Introduction: Planning for Development

City and regional planning serves the public. Beyond the provision of public goods, an economically limited concept, planning also supports the functioning and the reproduction of the capitalist economy, intervenes into the market when economically weaker social groups fall off the market, guides planned growth, and responds to - unplanned‖ growth. This - modern planning practice‖ largely - not totally - assumes that societies are economies: Even when education and health care are at a high level as Sri Lanka and Kerala in the 1940s through the 1970s, hardly any development specialist claimed the country was developed. If the GNP goes up, even the people have become poorer, as in post-1970s Sri Lanka, the experts would take note of it. This development discourse is followed by professionals and academics across the world, particularly since the mid-twentieth century. Myanmar where I put this issue together had been closed to Western influence for about six decades and does not have a fully established planning system, but it still follows the same modern planning ethos.

Beyond the provision of public goods, an economically limited concept, planning also supports the functioning and the reproduction of the capitalist economy, intervenes into the market when economically weaker social groups fall off the market, guides planned growth, and responds to -unplanned‖ growth. This -modern planning practice‖ largely -not totally--assumes that societies are economies: Even when education and health care are at a high level as Sri Lanka and Kerala in the 1940s through the 1970s, hardly any development specialist claimed the country was developed. If the GNP goes up, even the people have become poorer, as in post-1970s Sri Lanka, the experts would take note of it. This development discourse is followed by professionals and academics across the world, particularly since the mid-twentieth century. Myanmar where I put this issue together had been closed to Western influence for about six decades and does not have a fully established planning system, but it still follows the same modern planning ethos.
For the authors of this special issue modern planning is neither a single thing, nor has a single origin. In a broader sense, planning has Western origins and was exported/imported to the non-West. (Healey and Upton 2010;Naser and Volait 2003) Much of the exporting has taken place under colonial conditions. (Home 1997;King 1977;Perera 2005;Porter, 2010) The exporting has not been a direct process: Planning was carried through planning practices and laws by engineers and planners, but first adapted within the colonial system and negotiated by local officials. (King 1977;Perera 2005;Ward 2002) The acceptance of the discourse by local planners requires them to empathize with its creators' worldviews, i.e., develop a colonial mindset. As this was not totally possible, the outcome was a third practice developed through the adaptation of colonial norms to local social, political, cultural, and environmental conditions. In this sense, the history of post-colonial planning is long, extensive, and cross-cultural with no comprehensive history, rational framework, or linear trajectory.
Despite its colonial origins and the significant incompatibilities with the local environmental, cultural and ideological contexts, there is very little critical examination of this imported planning discourse. (Perera 2009b;Porter, 2010;Rahder 2009;Tang and Mizuoka 2010) A critical examination of this discourse, especially from local socio-cultural perspectives is long overdue. This issue expects to contribute to building such critical understanding. (Healey and Upton 2010;Perera 2009b;Perera and Tang 2013;Porter, 2010;Tang and Mizuoka 2010) While I provide an introduction to the critique, the articles are largely grounded in Sri Lanka.
Within this large area, this special issue concentrates on a major post-colonial goal of planning: national development. The development journey of our time --after WWII-opted to improve the economies with the intent of achieving a higher quality of life through it. In the era of nation states, i.e., after the dismantling of the European empires, largely after the two world wars, the two main goals of the societies across the world were independence and development. (Sachs 2010;Wallerstein 1975) Within the primacy the nation achieved, (Duara 1995) both these goals were conceived at national scale. Established through global organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF, the UNO, and international development arms of core states such as the USAID and ODA, development was meant to be economic: catching up with the West and measured monetarily in terms of the GNP growth.

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Many have questioned this paradigm, including progressive scholars and governments. (Pieterse 2001) Andre Gunder Frank (1979) argues that the core capitalist countries developed through the underdevelopment of other societies; capital accumulation in the former was built upon the exploitation of the latter which became known as the Third World. Today's neoliberal regimes too grow at the expense of the periphery, whether within the city, country, or the world.
The studies in this issue critique the hegemonic planning discourse from the site of south Asia. In this issue, Perera (this issue) maps out the development of Sri Lanka, but from the position of the nation state. As a means to development and other goals, the authors of this issue consider planning as a process, not a product. Planners involve in planning; they are not plan-makers, but reflective practitioners. (Schön 1983) Rather than trying to build a comprehensive knowledge of planning which is impossible, the authors investigate key instances/ components of planning's complex trajectories that might reveal some of its key characteristics. The focus is on the kind of planning produced at key moments and how.
The analysis begins with an investigation into the growth of prime industrial cities of the West that was universalized to understand urbanism. Making the study tangible, the issue focuses on Sri Lanka, but with studies from the USA and India providing the breadth. The authors attempt to adopt subjects' vantage points of critiques, not to represent them but to subject local ideas to discussion and debate within larger development and planning discourses. Providing context for the issue, the next section will layout the contours of the hegemonic development discourse. i

Development: The Transformation of an Idea and Practice
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2011: 392) defines development as -the process of developing or being developed.‖ As a verb, it is to -grow or cause to grow and become more mature, advanced, or elaborate.‖ In this sense, development is a maturing process and continuous growth in a positive direction, becoming better and better. The foremost belief about development is its pivotal (perhaps the only) role to bring about prosperity and wellbeing for societies across the world.
At the end of the nineteenth century, there was a massive attraction of population to urban centers and urbanization became widespread especially in Western Europe. The term development was then combined with the urbanization process to form ‗urban development.' (Esteva, 1992) Although the notion of development was incorporated into many disciplines, it did not establish the generalized image that began to circulate since World War II.
Development was conceptualized at the beginning of the century, and came out in various statements and declarations made by the US President Woodraw Wilson  and his rival who led the first sustained revolution against capitalism: Valdmir Lenin .
(President 2016) Yet development was institutionalized after the Second World War. With its introduction by Harry Truman (1884Truman ( -1972, (Harry 2016) the President of the United States, in his inaugural address in 1949, development became a hegemonic term in social discourse. (Escobar 1995;Esteva 1992; Sachs 2010) Truman proclaimed science, technology, and capital as the main ingredients of development. In order to achieve the development that the West did, other societies need the technology and capital the only source of which was the West (now includes proxies such as Japan, Korea, and China). Truman also promised that the American dream of peace and abundance would be extended to all peoples on the planet. (Escobar 1995;Isibister 1991) Europe was rebuilt immediately after the War. Putting the doctrine into practice, through the Marshall Aid package, USAID helped the transformation of piles of rubble into modern cities in Europe. As some Japanese cities were also helped, the optimism spread. Since then, the entire non-Western world pursued development at a national scale, focusing on the growth of the national income. Achieving rapid economic progress through substantial technological and industrial enhancement, i.e., the Truman Doctrine, defined the modern (post-war) discourse of development. Truman (2016) mentioned poverty and the lack of modern scientific knowledge as main obstacles to the development of the people, communities, and the nations in the world. According to this doctrine, undeveloped nations have to make sacrifices to achieve progress through the enhancement of technology. National leaders across the world, including Ho Chi Minh, subscribed to this doctrine.
Bringing the trajectory of the concept of development as economic growth to a peak, the neoclassical economist Walt Rostow (1960) outlined it in terms of stages of growth. He mapped out the economic transformation of a nation from an agrarian society to modern era through the industrialization and the enhancement of technology in term of five distinct stages, the take-off being the key. In Rostow's (1960) terms, all nations will develop independently. The cause for some nations delay to achieve development is within the country, but the failure of one nation will not affect others.
Most non-Western leaders did not experience such economic freedom and became frustrated. The scholars who studied the causes of the ‗backwardness' of Latin American economies, commonly grouped into the Dependency School, began to suspect independence. Criticizing the idea that underdeveloped nations are responsible for their failure to develop, Frank (1979) well demonstrates that the same process that develops core states under-develops the periphery. He calls this the -development of underdevelopment.‖ From this perspective, based on a structural relationship between Western core states and non-Western peripheral states, no country can independently develop without underdeveloping another. Furthermore, Frank (1979) argues that the peripheral nations are intentionally kept underdeveloped by the core states to fulfill its requirement for cheap raw materials, labor, and new markets for their products.
Conceptualizing the capitalist politicaleconomy, Immanuel Wallerstein (1979;2004) views the core and peripheral nations as forming a single world-economy. Emerging in Europe, during the long-sixteenth century (1450s-1650s), the European world-economy expanded through the incorporation of new zones into it, incorporating the whole world by the late 1850s. According to Frank (1979), communities which are not a part of this system cannot be ‗underdeveloped,' for underdevelopment happens as part of the development process of another state. Within Wallerstein's (1979;2004) world-systems perspective, before their incorporation into the world-system, these societies had been in the ‗external arena' and were incorporated as raw material producing peripheral societies. The incorporation was carried out through the production of compatible economic units such as plantations as the main centers of production. (See Perera1999) The late-1960s/early-1970s saw a big change in this political-economy. The challenge to the hegemony was evident in the escalation of the Vietnam War and the control of oil prices by OPEC countries. The USA began to change aspects of the world order created under its hegemony. For example, it moved away from the Brettonwoods Agreement and its relationship with the UNO. Scholars began questioning the validity of development. Accelerating the change, the turn of the 1990s saw radical socio-political changes across the world. The USSR collapsed in 1989 and the Cold War between two states, the clash between the opposing socio-economic systems waned.
Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping led the rescue of capitalism from the crisis. The particular restructuring is known as neoliberalism. (Harvey 2005) As part of the rescue effort, i.e., neoliberalism, the Third World states were made to adopt structural adjustments. The austerity measures were complemented with massive infrastructure projects. Such projects are evident in Sri Lanka from the Mahweli Project of the 1980s to the current Megapolis. Alongside, housing policies moved from slum-clearance and the provision of public housing to less expensive but more effective support systems in the ________________________________________________________________________ 1980s. However these achievements were challenged during the Rajapaksa rule.
Along with the changes in development practice, the idea of development too was questioned. In editing a Development Dictionary Wolfgang Sachs (2010) questions the key concepts and principles employed in the development thinking. He demonstrates that the key principles of development have failed to meet their original objectives. (See also Isibister 1991;Harris 1987) By the beginning of the 1990s, a group of intellectuals who came to be known as -post-development‖ scholars argued that the founding premises of the hegemonic development discourse has been out dated by history. (Esteva, 1992;Escobar, 1995;Rahnema and Bawtree, 1997;Sachs, 2010) One of the first indications of this impasse was The End of the Third World by Nigel Harris (1987) which was followed by the jump in economic standing of the four tigers: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Sachs (2010) argues that both the US hegemony and the idea of development do not exist any longer. The USA may still feel that it is running ahead of other countries, but postdevelopment scholars assert the race is leading towards an abyss. Highlighting the complexity of the issue, Jan Nederven Pieterse (2001) incorporates the critics into the discourse. According to him, by offering critiques, the critics too have -joined‖ -or become a part of--the development discourse. He well documents the transformation of this discourse.
Employing the developments in cultural studies, Arturo Escobar (1995) stresses that the development discourse produces underdevelopment. According to him, the selfproclaimed developed world provides the identity of -underdeveloped‖ to non-western nations within the representations and the institutional practices of the West. Thus, the development discourse Others the inhabitants of the non-West, transforming them into subordinates of the developed world.
Development, for Escobar (1995), is a deficit model that convinced non-Western societies that they lack something internally called development and they ought to work hard and make sacrifices to overcome this. For him, (Escobar 1995:45) development is a system of relations that combines three elements together: 1) the process of capital formation, 2) a series of cultural considerations, and 3) the creation of institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and USAID to facilitate the smooth operation of the First World. The development discourse is a system of relations established between these. Moreover, the idea of development is encapsulated in the belief that social, cultural, and political progresses are only achieved through material advancements. (Escobar 1995) Ilan Kapoor (2008) who endeavors to understand national development practice through a postcolonial perspective concurs that the Western states created the problem of underdevelopment in the Third World and then came up with solutions. He finds that the solutions to underdevelopment it created, particularly the development policies based on structural adjustments, good governance, and human rights are based upon the West's own industrialization experience and prioritize economic growth in the Third World. Moreover, these -solutions‖ are abstract and incompatible with the local conditions. Through this policy formulation process, which combines the -Third World‖ into a single group, the West has both ignored the rich diversity and the priorities of non-Western societies, and turned them into subordinates.
Dependency theory criticizes the West, but still considers Europe as the universal model, overlooks the power relations within imperialism and capitalism, and considers the Third World -a passive bystander in the imperial/capitalist game, with no will or ken to resist it.‖ (Kapoor 2008: 12) As these theorists accept the core-periphery division, they too are unable to appreciate the social, cultural, and political diversity of the world. Despite the deep insights he provides, Escobar (1995) too overlooks the peoples' resistance to the (mainstream) development discourse.
-Development‖ is not totally Western. It is Western in the sense that it has its origins in imperial Western-Europe, it privileges the West, it is profitable for the West, and facilitates capital accumulation in the West. Yet the subjects also take part in its creation and maintenance; the functioning of the capitalist world-economy depends on local agents: states and corporations. As Gandhi once said, no one can be colonized without his/her consent. Europeans never went to Africa and enslaved Africans on their own. It was impossible. In fact, some Africans sold some of -their own people‖ to European slavetraders, colluding with the foreigners for their own profit. Similarly, the Europeans could not capture Kandy (in today's Sri Lanka) until the aristocrats got the British to get rid of the king for them in 1815.
As Perera highlights in he following article, in regard to Sri Lanka, in the post-colonial world, the political leaders and development experts imported this development doctrine and the deficit model. The practice of development in these states was organized through newly formed organizations at global and international levels, government offices in national capitals, and universities and research centers in developed countries and institutions. In accepting this doctrine and model, national leaders imported a problem which transformed these states into Third World countries. Development became a hard-hitting goal for their nations which did not have access to expensive technology and capital. National leaders were frustrated to see no change in their economic standings, although some economies grew faster than those of the West during the industrial revolution.
In this, ‗experts' from international and national organizations were involved in ‗abnormalizing' the extant state of development. Pradeep Dissanayake (this issue) documents how the residents of Nawagattegama and Mahakumbukkadawala began to feel poor after the advent of the NGO and depended on aid. As evident in this example, instead of theorizing the existing, the experts transformed the ground, i.e., transformed the communities to fit the model. Some interlocutors say that they were not poor before this development intervention. Then the same experts -or ones belonging to the same genre--came up with solutions to the problems they (inadvertently) created. This process has continued as the model, reproducing the organizations and the development machine. Development was a noble idea, but became self-serving process.
The larger capitalist world-economy depends on local agents who help channel capital accumulation towards the Western core of the capitalist world-economy, for a small benefit. This political-economy is also produced and reproduced --across the world--in and through the policies and programs of non-Western states and entrepreneurs. The discourse is also participated by national leaders, development experts, and the NGOs which together form the development machine.
Going beyond the experts, postcolonial scholars develop a sense of appreciation and empathy for the people's resistance against domination of the imperial subjugation. Dominating the non-West by attributing an inferior identity on them is a deep concern for postcolonial theory. Instead of seeing the subalterns as victims, it refers to the ability of post-colonial subjects to initiate action in engaging or resisting the imperial power. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 2002;Kapoor, 2008;Perera 2016) In their scholarship, both eminent postcolonial theorists: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999) and Homi Bhabha (1994) have not only acknowledged the individuals' agency, but emphasize (subaltern) agency as a form of ‗negotiation.' (Kapoor, 2008) In order to defy the homogenization of the Third World subaltern, Bhabha (1994) introduces the ‗third space,' a space inbetween binary opposites of orientalist representations, creating room for the heterogeneity of dissonant and/or dissident histories and voices.
In contrast to development theories, postcolonial studies have played down the role of the state and capitalism: -neither Said nor Bhabha focuses on capitalistic transactions or economically-oriented subversive agency by the subaltern.‖ (Kapoor 2008, 15) Postcolonial theorists have also ignored key ‗material' issues of the distribution of resources and poverty. Although not to the liking of hard line political-economists, many leading postcolonial scholars, including Spivak, refers to Karl Marx, multinational capital, and international division of labor. ________________________________________________________________________ Postcolonial (and subaltern) studies provide deep insights into aspects that are not captured within the dualistic framework of the mainstream development discourse. More importantly, it opens up room to read the people's engagement in development and to take account of the agency of people/subjects in the developing world. It also opens up a fresh avenue to address the local production of knowledge on development through the hybridization of the imported concept of development and local knowledge.
Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen (1999) pinpoints a mix up in the means and ends of development. Due to the economic focus of the discourse, the experts and critics have lost track of the fact that the economy is a means to good life, but not the ultimate goal of development. In the struggle to become wealthier, nations have neglected some important values in regard to lives and livelihoods. For Sen (1999), development can only be achieved through ensuring the economic, political, and social freedoms in a society.
According to Sen (2009) who focuses on social justice, development is represented in the freedom of people to live the life they value, as long as they wish, albeit within certain constraints. To achieve development the state should support people's aspirations and remove the major sources of ‗unfreedoms,' or deprivations that block the achievement of freedom and the fulfillment of aspirations. The unfreedoms include poverty but this is not the only thing to overcome as in the formal development discourse; other deprivations include the lack of political rights and choice, vulnerability to coercive relations, and exclusion from economic choices and protection. At the same time, the state should support the aspirations of the people through, for example, more economic opportunities, political liberties, social powers and enabling conditions of good health, basic education, and the encouragement and cultivation of initiatives. (Sen 1999) From a practice standpoint, mainstream development has been a massive, powerful discourse with no nation, community, or individual is able to avoid. Many criticisms and progressive ideas have been co-opted into the mainstream discourse. John Turner's (1972) suggestion to support self-building was absorbed as -slum and shanty upgrading‖ and -sites and services‖ projects that would reduce the state expenditure. Sen's (1999) approach too is appropriated and transformed by global development agencies into -capacity building.‖ New ideas continue to develop. These range from Mohammed Yunus' (2016) microcredit to Bhutan's Happiness as development (2016). As these sprout, the agents of development negotiate the mainstream discourse generating a (hybridized) third version of development. This provide an opportunity to ground the discourse, theorize development rather than employ a theory or model, account for people as agents of change, and open up room for them to exercise their agency. It is here that planning and policy making have key roles to play.

Planning
A primary object of planning in the non-West has been to help develop communities. Yet planning at large has hardly matched the needs of national development. The basic issue is with the lack of knowledge. (see Perera, this issue) Planning is not one: one kind is technical and beauty oriented; the other is concerned with people. The original planning discourse was rooted in society and its main concern has been social. It was developed as a means to help those who fall out of the market and still continues.
Yet the city beautiful and garden city type ideas took the focus away from people. (Perera 2005) They established a tradition based on aesthetics. In this sense, this stream of intervention derailed original planning, moving it away from social causes and separating it from the specific socio-political context. So, importing ideas became an easy task. (Perera 2005) This type of planning was easily dressed up with statistics, maps, and abstract concepts such as populations and land uses. Many schools have debates between those who -play with numbers‖ and -color maps,‖ as each calls the other, keeping people in the margins.
The political and social cause of planning was lost, not only in the periphery, but also in core Western states. As Chloé Dotson and Nihal Perera (this issue) argues, capital unilaterally dominated planning in the USA, building company towns, and discriminatory planning practiced at the peak of US industrialism was the cause of the decline of industrial cities in the late-twentieth century.
Yet the concern for people reemerged at various points in history through the discussion of redistribution of resources, ethics, advocacy planning, and equity planning. They have become more sophisticated with the advent of subversive planning, (Miraftab 2012a; 2012b) small change, (Hamdi 2004) and planning as storytelling. (Sandercock 2005;Forrester 1993) The struggle continues: story telling first decentered the planner, opening up room for the empowering of women, aborigines, and other subordinate people. As I have stated elsewhere: As Leonie Sandercock (2005: 310) highlights: -community actors have great stories to tell, but no means of telling them, except to each other.‖ People's stories cannot be substantively heard unless the researcher develops empathy toward the story-teller. This requires the researcher to not only see physical spaces, but also understand how and why the spaces and their meanings are produced and negotiated from the producers' and users' worldviews and perspectives. (Perera 2016, 15) Yet, this discourse gradually saw the recentering of the planner through the emphasis on the planner's story and how to say it more convincingly. (See Throgmorton 1993) Currently, the social-justice oriented planning is largely displaced by the capital-centered one. In the contemporary neoliberal sociopolitical environment, planners have lost their social project and direction Most of them find sites for capital investment to almost the exclusion of other types of planning, whether in Pudong, Bandra Kurla, the Megapolis in Sri Lanka, or the gentrification in the West. As the foundation of their professions deteriorates, development and planning professionals (except a few) are curiously silent. Even the minorities -whether in the USA or Sri Lanka--are protecting themselves by ignoring racist and sexist practices rather than questioning them. Gender is somewhat addressed (e.g., Fainstein andServon 2005, Sandercock andForsyth 2005), but race issues is hardly changing.
While looking backwards to understand the conditions such as neoliberalism that shaped the above environment, we also should look forward into what is in the making. During the twentieth century, the whole world, including Europe, followed the US model (Ward 2002); at least learned from it. However, the impact of the global future (perhaps led by Asian states) is looming stronger. It is important to take note of and critic the future that is been made in Asia. (Perera and Tang 2013) It is certainly time to question the burgeoning Chinese, Indian, Hong Kong, Japanese, Korean, and Singaporean models that are being exported with crisscrossing development aid. The struggle for their piece of the pie by above actors was all around me in Yangon where I wrote this introduction.

The Contents
The articles begin with exploring the construction of planning in the West which does not have a simple single story. Highlighting the relationship between planning and development, Dotson and Perera examine the planning and building of one of the prime capitalist industrial-cities (or company towns) built from scratch according the principles of American exceptionalism, supremacy, and power. The development of Gary, Indiana at the dawn of the twentieth century was influenced by the coagulation of these values at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and responses to the failures of first generation industrial cities such Pullman, Illinois.
However, the Gary-experiment resulted in mass unemployment, causing racial riots, violence, dramatic depopulation, and business blight. By the end of the century -The City of ________________________________________________________________________ the Century‖ was called the murder capital of the USA characterized by hopeless people (at the formal level) and a helpless city government and civil society organizations like churches that are unable to provide basic services to the remaining inhabitants. The decline was primarily instigated by racial segregation, the same value system the city and its school system inculcated, but viewed positively at first. Instead of being dramatic, the decline causes slow violence (Nixon 2013); it kills, people, lives, and communities, especially Black, relatively slowly. So far, the investors, planners, and consultants who attempted to rebuild Gary have clearly demonstrated their lack of understanding of its inhabitants and the inability to see social injustice.
In -Squandering Opportunities,‖ Nihal Perera grounds the development discourse in Sri Lanka. Instead of looking at national development from outside, he opts to look at the larger structures of dependency and worldsystems from within the nation. He asks whether there were any opportunities for national leaders to change Sri Lanka's development-predicament? If so, what were those opportunities? And how did the national leaders make use of them? While acknowledging the larger socio-political structures, he investigates the opportunities these structures and their conjunctures afford for changing the economic standing for the nation and how the national leadership across the non-Western world has squandered them. He highlights three opportunities, with one right at independence of Ceylon in 1948. While most nations could not, the opportunity in the1970s was well used by the four tigers: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan to advance their economic standing in the world. The third opportunity is in the present.
Perera highlights that neither the national leaders of Sri Lanka nor their development advisors saw these opportunities. According to him the issue is intellectual; there was hardly a knowledge of such opportunities. Hence they were squandered, not actively, but due to ignorance. Making use of such opportunities require the national leaders and experts to first develop an understanding of the world-economy and the kind of opportunities it affords for (positive) change. It is highly difficult with the craze for growth and infrastructure projects.
Jeffrey Lauer digs deep into a collision between both a past and a future represented in the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project's (in Ahmedabad) and neoliberalism and urban development. In -The Past's Affect on Development,‖ he investigates how the Project's planning process attempts to incorporate the purportedly 600-year old Gujari Bazaar (Sunday Market). He demonstrates how various actors associated with the market successfully fought potential displacement through the claim of cultural heritage. At the same time, however, the project attempts to absorb the -traditional market,‖ making it a market of dead things.
Although the results of a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that linked the market to local and global narratives of cultural legitimacy provided for the market's inclusion, its redevelopment was ultimately left to Sabarmati planners who contextually reframed, spatially repositioned, and thematically reprogramed the market to fit Ahmedabad's modernity. The neoliberal planning project both included and co-opted the market into its re-imagination of Ahmedabad's riverfront. While it is unlikely that the market will die, how the market negotiate its future is yet to be seen.
-What Development Has Done to a Town‖ brings the discussion to the tipping point. Shalini Mariyathas, Nihal Perera, and Mohamed Yehiya examine the great transformation of Hambantota town in Sri Lanka during the last regime  through a slew of uncoordinated projects. They examine in details how to characterize the development of the city and demonstrate how such -development‖ destroyed Hambantota town. The middle-classes, especially the professionals and investors reaped the benefits in terms of contracts, positions, and money, but planners and planning scholars have hardly questioned the injustice upon which their discourses and profits were built.
It also highlights how specific people and planners use their agency to make the city a better place. Along with people's responses to top-down planning, advocacy planning is also practiced.
Pradeep Dissanayake also demonstrates that development projects carried out by World Vision inadvertently impoverished people in Nawagattegama and Mahakumbukkadawela. By the time the NGO left Mahakumbukkadawela, the people have become dependent, the institution created to continue the development process had collapsed, and there were no locallydeveloped institutions and relationships, especially social capital hold the community together. In contrast, the inhabitants developed the adjoining Sankadayagama village without much external aid, and despite discrimination by select national governments and people in adjoining villages. It also demonstrates how residents of Sankadayagama used home-grown tools: They used the maranadhara samithi (death benevolent society) to develop the community, indicating that it is neither external aid, nor the samithi that is key to development. It is the people and their home-grown processes.
Practicalizing above discussions, Nihal Perera then returns to spell out possible issues and concerns central to developing a plan for -grounded development.‖ In this, he speculates on the value of ordinary ideas and key deprivations that need to be addressed. Highlighting the point that economic primacy in society is a Western-capitalist cultural trait, he demonstrates the significance of culture and people's immediate concerns for development.