CTBUH Sri Lanka 2021 tackles future cities, carbon, climate and societal crises

The CTBUH Sri Lanka conference on ‘Future Cities: Addressing Carbon, Climate and Societal Crises’ was held recently at Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall. It was able to yet again successfully gather many prominent tall-building professionals in Sri Lanka in the form of structural engineers, building services engineers, architects, academics, researchers, developers, builders, specialist material suppliers, and also some young prospective future tall-building leaders in the form of postgraduate and undergraduate students from leading universities in Sri Lanka.

The audience included well over 60 participants who joined physically and over 100 participants who joined virtually.

The conference was initiated with a welcome address by Shiromal Fernando, the country representative of CTBUH where he focused the audience›s attention into the topic of the evening, Future City. In addition to this, he highlighted the emerging skyline of Sri Lanka and the port city development that can transform the conventional mono-centric city to polycentric cities. Further, he started off the workshop by giving an insightful introduction to green-integrated cities and the need for greener construction for a sustainable future.

The first keynote Speaker of the conference was the Chief Guest – Prof. Ranjith Dissanayake on ‘Future Plans for Sustainable cities in Sri Lanka.’

During his keynote speech, he discussed the visible transformation at various parts of the country and how the green initiative can transform the society to work as one and create a country we love to live in.

In addition to this, he also educated the audience on the national projects that are initiated to planting of trees, road safety improvements and river conservation.

Professionals of the industry who joined as keynote speakers for the event also included Dan Amarasekere, Prof. Wije Ariyarathna, Prof. Sarath Kotagama, Prof. Priyan Dias, Prof. Priyan Mendis and Yamuna Jayaratne.

This was followed by the panel discussion carried out by Niroda Gunadasa , Dilina Hettiarachchi, Udayanga Alwis, Tharindu Samarasinghe and Thilini Liyanage on the topic of ‘New Urban form for the New Normal’, where the discussion was raised on the changes that occurred due to the pandemic. During the panel discussion, questions by audience members present physically and virtually were addressed by panel members.

Tokens of appreciation were handed over to the keynote speakers by Shiromal Fernando and the panellists received tokens of appreciation by Ruwan de Silva.

The participants physically present were then invited to the Port City visit in the arranged transportation and the virtual participants obtained the live stream of the visit. Jayaratne provided the introduction of the port city at the gallery followed by the site visit.