I recall with great affection and gratitude, the discussions in the 1960s and 70s with architects like Minette de Silva, Geoffrey Bawa, Ulrik Plesner and Valentine Gunasekera and with colleagues like Anura Ratnavibushana, Turner Wickremasinghe, Nihal Amarasinghe, Lucky Senanayake, Vasantha Jacobsen, Pheroze Choksy and Ismeth Rahim, during the formative stages of a contemporary Sri Lankan architecture. The need to instil a sprit and soul. And later having had the opportunity to see the Work of Great Masters like Gaudi, Le Corbusier, Scarpa, etc. There was a single thread, a thought process in their work that created the architecture and held it together.

In the French architect Le Corbusier’s gem,the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, the exterior, the interior and the spatial form tenderly holding the spirit and the soul of the building,all coming together to create a holistic oneness.To me that is what architecture is all about.

On the other hand, the architecture of countries without a strong cultural base, countries like Dubai have a different approach. Steve Rose writing in the Guardian had this to say, ‘Foreign architects have had a ball in Dubai, at least until recently. It’s been the place where you can get away with anything. No matter how outlandish or oversized the idea, no one seemed to be saying no, and somebody else was always paying. As a result, the emirate has been waging some sort of architectural arms race with itself, each new development trying to outdo the last, while the rest of the world looked on with a mixture of disdain and envy. Dubai has on stream some of the craziest highlights from a future that will probably never arrive – but, you never know, still just might’. Are these buildings, architecture or just exhibition pavilions?

Kate Ascher, author of "The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper", explain what happens to sewage from the Burj and Dubai’s other tall buildings. ‘During Dubai’s economic boom in 2009 the city’s rapid growth meant that it was stretching its existing sewage treatment infrastructure to its limits. Sewage from areas of Dubai not connected to the municipal piped network at the time was collected daily from thousands of septic tanks across the city and driven by tankers to the city’s only sewage treatment plant at Al-Awir. Because of the long queues and delays, some tanker drivers resorted to illegally dumping the effluent into storm drains or behind dunes in the desert resulting in much controversy. The result of sewage dumped into storm drains was that it flowed directly into the Persian Gulf, near to the city’s prime swimming beaches.

Coming closer home, Singapore comes into focus. When Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yue visited Colombo in 1962, he saw a city of buildings spaced out along tree lined streets of mostly two, and in the inner city buildings elevated to three or four floors at the most, Large houses in gardens all surrounded by trees. Lee Kuan Yue` was impressed, his Singapore after the war was in shatters and desperately wanted Singapore to look like Colombo. But the problems of Singapore were different, as a country it was a city state, while Sri Lanka was a country, a country. However, the idea of covering Singapore with trees was engraved in his mind. The first trees to beautify Singapore went from Sri Lanka.

‘Today, the architecture of Singaporedisplays a range of influences and styles from different places and periods. These range from the eclectic styles and hybrid forms of the colonial period to the tendency of more contemporary architecture to incorporate trends from around the world. In both aesthetic and technological terms. From the late 1990s, like many other global cities and aspiring global cities, the Singapore Government consciously launched a drive to develop ‘iconic’ landmarks in the city, as a means to strengthening the Singapore brand identity as well as to attract foreign tourists.’ With every architect fighting to be different and to do what has not been done before, at times even harbouring on the gimmick. Singapore has come of age with landscaped environments and an ever increased planted foot print. Every leaf, of every plant is polished. Is it for the purpose of documentary photographs only and is it sustainable in the long run?Has architecture that had an inherent spirit and soul, today, been reduced to a soulless gimmick?

Many who have lived in Mega cities are disillusioned by their unsustainability as environments become unviable in the long run. Stephen Bayley, an art and culture guru, interviewed and published by AFP London (CND 9/8/06), says the British capital is a ‘frightful mess’ where ‘very few of the patiently evolved systems that support the daily movements and transitions of the megalopolis work properly’. ‘Most of them are getting worse. London is filthy, lawless and expensive. These are not great conditions for civility to flourish’. ’Putting 10 million aggressive hominids into close proximity and inviting them to engage in serial acts of competitive individualism for jobs, schools or parking spaces, could not be considered a reasonable idea’. ‘You put rats in claustrophobic circumstances and they become homosexual, murderous and cannibalistic in no time at all’. ‘Instead humans (left to their own) find ingenious solutions, underground car parks, coffee shops, Chinese takeaways. One man buses, cycle lanes, Tall buildings etc.’the real users have human solutions, unfortunately, outdated planning theory does not.

Sri Lanka should entail solutions to problems that come within the aspiration of the people of Sri Lanka. They should be Sri Lankan specific solutions. Instead of a Mega City that is meaningless, we should be having a series of small urban centres spread around the country that the villages could relate to and depend on for advance services. The communities the repositories of the important cultural matrix, would remain intact and inviolate.

We should not be copies of what is done elsewhere. Certainly not clones of what is done in Singapore.Sri Lanka still respects human scale, whereas Singapore has exploded out and the building are not scaled to humans any more. Humans are just miniature props in an oversized artificial space.

For some reason, the politicians of Sri Lanka are enthralled by Singapore, a dictatorship and a police state. Over a period of thirty or forty years the people of Singapore have been, for lack of a better word, cloned to do things in a certain way.

They cannot drop dirt on the street, spit on the floor, eat chewing gum, have long hair, males have to pee sitting down, if they do it standing there are watches who would report them to the authorities, they cannot buy a car of their choice, the apartments get more and more compact and smaller, as each tower rises into the sky, they cannot express their feelings only if approved by the government, the leaves of the plants displayed in all buildings are polished on a daily basis. Singaporeans talk of biodiversity but are scared of it, they prefer animals and reptiles in zoos. Singaporeans don’t smile any more, simply because they are not taught or told how to,but enjoy the pub and deviant night club scene, eat fast foods and not complain.The Government of Singapore has over the years purposely bred this speciallycloned individual who will do what it is told, fit into and except a congested urban lifestyle.

In most mega cities, according to Lloyd Alter, writing on urban design, refers to young people moving into the city and renting apartments or buying condos, one would expect businesses would set up that cater to them, particularly restaurants and bars. given that their apartments are so small and their days so full of work, that restaurants would be their dining rooms. In fact, the opposite is true, ‘instead you get pretty much a monoculture of corporate chains and non-food services.Developers, property managers and individual businesses who own the retail spaces, have their own concerns.’‘Bringing in a small restaurant is usually a headache’ says one development consultant. Lenders who finance construction don’t like mom and pop restaurants either, as the developer of one of the more prestigious condos remarked ‘the likely hood of Mc Donald’s paying the rent is dramatically different than one-off restaurant owner’

According to Chris Hume, ‘the streets have become a reconfiguration of the expected brands, logos, colours and signs. Starbucks, McDonald’s have taken over every corner and another bank has washed across the city like a tsunami of sameness, and condos are their enablers’. Besides the banks and the developers he blames the condo owners too. ‘Afraid of noise, smells and people who are not condo owners like them, each condo is a fortress and every management a Spanish Inquisition’.

The former Toronto city councillor Kyle Rae speaking on ‘the lack of diversity and choice of the new humans. They don’t want noise. They don’t want smells. They don’t want cooking on the premises. So they get McDonalds, Starbucks and so on: they just truck in the supplies’. Lloyd Alter supports a more human version and insists that ‘the creative economy thrives in older, mixed use neighbourhoods because they generally are more interesting and fun to be in and you don’t have to eat lunch at McDonalds. The streets are lined with small and often unremarkable two or three storey buildings that have huge advantages. One they are flexible and two they are being older, cheaper as the mortgages have been paid off.’Where Jane Jacobs noted that ‘new ideas need old buildings’ Lloyd Alter added "young people need old buildings. You don’t find a vinyl record store or tattoo shop in these new towers.

At this rate the Mega City of the Future, say 2050, is a frightening concept. Would we require new planning concepts and principles, as well as humans cloned as new soulless machines, devoid of all human feelings, to inhabit them? And would man as we know it, evolve to be just static lumps of matter or are we on the brink of extinction. Or is that what the political elite requires for their own survival. (Concluded)