The
Core Area Plan is defined as the core area of the Colombo Metropolitan
Region (CMR), which overlaps with the boundary of the Western
Province. More specifically, the Core Area of the CMR consists
of the municipal councils of the City of Colombo, Dehiwala Mt.
Lavinia and Sri Jayawardena Pura-Kotte, and a few local authorities
in the Western province. The Core Area is alternatively known
as the Capital Territory (Map 1).
The Core
Area covers approximately 16,000 Ha., and its population had been estimated at
1,313,952 in 1994.
The
vision of the Core Area plan is to create a Gracious City which is functionally
efficient, economically viable, environmentally sustainable and socially integrated
to address the challenges, with the improvement of quality of life and to act
as the engine of national economic development of Sri Lanka in the 21st century.
In
conceptualising the envisaged development of the Core Area in the 21st Century,
the Core Area Plan recognises the importance of achieving a number of
objectives
and these objectives can be stated as
-
To develop the city of Colombo as the financial and commercial hub of the South
Asian region.
- To improve the transportation system to increase its efficiency
and reduce congestion and travel time.
-
To conserve revitalize, repair and cautiously replace the Architectural and historical
master pieces, urban scale of the national patrimony of individual buildings and
the urban space in between which will lead to continuation of the urban fabric
in harmony with the existing urban tissue.
-
To increase the infrastructure capacities in order to meet the increasing demand
for infrastructure facilities in the coming years.
-
To ensure environmentally sustainable development in harmony with the natural
network of wetlands, water bodies, marshes, rivers, beaches etc. by reinforcing
to enhance the garden city image.
-
To preserve the highland agriculture as far as practicable and integrate it into
the general land use of the Core Area so that an environment with more greenery
character can be enhanced.
-
To increase the quality and quantity of the housing stock and the associated social
infrastructure.
-
To establish a more efficient security system to ensure adequate security in the
Core Area.
- To
increase the amount of buildable land for commercial, residential and recreational
purposes in order to prevent speculative increases of land prices and undesirable
sub division of urban land.
-
To encourage private sector participation in development projects and programmes
within the planning framework of the Core Area.
