During the past years in Sri Lanka, especially Colombo City has been implemented with a number of urban improvement programs geared mainly through the state sector interventions. Today, we are in a position to revisit these strategies and cases with reference to their successes and failures, positive and negative results. As a response to the very local situation, the Urban Design Program of the Department of Architecture of the University of Moratuwa has been committed to establishing a platform to facilitate the dialogue on issues faced by cities of the world today and network among those who do experiments on Cities, People and Places. 

ICCPP is the one and only scientific conference series held on the theme of Cities, Urban Development, Planning and Design in Sri Lanka. Invitees are those interested in the subject of Cities, People and Places to closely examine the ways in which the city exists as a ‘people’s place’ and how each city’s uniqueness is constructed upon the ways in which ‘urban life’ prevails and contributes to the making of places.

This international Urban Design conference series is aimed at bringing to light the multifaceted complexities of transformations of places. It invites the architects, planners, urban designers, geographers and ordinary people, who should be involved in the creation and transformation of places to interrogate what is happening in their cities, how they transform and how architects, planners and urban designers are either employing principles of place-making or not.