Abstract:
Small cities in Asia will have to play a 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 a sudden 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
