Idea 476 of 500. Cluster 26: The cities, one idea each
Colombo: a night market on the Galle Face Green run to a standard, every weekend
The mechanism, from the book
Every city has one thing it could be known for, and most are not yet known for it.
Every idea in cluster 26 uses this mechanism.
A first step
Walk the green on a weekend evening and note what is missing: seating, lighting, bins, card payments, a price board. Then propose a short set of standards to 10 of the vendors already trading there, with a shared cleaning rota paid by a small weekly fee from each. The number who agree to pay, written down with their stall names, tells you whether a managed market can stand.
- Who pays first
- A food vendor already trading on the green, who pays a weekly pitch fee because a clean, managed market brings more customers who spend more.
- What leaves today
- Colombo's visitors spend their evenings in hotel restaurants and malls, and the city's best open space stays a place to walk through rather than spend in.
The idea and the mechanism are from the book. The first step was written for this site as a suggestion; if you know a better one, say so.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
The only test any idea on this site has to pass. The four rules that go with it are here.
In the book
- Ch. SeventeenOne Building
One building, and what a city could be known for
More from cluster 26
- 477Colombo: the Pettah as a managed market street, cleaned, lit and sold to visitors as the best bazaar in Asia
- 478Kandy: the lake promenade with cafés and evening performances, not only the temple
- 479Galle: the coral coast, the gardens of Hikkaduwa and the reef under Rumassala, where a visitor or a Sri Lankan abroad becomes a coral mum or a coral dad, with a coral in their name, the way people name a star, and a photograph of it every year as it grows
- 480Jaffna: the food the rest of the island does not have, odiyal kool, the crab curry and everything the palmyrah gives, cooked where it comes from and shown off to the world as a cuisine of its own
- 481Trincomalee: the summer beach town, sold for the months when the south-west coast has its monsoon
- 482Negombo: the first and last evening of every visit, 15 minutes from the airport, with the fleet coming in to the beach, the churches and the lagoon sold as the island's welcome and its send-off
Idea 476 of the 500 in the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? Every one can be started by one person, one family or one small firm.