Striking a balance between the visibility of landmarks and the demand for development: the case of Sri Jayawardanepura parliament surroundings

Abstract

Landmarks’ which is one of the five elements those contribute to the city image, as first explained by Kevin Lynch, can be manipulated strategically to enhance the visual quality of urban environments. Landmarks are point references and their key physical characteristic is singularity which can be derived by maintaining background contrast. Urban Planners adopt various regulatory measures such as height restrictions and development control guidelines to maintain singularity of landmarks but they are mostly arbitrary and not methodologically derived. They are challenged in situations where the pressures for development is high and the real estate market conditions do not justify such controls. This paper presents a similar situation in Sri Jayawardanepura new capital city of Sri Lanka, where as a policy decision of the government, the prominence of the Parliament complex had to be preserved amidst enormous demand for developments. This paper presents a scientific methodology to handle this situation enabling physical developments to get to the optimum while maintaining the prominence of the Parliament complex. Visibility Analysis, which is an Isovist technique, based on the concept of the Imageability, was adopted to develop a methodology to propose the development types and the height controls in the vicinity of a landmark. Results indicated that such scientific approaches enable to liberate considerable extents of lands for development, which otherwise were restricted on arbitrary controls, as well as some new controls, without which the intended prominence of the landmark features wouldn’t have been preserved.