Building resilient communities in Slave Island: mapping collective memories through cognitive mapping

This study explores community resilience and the relationships between the built environment and memories of an urban neighbourhood using cognitive mapping as a research tool. This correlation acts as a tool that holds communities together and it is important to acknowledge them to enhance the social sustenance and resilience of those communities. However, these relationships are being disrupted through the urban regeneration projects of Colombo causing displacement, the discontinuity of identity, and the erasing of history and memories of inner-city communities, further resulting in gentrification. The research focuses on the contested neighbourhood of Slave Island as the case study area where the urban landscape has gone through drastic changes to make way for urban development projects. The study explores features in the built environment that hold collective memories to preserve and recreate them using cognitive mapping as a research tool. Six distinct residents were asked to produce a cognitive map of Slave Island and each map was analysed through a theoretical framework to understand them in terms of built environment and memories. The findings indicate that shared spaces, typologies, landmarks, public spaces, and paths have a strong association on shaping the collective memories of the residents.