A Potpourri of Concrete Nation-Building
The Myanmar International Convention Center 2 looms at the end of a road. (photo: Manuel Oka).
Naypyidaw has been Myanmar’s capital since 2005, and seems the polar opposite of its predecessor, Yangon. Here, in the middle of Myanmar’s heartland, lies a capital created ex nihilo. By many counts, Naypyidaw is not even a city. It is a military creation inspired by fear, grandeur, and a skewed sense of national identity. It is “dictatorship by cartography, geometry”, as the journalist Siddharth Varadarajan put it, lacking the “urban cadences and unpredictable rhythms [of] city life in Rangoon or Mandalay.”
We came to Naypyidaw in 2015 as part of the process of researching our book Yangon Architectural Guide, published with DOM in the same year. Yangon’s built environment, we thought, could only be understood in the context of the new capital to the north. Since the construction of Naypyidaw had begun in the early 2000s, official buildings in Yangon had been neglected, with public works spending instead focused on the new capital. Yangon’s recent history, particularly the 8888 Uprising of 1988 and the 2007 Saffron Revolution protests against Myanmar’s national military government, also provided clues about Naypyidaw’s urban experiment – a city designed on the drawing board by Myanmar’s paranoid military, the Tatmadaw.
Naypyidaw’s Wunna Theikdi Stadium, built for the 2013 Southeast Asian Games.
Naypyidaw’s authoritarian roots are well-known, and most speculation involving its urban form connect with this narrative of a city built by generals hiding from their people. Back in 2015, we thought that the interesting question would be how the players in a newly democratising Myanmar – parties, political appointees, foreigners – would interact with this by-and-large military creation, how they would write history on such a seemingly ill-suiting canvas. We left this question unanswered, careful to leave any mention of a “democratic opening” in quotation marks – its sustainability had always appeared suspect given the important role that the military had carved out for itself in the country’s nascent institutions, above all its Constitution.
The Burmese Army took power in a coup d’état in February 2021, thereby reversing several years of democratic progress, however imperfect it may have been. In a strange and unfortunate twist of fate, it appears that Naypyidaw is now back on track to becoming a purpose-built capital, designed with the spatial isolation of the country’s rulers in mind. Whether or not this will be the city’s abiding legacy is anyone’s guess.
The approach to Naypyidaw’s Uppatasanti Pagoda.
The most recent images reaching us from Myanmar on social media bear a strong resemblance to those smuggled out of the country 14 years ago during the Saffron Revolution. Throngs of people walk the narrow and confined streets of Yangon and other urban centres such as Mandalay. They are joined by passersby and eyed by regime informers. Impromptu barricades are erected and the police and military have resorted to their old playbook of brutal intimidation. It is a deadly, threatening atmosphere of fear versus defiance.
The images from Naypyidaw on the other hand are much sparser and more surreal. In the early morning hours of 1 February, aerobic trainer Khing Hnin Wai was filming her regular exercise video for Facebook, posing on a roundabout on Naypyidaw’s giant Yaza Htarni Road. While doing her routine, and with her back facing the 20-lane highway, a convoy of armoured cars rolls toward the parliament complex. With the video soundtracked by the dance track ‘Ampun Bang Jago’, no ambient sound gives away the roaring vehicles, and Khing goes about her business seemingly unperturbed.
A disguised mobile phone mast.
Khing’s video drew the world’s attention to this most unusual capital city, which puts our assumptions about urban space and its relations with political protest to the test. Naypyidaw is not an organically grown city – its vastness exists by design and runs counter to the city’s young age. As an idea, Naypyidaw was only conceived around the turn of the millennium, although nobody is quite sure given the secrecy the city is shrouded in. Several reasons for its construction are usually offered, most centring around security: the military junta feared its own people and needed a safe distance which Yangon could not offer; the same junta fantasised about foreign powers (perhaps a US-led UN force acting under vague Responsibility to Protect guise) invading Myanmar, with Yangon too exposed due to its proximity to the open sea.
The military may have thought that with a new capital completed, a gradual and managed opening of the country’s political sphere could be allowed to occur: this process, the idea perhaps ran, would be less likely to get out of control if masterminded from Naypyidaw instead of the disorderly former capital Yangon. This opening up of Myanmar began with the formally civilian presidency of Thein Sein, who was elected in 2011 as the leader of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the newly-formed political vehicle of the junta. During the country’s 2015 elections, however, the USDP was overtaken by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) as the strongest faction in parliament. Despite the NLD’s electoral success, however, the Constitution guaranteed military appointees a crucial 25 per cent of parliamentary seats. This ensured that constitutional provisions – including on presidential eligibility requirements, such as nationality of family members – could not be amended without military buy-in–, and thereby Aung San Suu Kyi, mother of two British children from her marriage to the historian Michael Aris, was effectively barred from ever becoming president herself.[1]
Naypyidaw is riddled with countless ornate roundabouts.
Over the course of the 2010s, Naypyidaw’s parliament, the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, became the scene of surprisingly lively debates and unpredictable voting, providing a semblance of a functioning democracy in the most unlikely of places. Yes, the NLD disappointed many outsiders with a lukewarm embrace of (Western-inspired) reforms and an inexcusable approach to the Rohingya crisis in the southwestern Rakhine state, where hundreds of thousands of Muslim Myanmar citizens were displaced to neighbouring Bangladesh. Nonetheless, a steady flow of international delegations, consultants, and the odd business-person gave Naypyidaw a veneer of approachability. Then came the 2020 elections, the results of which the Tatmadaw disputed. Since February 2021, Myanmar has been caught up in violent clashes between the Civil Disobedience Movement and the heavily armed police and military. Hundreds of protestors have died.
***
Why is Naypyidaw where it is? Heinz Schuette, writing in his monograph on the city, cites the urban planner Kyaw Lat, who we also had the privilege of interviewing for our book. Kyaw suggests that Naypyidaw falls squarely in the tradition of the Burmese capital, which has changed place several times throughout history. Naypyidaw is the residence of the nation’s rulers, lies at the interface of important trade routes, and has a strategic military position in the centre of the territory, both ideal for collecting taxes and for quelling unrest. Yangon (formerly Rangoon) could never fulfil those criteria, being a by-and-large colonial creation, whose multiethnic heritage always sat at odds with a BamaBuddhist-centric national vision of the ruling military.
A winding street connecting the bungalows of the Mount Pleasant Hotel.
Naypyidaw’s Union Territory has an area of more than 7,000sqkm, more than 10 times that of Yangon. A total of just 900,000 people are said to live here, compared to the more than five million of Yangon. The territory comprises Naypyidaw proper, three old municipalities, and the Naypyidaw Control Center. Naypyidaw’s population density is thus extremely low; there are clusters of buildings at most, often appearing at random and without any connection to their surroundings. On top of that, much of the city is off-limits and reserved for exclusive military use. Observers have struggled to put words to the sensation of visiting the city. “A deceptive vastness of emptiness and barriers” (a photographer) and “an almost frighteningly deep space” (a journalist) represent some of the better attempts to do so.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but Naypyidaw’s photographs evoke silence above all. They mirror the city’s strangely odourless, eerily quiet atmosphere, and make us reassess the meanings of “vastness” and “emptiness”, words we normally associate with freedom. These images instead convey suffocation. There is no public space here, no human interaction that could provide a context for the edifices scattered in this nothingness. Attempts to capture this on camera often fail. One thing is for sure: if ideas need density to spread, their transmission is suspended here. This authoritarian control over territory works also on the mind.
The ornate interior of the Uppatasanti Pagoda.
Naypyidaw proper’s urban layout follows a clear segregation of use, testament to the planner’s desire to separate inhabitants from the state’s institutions, and foreigners from the ordinary people. Economic, residential and even hotel zones are strictly delineated. The latter lies adjacent to the undeveloped diplomatic housing compound, with the ministry area 10km to the north. This city is neither compact nor accessible. Most visitors on official business fly into the oversized international airport and then drive to their hotels, only to be picked up again to be driven to their appointments in one of the public buildings during the day.
Public works in the lead-up to the 2005 transfer were cordoned off from sight by huge barriers and screening. A plethora of companies were enlisted in different parts and stages of the project. Architecturally, Naypyidaw offers a potpourri of concrete nation-building – simple copying and faceless rendering. The nation-building attempt is perhaps most visible in the form of the Hluttaw building, whose roofs resemble old Burmese royal palaces. The vast complex’s 31 buildings are said to represent the 31 planes of existence in Buddhist cosmology – not unproblematic in an allegedly multi-confessional and multi-ethnic state. The Uppatasanti Pagoda, meanwhile, is a nigh-identical copy of Yangon’s iconic Shwedagon Pagoda (except for it being slightly shorter and hollow). Most ministry buildings and hotels possess a generic feel. The same applies to a host of sporting venues built for the Southeast Asian Games in 2013, including two identical stadium complexes 35km apart.
The Star World Hotel in the city’s hotel zone.
Ultimately, Naypyidaw’s principal aim is to exert control over its territory and the people living here and in the rest of the country. This control is achieved with the simplest of methods. Pedestrians are restricted to gated shopping and hotel complexes, as Naypyidaw is unwalkable due to its scattered buildings and large driveways connecting them to the main roads. Opulent roundabouts provide orientation points, but there are hardly any visual clues as to where roads may lead. Everywhere it is eerily quiet, the only noises coming from mopeds and gardening tools used for keeping the vegetation in check.
The main mode of transportation is motor vehicles, with wide multi-lane roads connecting the disparate parts of the city but hardly any traffic on them. Other distances are traversed by golf cart, with buildings strewn far apart. Even the rooms in most hotels are often located in separate buildings. Naypyidaw is a city without an easily discernible centre, which is by no means an accident. The symbols of power, above all the gigantic parliament building, are inaccessible and cut off from the outside by moats and iron bridges. There is no public space surrounding them, and therefore no place for a protesting public to congregate. The insurmountable power of sheer space, ingrained in so many squares in mainland China, finds a new definition here: Naypyidaw appears entirely devoid of urban space. This did not happen by chance, but was carefully planned.
***
And still, Naypyidaw is not a place without a demos – the conventions of protest have just been reconfigured. Take the government employees who, at least initially, formed a major part of the Civil Disobedience Movement. Although there was no general strike, employees of several ministries were among the most outspoken protestors, posing in front of the signage of the various ministries, which is often displayed on manicured lawns in front of the building gates to be visible to those driving by. In a way, these crafted spaces provide a photogenic stage on which to protest for an audience requiring representative imagery. Hundreds of mopeds have also formed protest convoys, captured on Facebook and other social media while these services were still accessible – in February, Myanmar’s military ordered internet service providers to restrict access to these platforms.
A shanty town behind the Wunna Theikdi sports complex.
Protests of this kind make the demonstrators very visible, especially in Naypyidaw. They cannot easily be submerged in the anonymity provided by a more urban space of the kind afforded by the former capital Yangon. Add to that the fact that a large number of government employees live in public housing compounds. Their livelihoods are thus completely reliant on the state providing them support. In fact, many have already been threatened, sacked, or imprisoned for their participation in the protests. The same sense of total dependency on the regime applies to army members, many of whom live in a parallel universe of military compounds, where their schools and other amenities are sealed off from the “real” world.
This real world exists only some kilometres away, in Pyinmana, one of the “old” and more traditional municipalities that are part of the Union Territory where normal Myanmar life unfolds on its streets and markets. Here, protests have continued like they have across most of the country, and the military have cracked down using live bullets against unarmed protestors. To this day, the will of the people remains unbroken, and the outcome of the current protests is all but certain: Myanmar risks becoming a “failed state”, returning to a state of civil war compounded by the economic problems it brings with it, such as shortages of goods, lack of (foreign) investment and possible international sanctions.
A tea shop next to the pool building of the Wunna Theikdi sports complex.
Naypyidaw cannot, by definition, see the kind of street fights that have been visible in Yangon, Mandalay or other cities across Myanmar. Naypyidaw’s urban layout may, however, lend itself to palace intrigues – politico-military factions breaking off, cordoned off, and spatially isolated. The ease with which the parliament building was taken during the coup suggests that it may just as easily be retaken, even by outsiders. The impending economic collapse and further international isolation bode ill not just for the country as a whole, but for Naypyidaw in particular. It is likely going to dilapidate physically, parts of it being abandoned or remaining unfinished. Already, a sense of decay is palpable.
Going forward, it is hard to see the hegemonic role of the military sustained in any political settlement. With the creators of this city hopefully abdicating, their physical legacy in tatters, Naypyidaw will stand as a cautionary reminder of military hubris and the primacy of politics over urban planning. If, on the other hand, the coup succeeds and the new junta remains in power, akin to the 1990s perhaps, then the army of Naypyidaw’s civil servants is set to govern a country more estranged from its political leadership than ever before. The physical isolation of Naypyidaw, and the generals’ retreat into their concrete fortress, will become even more entrenched.
A series of retail units under construction.
We said at the outset that Naypyidaw was created ex nihilo, without the same weight of history as a city that has grown organically. We may now need to revisit this statement. Naypyidaw is young, and we had thought that Myanmar’s recent “opening up” might stand in defiance of its urban form. It too seemed a place whose history was yet to be written. Let us hope that this was not a pipe dream and that this same urban form will not now dictate the look and feel of Myanmar’s next chapter.
[1] On 6 December 2021 Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to two years in prison after being arrested by the junta and charged with inciting dissent.
Words Benjamin Bansal and Manuel Oka
Photographs Manuel Oka
This article was originally published in Disegno #29. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.