Nihal Perera
Nihal's main research interest is in the social production of space. His work focuses on lived spaces; how ordinary people negotiate/transform absolute and abstract spaces and produce (lived) spaces for their daily activities and cultural practices.
The two-time Fulbright Scholar (China and Myanmar) was Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore. He received three Fulbright-Hays awards and was nominated for Heiskell and Malone awards. Besides the USA, Nihal has taught in China, Germany, India, Italy, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand. His publications include People's Spaces; Transforming Asian Cities (co-eds); Decolonizing Ceylon; Importing planning problems; the Planner’s City; Contesting Modernities in Chandigarh; and Feminizing the City.
The two-time Fulbright Scholar (China and Myanmar) was Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore. He received three Fulbright-Hays awards and was nominated for Heiskell and Malone awards. Besides the USA, Nihal has taught in China, Germany, India, Italy, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand. His publications include People's Spaces; Transforming Asian Cities (co-eds); Decolonizing Ceylon; Importing planning problems; the Planner’s City; Contesting Modernities in Chandigarh; and Feminizing the City.
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has not given them the ability to know Wanathamulla (or similar neighbourhoods). They have missed the local realities. As planners have lost their instincts and empathy in their training, the politicians rationalise their action, rather than adopting rationality. ... What they have produced is a mess at best.
The local processes, from a formal standpoint, are incomplete, conflicting,
and changing at best. As Srivastava’s (2015) Gurgaon, Wanathamulla manifests entangled processes of intimacies, antagonisms, dreams, identities, boundaries, and their porousness. ... The local rationality has defied the outsiders, exposing their social, spatial, and economic illiteracy. ....
It is the high-rises built by the state that have become concentrations of poverty, vice, and drugs and flat-dwellers are the ones who need help. The politicians, professionals, and authorities opted to act without understanding but asserting, using their positional superiority, the notion that they can be turned into middle-class people by providing flats which makes them extremely powerful. In practice, the relocated people are forced to respond to middle-class demands of paying bills but without middle-class incomes and capabilities. This attempt to create consumers out of producers and shift their focus from livelihood to consumption has created only an assetless population trying to survive without social capital and economic competence, with very little agency. This is a process of causing “slum” conditions. ... This is slow violence; characterised by processes of gradual disempowerment of somewhat “law abiding outlaws” who are gradually pushed into chronic poverty.
The hardest impediment for those who strive is the stigma. Through their
projects, the authorities and the UDA project a negative image of Wanathamulla people as slum-dwellers and try to control them using brutal strategies such as eviction of self-builders and, in high-rises, disconnecting the water supply to select flats when they fail to pay the rent. The law enforcement is prevented by the stereotyping of the whole neighb3ourhood as “criminal”. This institutionalisation of stigma and second-class citizenship is much harder for the people of Wanathamulla to overcome. The result is the existence of an entrepreneurial community that is neither able to materialise the potential benefits of the resourceful. locale nor to contribute to the development of the neighbourhood and the city at large.
Yet Wanathamulla people are resilient, although at a high social and monetary cost. The people’s processes, intermittently supported by external actors such as Gunasinghe, NM, and Premadasa, have not only survived but also supported the people dumped in the high-rises to develop community. Their responses to the stigma are highly effective. Wanathamulla people have not simply built homes for themselves but have established and reproduced a community, creating jobs, and livelihoods for themselves.
has not given them the ability to know Wanathamulla (or similar neighbourhoods). They have missed the local realities. As planners have lost their instincts and empathy in their training, the politicians rationalise their action, rather than adopting rationality. ... What they have produced is a mess at best.
The local processes, from a formal standpoint, are incomplete, conflicting,
and changing at best. As Srivastava’s (2015) Gurgaon, Wanathamulla manifests entangled processes of intimacies, antagonisms, dreams, identities, boundaries, and their porousness. ... The local rationality has defied the outsiders, exposing their social, spatial, and economic illiteracy. ....
It is the high-rises built by the state that have become concentrations of poverty, vice, and drugs and flat-dwellers are the ones who need help. The politicians, professionals, and authorities opted to act without understanding but asserting, using their positional superiority, the notion that they can be turned into middle-class people by providing flats which makes them extremely powerful. In practice, the relocated people are forced to respond to middle-class demands of paying bills but without middle-class incomes and capabilities. This attempt to create consumers out of producers and shift their focus from livelihood to consumption has created only an assetless population trying to survive without social capital and economic competence, with very little agency. This is a process of causing “slum” conditions. ... This is slow violence; characterised by processes of gradual disempowerment of somewhat “law abiding outlaws” who are gradually pushed into chronic poverty.
The hardest impediment for those who strive is the stigma. Through their
projects, the authorities and the UDA project a negative image of Wanathamulla people as slum-dwellers and try to control them using brutal strategies such as eviction of self-builders and, in high-rises, disconnecting the water supply to select flats when they fail to pay the rent. The law enforcement is prevented by the stereotyping of the whole neighb3ourhood as “criminal”. This institutionalisation of stigma and second-class citizenship is much harder for the people of Wanathamulla to overcome. The result is the existence of an entrepreneurial community that is neither able to materialise the potential benefits of the resourceful. locale nor to contribute to the development of the neighbourhood and the city at large.
Yet Wanathamulla people are resilient, although at a high social and monetary cost. The people’s processes, intermittently supported by external actors such as Gunasinghe, NM, and Premadasa, have not only survived but also supported the people dumped in the high-rises to develop community. Their responses to the stigma are highly effective. Wanathamulla people have not simply built homes for themselves but have established and reproduced a community, creating jobs, and livelihoods for themselves.