Abstract:
Sustainability is currently the most pressing, complex, and challenging agenda faced by the city. The focus of
sustainability has turned on to wider issues of environment, ecology and people. Eco-city as a concept has
played a vital role in designing new habitats in the city. In the context of promoting nature as bio-centric entity
that controls itself, the eco-city has become a life-territory, a place defined by its life forms, topography and
biota, rather than by human activities. As a result the concept of eco-city is over-dependent on the carrying
capacity of land, thus paralyzing the growth of the city and its social evolution. We intend to test the strength of
the evolved city culture as a reliable tool in shaping strengthening the liveability of the city. In Sri Lanka, cities
have been built as political cum religious polis since antiquity and they pretty much yet remain politicallycentred,
fragmented and nature-represented. Although, the Sri Lankan city is full of trees, it is not green as a
living space because the illegible city form is distancing from society. Our research, through a literature review
and a field study carried out in the city of Panadura, intends to test new paradigms that make the city a
strengthened living container. We find that the socio-culturally defined ecological footprint is a useful tool in
reinforcing city’s liveability.
