In the last few years, as Myanmar has rejoined the international community, the Japanese government has expanded its technical assistance to include urban planning advice. It has wealthy Asian neighbors happy to invest in its future. The family of a Thai senior citizen who died after being violently knocked to the ground in San Francisco is seeking justice and blaming anti-Asian racism for his death. Down the block, young foodies (and stray animals) congregate around the barbeque stalls where, for a few dollars, they can pick out a dinner, ranging from simple tofu cubes on a stick to a spice-rubbed whole fish. When I first arrived in Yangon, I had assumed it was just another building demolition site. Now, staring down at the lot from a pedestrian overpass above a broad avenue (right-of-way being a quaint foreign concept here), I couldn’t help but wonder about the political mechanisms for implementing JICA’s master plan. As Yangon grows outward into the greenfields that ring the city, the farmers who currently work that land are organizing. To the east, there is China’s model of authoritarian politics and rapid economic change, where cities sprout up almost overnight and anyone standing in the way gets moved. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. (AP) world news 6 killed in 130-vehicle pileup on icy Texas interstate If Myanmar was for decades the black hole in the heart of Asia — a frozen nation in the middle of the most dynamic region on earth — the Secretariat Building is the black hole in the heart of Yangon. Just because the military is ceding political power doesn’t mean its leaders have any intention of ceding economic power. Not the next year, when they placed opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, where she remained for most of two decades. What makes Yangon’s future doubly unpredictable is that it is taking the leap into democratization and hyper-urbanization simultaneously. Her supervisor, Deputy Chief Architect Hlaing Maw Oo, who had been quite gracious when I met her at an academic lecture in Yangon, ignored my repeated attempts to schedule an interview during my trip to Naypyitaw. But inspiration may not be enough. A young woman who was shot in … And through the privatization of public buildings, government officials and their cronies will retain personal control over prized parcels that would have otherwise been transferred to democratic control. She read through the slides word-for-word, studiously ignoring my repeated prodding for additional details. Right: Elevator, City Hall. “This department is under construction,” he told me. During a half-century of stagnation — Burma attained a shaky independence in 1948 but became a one-party state in the 1962 coup — the City Hall building fell into decay. Perhaps the biggest question is who will carry out the plan after the transition to an elected government. Predicated on preserving the historic colonial center, the blueprint calls for directing development to a series of dense nodes arrayed around the region to be linked together by an improved transportation network. But Masahiko contends that the Japanese interests are more grandly geopolitical than narrowly economic. Daniel Brook has published on architecture and urbanism in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and Slate, and in his book, A History of Future Cities. Daybreak along the Circle Line in the Mahlwagone neighborhood. ... People walk next to Yangon City Hall on February 1, 2021. Their culture was quite different in the past, so it’s hard for them to abide by international standards.” I understood what Masahiko, a Japanese public servant, meant by “international standards,” but in this region there is no standard. To the west, there is the model of democratic India, where NGOs get a say in planning but squatters hold up infrastructure projects and rent control makes renovation of historic neighborhoods all but impossible. “They owned the land,” he said in his top-floor office in one of the few Class A office buildings in Yangon, so “they wanted to share in the upside.”. Myanmar railway workers protesting in Yangon on Saturday, Feb 13, 2021. Situated across the street from a notable Buddhist shrine, the shimmering golden Sule Pagoda, City Hall’s simple four-story square-around-a-courtyard structure is ornamented with details that lend it the grandeur of a palace. I wondered whether an army officer could make the transition to democratic city planner. “They said they want to improve their circle line to be this fast,” Masahiko said. [Andrew Rowat], Still, Yangon has assets that other cities in the region didn’t have during their earlier development booms. Under military rule, the money was pocketed by generals and lavished on dubious vanity projects like the new capital, which boasts a 20-lane road (reputed to be the widest in the world), leading to a moated, 31-building seat of government — a full-blown, modern-day Forbidden City. However, we will develop the foundations of the building so that it can be expanded to 14 stories in the future if the rules change.”. A mix of the charming, modern, and tried and true. In this unusual period when dictatorship is waning but full democracy has yet to be established, the departing dictators and their cronies can stuff their pockets with impunity. He groaned audibly as he dropped the load with a thud in the center of the car. In 2007 in downtown Yangon, blood seeped unseen into the burgundy robes of Buddhist monks who had been shot by soldiers in yet another crushed … To this day, no hawker dares set up shop on the sidewalk abutting the building. The police have been under the leadership of Myanmar's military since 1995, and helped lead forces through Yangon. Consider, for example, the possibility that Thilawa SEZ succeeds wildly, creating thousands of manufacturing and port jobs a dozen miles from the city center, but the transportation infrastructure improvements fail. In 2012, Myanmar enacted a new law, ostensibly to protect farmers from having their land stolen for development, which increased the maximum jail time for criminal trespassing from 3 months to 7 years. Similarly, authoritarian governments in places like Singapore and China cap new car registrations to limit traffic congestion — a wise urban policy but one that would be very hard to enact in a city where leaders are freely elected. The generals may have held Myanmar in their grip for nearly 50 years, but they take over a country that has changed remarkably in the last decade. And notably missing from the list of protected historic buildings in Old Yangon is the city’s central train station, a late-colonial landmark much like City Hall that clads a modern institution in traditional Burmese forms. I noticed that in the photo on his ID badge, he was wearing a green uniform with the same insignia, the uniform of an army major. A $440 million Vietnamese development on the banks of Inya Lake, Yangon. Even the bona fide restrictions that have been enacted in accordance with the master plan may ultimately be undone by parties with a financial stake in unfettered development. To link all of these developments, the proposed transportation improvements are suitably ambitious, though most are far from shovel-ready. In the historic heart of the city, the Secretariat Building, the colonial seat of British Burma, sat abandoned and fenced off behind barbed wire, foliage growing out of its roof. The resulting master plan, “Yangon 2040: The Peaceful and Beloved Yangon — A City of Green and Gold,” expects the city to more than double in population by that milestone year. If you are a resident of another country or region, please select the appropriate version of Tripadvisor for your country or region in the drop-down menu. The downtown infrastructure is already groaning from this concentration. YANGON – Tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets of Myanmar's biggest city Wednesday, in one of largest protests yet of a coup, … This is a dynamic moment to visit Myanmar. Here, the possibility of overturning the new height limits had literally been built into the renovation. And because Myanmar was such a closed society for so long, most international experts, by definition, have little firsthand knowledge of the country. Just a month before I arrived in Myanmar last winter, international advisors from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), with the support of local officials, released a proposed master plan for the city. [Andrew Rowat]. A few blocks away, the High Court, a red-brick building completed in 1911 that boasts Yangon’s most famous clock tower, had been auctioned off to Thein Tun, the junta crony universally known as “Pepsi” for his monopoly on bottling the American soft drink. National elections in 2015 are the next step toward civilian governance (though a quarter of parliament seats will still be reserved for the military). First among these is the country’s intellectual elite. Even the civil servants who worked in Yangon were unaware that a new capital was under construction; they were simply told to pack up their offices and move north. Democracy has many strengths but municipal transformation in long-stagnant societies does not seem to be one of them. Also covers the express ferry from Mandalay to Bagan. As Masahiko told me, he had been trying to convince Toe Aung and other government officials “that without social considerations, there’s a global understanding that you cannot implement anything. In 2011, the building was privatized, but the auction was open only to bidders with government connections. Toe Aung had been retired from the military for nearly a decade, but he didn’t seem to have made his peace with people asserting their rights. Now, Yangon is on a path of liberalization, and a speculative wave is sweeping the city. Bringing a Western view of historic preservation to a region where it is just taking root, Thant Myint-U has convinced local authorities to institute a building height limit in Yangon’s historic downtown and preserve the grand structures of the city’s colonial past. When I rode it, a man got on with two giant piles of bananas balanced on what looked like a scale carried across his shoulders. Wearing the long hair of a European intellectual and the plaid lungi (summer-weight kilt) of a traditional Burmese man, he recounted his paper’s crusades against what he called “the high-rise problem [and the] misuse of public space by the government.”. The plan aims to accommodate this growth while still protecting green space and preserving the colonial streetscapes and landmarks of the city’s historic heart. The country has a new constitution, a new Parliament, and a National Human Rights Commission. It was used to coordinate Tuesday's mass walk-out of medical professionals across 70 hospitals, ... Police trucks in the downtown area of Yangon on February 1, 2021. Prior to the release of the statement, the Yangon Region military commander met with the cardinal at the archbishop’s residence in downtown Yangon on Wednesday. Myanmar’s coup leaders have called on hundreds of thousands of government employees — … As Thiha Saw, the editor of the reformist, Burmese-language Myanma Freedom Daily newspaper, enthused when I spoke to him in his office, “We’ve been waiting for this moment for 40 years. Let’s go for it!”. “I tried to pursue it but so far I’ve been unsuccessful,” he lamented. Footage shared by Ben Small shows a large group of demonstrators wearing white medical coats and holding Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) placards as they walk down the Pansodan Road in Yangon. There were so few passengers, no one even had to move out of his way. Thousands of people gathered for a second day in Yangon, Myanmar, on Sunday, February 7, to take part in a civil disobedience campaign in protest over the military takeover of Myanmar.Demonstrators called for the release of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other elected officials. China, India, Vietnam, Singapore, and Australia, all have widely varying rules and practices for eminent domain. Its first electronics and automobile factories are scheduled to open in 2015. On a recent trip to Tokyo, Myanmar Railways officials rode that city’s circle line, the Yamanote, which was built before Yangon’s but has been consistently upgraded and now travels at 55 miles per hour. Masahiko walked me down the hall to meet the man at whose pleasure he serves, the chief urban planning official for the Yangon City Development Committee, Toe Aung, a laconic, stone-faced man who wore a blue uniform with a chest full of ribbons over his breast pocket. At the time of my visit, the pale stone, stripped-classical edifice that had been the regional courthouse was covered in bamboo scaffolding and swarmed by construction workers, some from as far away as China. The master plan envisions the improved rail loop linking up with new light rail and monorail systems at transit hubs, and raising rail’s share of urban trips to 30 percent by 2040. Masahiko told me he had first visited Myanmar in 2005, but JICA had been working in the city for decades, even keeping a skeleton crew in country through the period of isolation that followed the 1988 crackdown on Aung San Suu Kyi’s democracy movement. Details of … What standard practice will ultimately be in democratic Myanmar is a central question hanging over the country. At dusk, an impromptu night market breaks out, as fishmongers sell the day’s catch from woven wicker baskets filled with fast-melting ice. To urbanize the surrounding area without building sprawl, the plan envisions a system of “sub-centers” (dense nodes of development) and “green isles” (blocks of preserved green space). Imperious in a tailored skirt suit, she insisted I watch a PowerPoint presentation she had given at a conference in Europe. Toe Aung was trained to suppress Yangon, not manage it. This is the first article in an ongoing series, “History of the Present: Cities in Transition.”, Coming soon: An overpass at Kaba Aye Pagoda Road, Yangon. It might as well have been the city’s official slogan. And no one knows what will happen in next year’s elections. Out on the streets of boomtown Yangon, the best-laid master plans seemed very remote from lived experience. In 2007 in downtown Yangon, blood seeped unseen into the burgundy robes of Buddhist monks who had been shot by soldiers in … You are reading an article printed from Places, the journal of public scholarship on architecture, landscape, and urbanism. If the transition comes off without a hitch, democracy itself is coming soon. On New Years Day, 2006, the junta announced that it had moved the capital to the newly-built city of Naypyitaw in the center of the country.