parks in Colombo
(Department of Architecture, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, 2020-12) Fernando, GS; Kariyawasam, SS; Dayaratne, R
Among the public services offered by the government of Sri Lanka, public parks can be identified as one of the crucial elements. With the increasing trend of building new public parks, it is necessary to identify the factors that may contribute to the optimum usage of parks. Literature on public park usage mostly discusses on impact of non-locational factors such as design elements, behavioral and psychological factors on the functionality. Therefore, this study aims to develop an approach to optimize public park location decisions based on functional efficiency. First, the usage of public parks was determined by standardizing the google visit data based on aggregated and anonymized data from users who have opted to allow access to Google Location History. Second, a questionnaire survey with a total sample of 165 park users was carried out to develop a user profile for parks and to understand its relationship with usage. Then the factors, which correlate with park usage, were used to define the factors of recreational attractiveness. These factors are share of population in the age group of 15 to 24, share of population in the age group of 45 to 65, share of population in the major ethnic group, street connectivity, park size and number of competitors in the neighborhood. In order to calculate the recreational gravity of each public park, data was obtained on defined attractiveness factors from each Grama Niladhari Division in the market range of each park and the distance from each GND to each park. Next, it modeled the gravitation relationship between usage and recreational gravity of each case study. Finally, the applicability of the derived model was tested with three additional cases. Accordingly, the model predicts the functionality with -15% variance for moderate size parks, -25% variance for small parks, and -35% variance for large parks with R2 of 0.66. Therefore, the model needs extension with some additional factors. Importantly, it highlights the importance of considering locational factors along with non-locational factors to optimize the public park location decisions.
item: Conference-Full-text
An evaluation on national housing policy Sri Lanka related to plantation housing
(Department of Architecture, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, 2020-12-15) Hapuarachchi, SP; Kariyawasam, SS; Dayaratne, R
Sri Lanka provides more than 50% share of the Tea as a beverage in the world market, but tea estate families are some of the poorest in the country. They live in line houses with deteriorated conditions. Providing adequate housing in the urban, rural and estate sectors is a major challenge. The National Housing Policy 2019 (NHP2019) has sought to address this issue based on principles of participatory planning and social inclusion, economic effectiveness, environmental protection, and cultural adequacy. Purpose of this research is to evaluate the NHP2019 in terms of the tea plantation sector and to assess whether the policy successfully addresses housing issues of this sector. The study is based on three case studies of Diagama estate, Thalangaha estate and Gee-Kiyana Kanda estate. Further it evaluates the NHP2019, in terms of appropriateness of the problem identification, developing the solution (policy formulation) and effectiveness on real ground application (policy implementation) using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods. The data collection involved a questionnaire survey with a proportionate sample of 172 households selected from three estates, an expert opinion survey with eight experts, and eight focus group discussions. The qualitative analysis was based on a content analysis using NVivo 11 software, and correlations and descriptive statistics were used for the quantitative analysis. The findings revealed that the NHP has not given due attention to the concerns of tea producers at the problem identification and policy formulation stages. There are also limitations of implementation such as no action on previous line rooms, land tenure, limitation on small loan programmes, productive land use for housing construction, issues in fund allocation and infrastructure provision. This research highlights the importance of policy reviews and revisions, which is rare in the practice of Sri Lanka.