On April 4, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) announced that it had approved the Colombo Urban Regeneration Project, a $200 million project that the Bank states “will improve housing conditions for low-income communities in Colombo by constructing affordable housing and redeveloping land” and will “improve living conditions for those most in need in the country.”
The AIIB-funded project is part of a broader initiative, the Urban Regeneration Project (URP), under which an estimated 50,000 households will be resettled. The initiative has a long and complex history.
The first phase of the national government's initiative began in 2012, and local civil society organizations documented the negative impacts on those who were resettled, including forced evictions. CSOs stated that “range of existing domestic legal and policy safeguards and standards [were] flouted with impunity” during the process of resettlement, and “military force, intimidation and harassment were used to evict people from their homes and the process did not follow Sri Lanka’s laws related to land acquisition.” CSOs also documented the poor living conditions in “upgraded” condominiums, where households were given a single 400 square foot condominium to accommodate those who were resettled. In one of the sub-projects, the majority of resettled households consisted of more than four people, and 6.5% of households were as large as 10 – 14 people. Access to services and maintenance for the buildings was limited, and many of the buildings rapidly deteriorated into “vertical slums.”
The AIIB-financed third phase of the URP will involve the resettlement of 5,500 households in Colombo. 23,000 people are likely to be resettled—perhaps more. AIIB documents describe efforts to address civil society’s concerns about earlier phases of the project, stating that the project “will support the continued implementation of URP Phase-III but with significant improvements—such as the improvements in technical design, resettlement and post-resettlement policy, housing maintenance arrangements, innovation in redevelopment approach, and review of longer-term sustainability of public intervention in housing.” Documents also describe a number of measures that the Bank will take, including relocation in sites close to the sites people originally occupied, and a commitment to improve “the equity and efficiency of the housing relocation process,” property rights, and the housing maintenance system. AIIB also states that there will be improvements the safety, energy efficiency and durability of the new buildings. However, the documents do not contain clear commitments in relation to other concerns about the project. The size of each unit constructed under the project remains extremely small—550 square feet on average—and documents do not adequately assess whether the condominiums will be affordable to all residents.
The AIIB has committed to invest in a manner consistent with the SDGs, including SDG 11.1 on “adequate, safe, and affordable housing,” and its policies commit to provide “poor and vulnerable groups … with legal and affordable access to adequate housing.” In light of the failures of the previous phases of the URP to meet those standards, however, the AIIB will need to closely monitor the implementation of the project, and will need to work with the Government of Sri Lanka to ensure that housing constructed meets international standards for “adequate” housing.
