High-Life in a High-Rise: Governing Urban Marginality During Covid-19 in Colombo, Sri Lanka

This research study illustrates that urban development projects create disruption in everyday life-worlds of people. My study focusses on urban communities dispossessed from their homes in waththas (Sinhala term) to government owned, high-rise blocks in Colombo, Sri Lanka. My main research aim investigates processes, relationships and means which afford resettled residents to construct a sense of home during a time of global and local uncertainty. This paper examines the impact of Covid-19 and governance of urban marginality in Colombo. I use ethnographic research in the form of lived experience and participant observation, a household survey and in-depth interviews. My study investigates the formation and perpetuation of discourses regarding the urban poor who are viewed as the “urban underclass” (Wacquant, 2008).  I illustrate that despite relocation in high-rise housing projects and attempts to create modern, upgraded living, the discourse of the underclass persists in public sentiment, media representations and research which increases marginality. As Wacquant (2008) opines "marginalisation is a product of class logic which is redoubled by ethnonational origin and attenuated by state action". This paper demonstrates the excessive power and strategies exerted by the state to govern the urban poor during a pandemic