Criminalisation is often understood narrowly—as something that happens after a crime, involving police, courts, and prisons. But we argue that criminalisation is not only about breaking laws; it is about how laws are written, where suspicion is cast, and which bodies are deemed out of place. We expand our understanding beyond arrests and convictions, and examine how everyday life for communities is shaped by a carceral logic—one that disciplines through infrastructure, language, and design.

The criminalisation of poverty refers to the process by which survival strategies, informal labour, and public presence associated with economically marginalised groups are treated as deviant or unlawful. Rather than addressing poverty as a structural issue rooted in inequality, states respond by penalising behaviours such as street vending, loitering, or public sleeping, effectively punishing people for being poor. This logic directly infringes upon the right to the city, a concept first articulated by Henri Lefebvre (1968/1996), which emphasises not only the right to access urban space but also the right to participate in its production. 

A critical example of the criminalisation of poverty is Colombo’s Urban Regeneration Project (URP) of the Government of Sri Lanka and implemented by the Urban Development Authority since 2012, which reveals that criminalisation extends beyond incarceration; it includes the transformation of poor people’s living environments into carceral spaces themselves.

The Right to Stay: Who Is Colombo’s “Urban Poor”?

In Colombo, the urban poor are not defined solely by income, but by their relationship to land and infrastructure. This is especially evident in the wattes — self-built settlements that now house over 68,000 families across 9% of the city’s land. Far from being disordered encroachments, these communities have roots tracing back to the colonial era, when workers settled near ports and factories. Over generations, they have developed into structurally sound, socially embedded neighbourhoods. (Perera, 2025)

These wattes exemplify what scholars call urban marronage—acts of self-organisation and survival beyond the reach of formal systems (Bledsoe et al., 2022). By 2023, most of Colombo’s wattes had been incrementally upgraded by residents themselves, with 98% classified as in-situ settlements, over 80% with permanent housing and 99% formal grid connectivity. Over 90% of households have lived in these neighbourhoods for more than 30 years. (Colombo Settlements Survey, 2023)

Colombo’s wattes have evolved into community-rooted commons (Cahn and Segal, 2016). What began as informal occupation has, over decades, been consolidated into multi-storey permanent homes. As one long-time resident of 189 Watta on Torrington Avenue recalls: “api koombi wage ape gewal hadhuwe… podda podda, salli hambenakota” —we built our homes like ants, bit by bit, whenever money allowed. Today, that house is a two-storey structure with three bedrooms, an attached bathroom, running water, and electricity (Perera, 2015).

World-Class for Whom? New Colombo, New Tenants

To watte communities, Colombo is their home. Despite the hard-won growth that these communities have cultivated over decades, the post-war development boom of 2010, namely the Urban Regeneration Project (URP), rendered them newly scrutinised in order to prioritise a curated audience: tourists, investors, and a rising suburban Sinhala-Buddhist middle class who solemnly announce they are threatened as never before (Perera & Spencer, 2023). 

Inspired by the developmental visions of Singapore, Los Angeles, and Dubai, Colombo’s makeover positioned itself as a leap toward world-class status. But this beautification relied on visual order. This vision of the city is maintained through a politics of appearance—where colonial-era buildings are converted into luxury shopping complexes, pavestone sidewalks and landscaped parks are installed, and mangrove-adjacent paths cater to suburban leisure rather than ecological protection or community needs (Perera et al, 2024). For the floating population that commutes into the city by day, a militarised, orderly Colombo administered by the Ministry of Defence is attractive and functional (Perera & Spencer, 2023; Perera, 2025). 

In order to manufacture this new “world-class city” and welcome its new inhabitants, the URP  curated a way to rid its existing tenants and the “threat” they posed to prime real estate and the perceived safety of Colombo’s new tenants. A significant mechanism in this mission was the combined use of aestheticisation and narrative–propaganda–to cast watte communities as a combination of illegal, impoverished, unhygienic, and in urgent need of the state’s saving.

Story as Strategy: The Narrative Architecture of Criminalisation

The Urban Regeneration Project (URP) was not merely a spatial intervention—it was a narrative project making the case for beautification. The media, controlled largely by the state, vilified the survival, strategies, informal labour and the public presence of the urban poor. Under the guise of “discipline,” “modernisation,” and “progress,” the Rajapaksa government advanced an aesthetic and ideological cleansing of Colombo. Working class poor, racially and religiously mixed communities concentrated in the city centre, were depicted as unsightly, unruly, and in need of moral and physical transformation. The language used by state actors—“slum dwellers,” “illegal squatters,” and the “underserved”—curated a particular image in the public imagination. Relocation was framed not as displacement but as liberation—granting the poor, in the words of the then Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, a “better society,” a “permanent address,” and “recognition” through Western-style domestic aesthetics such as pantry cupboards and flush toilets. This new narrative coincided with moral campaigns like Mathata Thitha (An End to Alcohol) and anti-narcotics drives, further embedding urban renewal within a framework of social purification (Perera et al, 2024).

Beyond the URP, the negative language used in official documents regarding low-income communities are common. For example the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) for the 350 MW RLNG / Diesel Operable Combined Cycle Power Plant at Kerawalapitiya, Sri Lanka had the following note in the section on the sample of interviewees – “the team observed high risk of spending more time inside the houses of these low-income communities” as most of the community members are said to be drug addicts, and provided the alternate followed for their data collection, which had been to interview “a member from each family calling him/her to the garden area of the house and conducted a rapid discussion”.

Urban policy in Colombo frequently “chases efficiency” without engaging the lived realities, survival strategies, and spatial attachments of the urban poor. Practices such as public bathing, open cooking, or drying laundry outdoors are not signs of disorder but rational, adaptive responses to infrastructural exclusion. Yet these visible practices are aestheticised as unclean or unruly, and used to justify further displacement, regulation, or criminalisation. In Colombo, this logic plays out explicitly. The most recent example being the longstanding isso wadey vendors at Galle Face Green being removed from the seafront in February 2024, not for sanitation violations, but because their informal carts were seen as visually disruptive to the curated aesthetic of luxury hotels and foreign-facing urban development. This is particularly cruel given that many of them were only recently adapting from being relocated by the Slave Island Relocation Project. 

While classical legal theory outlines criminalisation as a rational system with four aims: punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation, this framework, beyond the four formal aims of the justice system, it is clear that criminalisation also serves a fifth, often unstated, objective: it expresses and enforces dominant social values by legitimising some narratives and rendering others deviant. As scholars like Hall et al. (1978) and Gilmore (2007) argue, criminalisation marks certain groups—such as the urban poor, ethnic minorities, and political dissenters—as inherently suspicious, dangerous, or unworthy of public sympathy. Therefore, “criminalisation grants states and dominant social groups the expressive power to uplift some narratives over others. Criminalisation serves as a way to “mark” certain groups or populations as deserving of punishment, and as a way of justifying both state and non-state violence towards them.” (Meghal Perera/Colombo Urban Lab, 2024) 

The media, controlled largely by the state, reiterated the ideal of a “slum-free” and “beautiful” Colombo, ignoring the fact that Colombo never had the sprawling slums characteristic of other South Asian metropolises. The UDA’s own data revealed that 50% of the city’s population occupied only 9% of the land, a disproportionality that made these communities less a social burden and more a territorial inconvenience(Centre for Police Alternatives, 2014).

Contrary to how the media described the wattes, these communities have historical and legal claim to their lands, have strong place-based kinship networks, and are strategically located. Over 50% of settlements were within 250 meters of a bus stand, with easy access to hospitals, schools, and employment centers. School attendance was notably high: in 96.8% of settlements, more than 90% of children were enrolled in school (Colombo Settlements Survey, 2023). As a result, most residents opposed relocation and faced forceful intervention. 

Urban Warfare: Policing Poverty Through Planning

Colombo’s beautification campaign operated as urban warfare. With the UDA under the Ministry of Defence, military forces carried out demolitions, evictions, and city planning with little oversight (Amarasuriya and Spencer, 2015; Perera & Spencer, 2023). Armed soldiers removed residents, sometimes overnight, sometimes with no warning or compensation. They were relocated to UDA built high-rise complexes in North Colombo -some complexes spanning over 1000 flats. Residents have to pay one million rupees over 20 – 30 years to get a deed to the flat – irrespective of whether they owned their previous home or how valuable the house they lost was. 

According to newspaper reports and court documents, around 2,500 members of the police, riot police, army, air force, and UDA officers arrived at Mews Street and started demolishing the houses using backhoes and diggers (Amarasuriya and Spencer, 2015). 

The community’s description of the military harassment is extremely disturbing. “We were removed from our homes by force. They took our signatures by force. The army officers told us that they will bulldoze our houses whether we move out or not. They told us that we can either take these apartments or live on the street”, was one resident’s account. Another said that an Army officer threatened to shoot him if they did not stop protesting. (Perera, 2015) 

Prison-Like High-Rises: Carceration Up the Elevator 

Field observations and interviews by the Colombo Urban Lab paint a sobering picture. In a survey of all UDA high-rises in 2024, residents across 24 high-rises cited overcrowding, lack of storage, and severe limitations on daily activities such as drying clothes, hosting cultural or religious rituals, or allowing children to play. Women, in particular, spoke of increased logistical burdens and time poverty. In buildings with no functioning lifts or corridor lights, everyday life became not only harder, but dangerous. Community-based organisations were largely inactive, recreational spaces for children were few and in disrepair, and the uniform apartments— 400 – 500 square feet per unit—often housed multiple families, a far cry from the larger, layered living spaces in the wattes. Even rituals around death or birth were compromised as there was no room for almsgivings, or to place a coffin in the living room without moving furniture into the corridor. Criminalisation by way of surveillance, harassment, and state-control followed watte residents into the high-rises. In practice, the high-rises have delivered what many residents describe as a prison-like existence: isolating, punitive, and economically unsustainable.

The high-rises built under Colombo’s Urban Regeneration Project have created physical confinement and a pervasive atmosphere of despair, surveillance, and social death. Residents describe their lives as “a slow death” (අපි හිමින් හමිනි්මැරෙනන්ේ) and liken their existence to that of “pigeons living in small cage[s]” (Perera et al, 2024). The built environment in the older phases has created insecure spaces with long dark corridors, different entry points into the complex and houses thousands of people brought in from different parts of the city. This enables crime to take place more easily as neighbour and stranger cannot be distinguished easily. In August 2025, a shooting incident took place at one of the high-rises in Wanathamulla, killing two and injuring three. 

The relocation from wattes to high-rises had many costs, including a literal payment burden which set families up for failure. Within the first three months, families are required to pay Rs 100,000 in lump sums—a near impossible ask for communities where daily-wage labour is the norm. Long-term loans taken at high interest, pawning of jewellery, and early withdrawals from pensions become necessary just to receive the keys to an apartment (Perera, 2015). After that, monthly housing payments (Rs 2,650–3,960) are added to bloated utility bills, pushing families into cycles of debt. It pushes them to borrow at high-interest or pawn jewellery. When payments are missed, residents risk losing access to water or being branded as “defaulters”—a form of economic criminalisation that treats poverty as moral failure.

Much of the research on the URP – generated by civil society and academia – since 2013 details how displacement fractured social, professional, and educational worlds. Residents have to commute farther to work, children dropped out of schools, women lost home-based businesses, and kinship networks were broken as families were scattered across buildings. Informal mutual aid—childcare, cooking, spiritual life—became impossible. The physical structure of the high-rises dismantled cultural continuity, similar to a prison. 

During COVID-19, high-rise residents were further subjected to curfews, surveillance, and media shaming, revealing that relocation did not erase stigma but simply concentrated control. 

Conclusion: Unbuilding the Carceral City

The URP criminalised poverty while violating legal norms. Documents were signed under duress, language rights were ignored, and military coercion displaced lawful residents (Center for Policy Alternatives, 2014, Perera, 2015). Meanwhile, by 2018 the project cost over USD 447 million, more than double the cost of Mattala Airport, yet lacked transparency or feasibility studies (Perera et al, 2024)

This study shows that criminalisation in Sri Lanka is not merely about arrests or imprisonment—it is a broad-spectrum governance strategy executed through the guise of urban planning. Through policies like the Urban Regeneration Project, the state reimagines poverty as illegality, informality as disorder, and difference as deviance. The carceral state is not confined to prisons; it is etched into concrete high-rises, encoded in utility bills, enacted through moral policing, and narrated by the media. These mechanisms make it possible to criminalise without ever issuing a charge—to police communities without uniforms or courtrooms.

References

Amarasuriya, H., & Spencer, J. (2015). “With that, discipline will also come to them”: The politics of the urban poor in postwar Colombo Lanka. Cultural Anthropology, 30(1), 60–83. https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/188891926/AmarasuriyaHSpencerJCA2015WithThatDiscipline.pdf

Centre for Policy Alternatives. (2014). Forced evictions in Colombo: The ugly price of beautification. https://f.cl.ly/items/3T1o3B3v263n3Z3r2u24/Colombo%20Evictions%20Report%20-%20April%202014.pdf 

Colombo Urban Lab & Meghal Perera. (2024). Criminalisation and the urban poor in South Asia [Unpublished internal document].

Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. University of California Press. https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/gilmore-ruth-wilson-golden-gulag-2007.pdf

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Perera, Iromi (2015). Forced evictions in Colombo: High-rise living. Centre for Policy Alternatives. https://www.cpalanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/High-rise-living_report-FINAL.pdf

Perera, I., & Spencer, J. (2023). Beautification, governance and spectacle in post‑war Colombo. In T. Goodfellow & D. Jackman (Eds.), Controlling the capital: Political dominance in the urbanizing world (pp. 203–233). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192868329.003.0008

Perera, Meghal, Nimaya Dahanayake and Iromi Perera (2024). Review of the Urban Regeneration Project (URP), Colombo. Centre for a Smart Future. https://www.csf-asia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Colombo-Urban-Lab-review-of-the-URP_Nov-2024.pdf

Perera, I. (2025). This house is not a home: The struggle for spatial justice in post-war Colombo. In U. Sengupta & K. B. Nielsen (Eds.), The politics of urban land in South Asia: Current challenges and new directions (pp. 146–162). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003530664-8

Colombo Settlements Survey (2023). Assessing basic services, tenure security, and livelihoods in underserved settlements. Sevanatha Urban Resource Centre & Colombo Urban Lab https://www.csf-asia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/CSS-Survey-2023-report_Final.pdf

Ashanee Kottage was a Research Fellow at Colombo Urban Lab – Centre for a Smart Future from May – August 2025.