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Master plans have been drawn up to rebuild devastated Unawatuna, but only haphazard reconstruction is taking place
Lost in a sea of plans
By Samir Shah
The wide curving stretch of Unawatuna beach looks a little bit smaller now than it was before December 26 of last year, and there are of course, fewer tourists. Even so, many of the restaurants and hotels have been re-opened for some time while many of the others, including those just a few steps from the water, are in the process of being repaired.

Walking along the beach on a weekend, it is clear that the residents here are working to preserve Unawatuna’s status as a haven for budget travellers, with a wide selection of small guesthouses. What is not clear is how Unawatuna will function as a village once the reconstruction is complete.

To address this issue and others, a group of hoteliers and members of the business sector formed the Unawatuna Tourism Development Society, or UTDS. Its purpose was to gather community input and represent that voice to donors, NGOs and government representatives.

“About 90% of the village economy is related to tourism. Villagers are not extracted, or different from the businessman,” says Ravi Liyanage, co-Secretary of the UTDS as well as manager of the Surf City Guesthouse. He also explains that this was the reasoning behind the name.

Liyanage defined the role of the UTDS as two-fold. The first was to use donor contributions in small projects that did not need government approval, such as child development programmes, social welfare programmes, and soft-loans for livelihood development. The second role was to represent the community and ensure government consent in the development of an overall reconstruction master plan.

However, there is more than one master plan floating around Unawatuna, and nobody is really sure of how the concepts in either relate to the needs or wants of the community.

Architect Ashley de Vos, who took up the task of preparing the Galle Master Plan in early January, decided to make an additional proposal for Unawatuna as part of his overall scheme and presented it to the UDTS in May.

When asked to describe his plan, he recalls the 1960s and 1970s in Unawatuna, when there were few houses and no hotels. “Unawatuna should not have had development on the seaside of the road at all. It should have been public land,” says de Vos. His basic concept is to build a road by-pass behind the hill that is now right behind the village. According to de Vos, this would free up land internally and allow the town to extend inland. He proposes mixed uses in the old stone quarry behind the hill such as a car park, an open-air theatre, and a community crafts centre.

He also envisions the beach area of Unawatuna to be one big resort with a series of small boutique hotels. Ravi Liyanage recalls that de Vos even asked the UTDS if they wanted a gate at the entrance to the town with a sign welcoming tourists along with uniformly painted three-wheelers. These last proposals were rejected in favour of preserving the mix of choices over a theme resort concept.

Yet there are certain consistencies between what the UTDS describes as its planning concepts and those proposed by de Vos. For instance, Liyanage explains that the UTDS believes the village to be separate from the beach as far as the planning is concerned and that the beach should be looked at with a different approach than the village. This corresponds quite well with de Vos’s idea of the road by-pass and moving activities inland which Liyanage admits is a good idea.

But what of the housing ? Liyanage explains that by saying the UTDS decided early on that they could not handle the permanent housing situation and left all decisions on this to the government and donors. Architect Ashley de Vos explains that there can be housing somewhere in the stone quarry or nearby, but that his plan is not specifically concerned with housing.

All of which, of course, still leaves a big question mark as to what is meant by the reconstruction of Unawatuna. There is one temporary camp near Unawatuna housing 10-15 families. Liyanage speaks vaguely of one housing settlement of 150 houses somewhere in the vicinity. At the same time, some people have simply re-built their homes on the same land.

None of this fits into the other master plan being prepared either. Earlier this year, the UTDS began speaking with Architect Daniel Libeskind and his office, famous for the original Freedom Tower design at the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. One of Libeskind’s employees was vacationing in Unawatuna on the 26th and got Libeskind interested in working with the village.

The Libeskind plan has not been officially recognized or accepted at this point, nor is it complete. There is a sketch plan that has been given to the UTDS with instructions not to share it with anybody. As such, the plan is not really visible to the community.

But the plan was prepared according to some basic concepts which Liyanage was willing to share. The first is that it claims not to change the social structure. After first toying with the idea of pumping sand in to the ocean to create a 100 metre buffer zone, the proposal offers a compromise buffer zone of 35 metres to 100 metres. Liyanage also explains that the plan is concerned with existing landscape and environmental improvements.

Whether in sketch form or not, this plan does not seem to address the issue of housing either. In fact, aside from the buffer zone, the only other concrete proposal is to plant mangroves and build a central solid waste management plant in Unawatuna.Ravi Liyanage and the UTDS are keeping an open mind about both plans. He hopes that once the Libeskind plan is complete, they can take the best of both master plans and get government approval to move forward.

But not all agree with this approach. According to Lalith Nagasinghe, owner of Lucky Tuna restaurant, the UTDS does not represent the people of Unawatuna. And since he and many others have never seen the Libeskind Plan, he feels it is likely that this does not represent the people either. He rejects any sort of buffer zone and claims that the members of the UTDS all benefit from moving people outside the 100 metre line.

While these negotiations go on, others are taking the situation into their own hands and building as they please or as they can. In one particularly misguided effort, the JVP built a fibreglass boat-making shed in the middle of the village. Residents are irritated at the stench it creates and say it is completely inconsistent with any vision that anybody has for Unawatuna.

Others are trying to get back on their feet again in defiance of any plan or buffer zone rule. There is one restaurant owner whose business had been completely destroyed and who had begun rebuilding some time ago. When the deputy chief of the local police came to stop him, he told him, “I have lost my wife, I have lost my house, and if you take this away, all I will have left is my life.” He then proceeded to sit down in the corridor, and said, “So why not shoot me and take it all away.”

He, like others, are not necessarily deterred or interested by planning initiatives or government plans. So while the plans remain on the drawing boards, the housing situation remains unclear, and people continue to build in the buffer zone, in some cases, all the way up to the high tide line itself.

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