Withstanding the Forces: A Study of the Spatial Configuration as the Factor of Organizing Activities in Small Cities

Abstract

Small cities in Asia will have to playa major role in future urban scenario, as a considerable share of the world urban population by the mid of this century will be living in them. Planning their growth thus, has become a need of the day, and to support their planning with better informed decisions research is urgently needed in many aspects of small cities. One such important aspect is the dynamics of the configuration of spaces, which the existing body of knowledge in planning has yet not fully explained and, towards which the planning approaches are conventionally least sensitive. In that context, this paper explores the dynamics of the spatial order in two small cities in Sri Lanka, namely Galle and Rathnapura. The two cities have been experiencing two types of forces associated with their growth and change. The first is the set of endogenous forces that urges them to change, sometimes expanding outward from their boundaries. The second is the flux of exogenous forces, among which technocratic urban planning process and recurrent and unexpected natural disasters are the prominent. Rathnapura city experienced annual floods, and a planned intervention to overcome that, and Galle city experienced asudden tsunami disaster and an unplanned project based intervention that affected its growth. The interventions resulted in a reconfigurations and changes in the spatial order of activities in both cities, but in manners that were unprecedented by the planning agencies. The paper discusses this phenomenon of self-organizing, responding to the effects of external forces of change, as a function of the 'spatial configuration': that is the overall composition of spatial elements, to determine the 'activity pattern': that is the order of the location of activities in space. The spatial configurations and the activity patterns of these two cities before and after the said interventions are compared. The pattern of the activity spaces are studied with activity mapping and the spatial configurations are studied using Space Syntax.