Abstract
The Kandyan Home Garden system of Sri Lanka represents one of the world’s most enduring examples of integrated agroforestry — a mosaic of trees, shrubs, and herbs surrounding dwellings that blurs the boundary between forest and farm. Historically, both the domestic home garden and the wider forest-home garden formed socio-ecological continuums that sustained household food, medicine, and income, while maintaining habitat for native flora and fauna. These systems also encoded distinctive food cultures and local governance practices, shaping how communities negotiated autonomy, stewardship, and subsistence. Colonial interventions from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries disrupted these networks by imposing plantation economies and new land-tenure regimes that fragmented traditional holdings, commodified land, and subordinated local foodways to export-oriented production. Yet remnants of the Kandyan structure persist, especially in Sri Lanka’s suburban and peri-urban landscapes, where they continue to reflect vernacular knowledge and cultural resilience. This paper revisits the Kandyan Home and Forest-Home Gardens as historical precedents for decentralized food production and as cultural frameworks of everyday politics — where household practice intersects with environmental governance. It argues that Sri Lanka’s current suburban morphology, neither fully urban nor rural, parallels ancient settlement patterns that balanced density with productive green space. Reinterpreted through modern agroecological and design lenses, the Kandyan model offers a scalable template for food sovereignty, cultural continuity, and bottom-up resilience in the face of climate and supply-chain volatility. Sustaining this suburban mosaic may thus revive an older, ecologically integrated vision of city, culture, and forest as one continuum.
Presenters
Cem KayatekinAssistant Professor, School of Architecture and Design, IE University, Segovia, Spain
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Food Production and Sustainability
KEYWORDS
Kandyan Home Garden, Agro-forestry, Sri Lanka, Suburbia, Food Sustainability
