The Spatial Perspective of Ethnic Residential Patterns of Kandy City, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Kandy, the largest inland city in contemporary Sri Lanka, was the capital city of the Kandyan Kingdom for more than 250 years from the end of the 16th century to the early 19th century. After the British colonized the whole island in 1815 and moved the capital from Kandy to Colombo, Kandy became simply an ancient city preserving the former palace, the Temple of the Tooth Relic, other temples, devalas or shrines, forts, and so forth. Later, it became an important gathering center for plantation products such as tea, vegetables, and spices. After independence in 1948, Kandy regained its functional importance as a national center for religious and cultural affairs, a great regional center for public administration, education, health care, and commerce. The city serves also as a tourist resort of the country. In the process of history, many people of different ethnic origins migrated to the city, transforming Kandy city into a typical multi-ethnic city. In this paper, the author attempts to explore the residential patterns, precisely speaking, spatial perspective of residential patterns among major ethnic groups, namely, Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. The methods employed for measuring the residential patterns of ethnic groups are: representation ratio, index of dissimilarity, index of segregation and index of centralization. Data on ethnic categories were gathered in the field in 1985. Some of the points drawn from the analysis are: (1) that the imnalese, the most aominant group, do not show any concentration in residential areas but rather an even distribution in all 23 wards of the city, while the minority groups like the Tamils and Muslims have greater concentration closer to the built-up area and in areas of proximity to the center of Kandy city; (2) that the residential pattern varies according to the socio-economic status levels of the residents; in other words, the dissimilarity is lower in the lower and high class residential areas; (3) that the dissimilarity can be clearly observed between Sinhalese and Tamils, then between Sinhalese and Muslims, and the least between Tamils and Muslims; (4) Tamils and Muslims live closer to the city center proving that minority groups tend to concentrate closer to the city center although Kandy city is not an industrial center. © 1988, The Association of Japanese Geographers. All rights reserved.