Defining ‘urban’ among urbanizing rural : the case of Sri Lankan urbanization

Abstract

The level of urbanization of a country or a region is generally measured in terms of the share of its urban population. Since there is no universal definition for ‗urban‘, countries follow different approaches such as demographic, density, administrative, economic, morphological and functional, to define ‗urban‘ in their contexts and Sri Lanka uses a pure administrative approach. Surprising trend of urbanization was observed in Sri Lanka with a drop from 21.5% in 1981 to 14.6% in 2001 and 18.2% in 2012. This was questionable as ripple effects of urbanization can be experienced all over the country. Disputes and confusions over the definitions of ‗urban‘ are observed at International contexts. This research investigates this issue through a comprehensive review of existing definitions of ‗urban‘ and respective scholarly works. Initial review of literature had found that definitions of ‗urban‘ vary greatly between countries but usually they comprise of several criteria. This paper describes these findings on conventional approach and proposes an alternative framework to redefine ‗urban‘ in Sri Lanka, by two principle approaches ‗urbanism as a way of life‘ and the concept of ‗urban society‘ resulted from a complete urbanization through a human centered approach. The results indicated the geographical representation of level of urbanization in Sri Lanka and it was quantified as 34%.