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Urban Development as a ‘Condition of Possibility’ for Domestic Violence: Tracing the Multi-scalar Impacts of Post-War Urban Regeneration on Colombo’s Working-Class Poor
Posted on 17 November 2025
Dr Asha Abeyasekera has delivered an online talk for the BSA Sociology, Psychoanalysis & the Psychosocial Study Group seminar series on Violence.
Dr Abeyasekera's paper explores urban development as a ‘condition of possibility’ for domestic violence in working-class communities in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, she builds on the concept of ‘evictability’ – the role urban evictions play in the governance of ‘unwanted’ citizens (Van Baar 2017) – to propose ‘intimate evictability’ – a lens to examine the gendered and multi-scalar impacts of Sri Lanka’s post-war urban regeneration policy on Colombo’s working-class poor. She begins by drawing attention to how mechanisms of constraint were historically built into the architecture and urban planning of Colombo to produce the carceral geographies of contemporary working-class homes and neighbourhoods. Drawing on women’s life-stories, she then discusses how forced evictions of working-class communities in post-war Sri Lanka interface with the intimate sphere and percolate to the home in the form of inheritance disputes and domestic violence. By drawing attention to geography as a lived experience that plays a critical role in the production of intimate relations (Shabazz 2015), she makes a case for why bureaucratic processes that disenfranchise the poor must be read as existing on the same continuum as acrimonious kinship relations that are about incarcerating or discarding unwanted women.
Asha L. Abeyasekera is a lecturer at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York. Prior to arriving in York, she was a Urban Studies International Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a lecturer at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her research interests are marriage and kinship; home and homemaking; and morality, emotions, and personhood. She is the author of Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka (2021, Rutgers).