Yangon: History of The Present

Yangon: History of the Present
7/15/16, 3:05 PM
"
History of the Present: Yangon

Emerging from a half century of dictatorship, can Myanmars
principal city be a model of sustainable, democratic
development?
DANIEL BROOK
SEPTEMBER 2014
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. [Andrew Rowat]
https://placesjournal.org/article/history-of-the-present-yangon-myanmar/#
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Time and again, I spotted signs marking construction zones. Coming

soon: a guesthouse; coming soon: a bank; coming soon: a hotel. It might as
well have been the citys official slogan. Yangon: coming soon. 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. Known as the Ministers Office since
independence, the massive red-brick pile was left to ruin in 2006 when
the military regime that has ruled the country for decades packed up and
moved to a new capital city. Now, locals debated what it would become.
Surely, something was coming soon.
This is a dynamic moment to visit Myanmar. After decades in isolation,
the worlds longest-lasting military dictatorship is giving up power. The
country has a new constitution, a new Parliament, and a National Human
Rights Commission. In the past two years, it has welcomed Barack Obama
(the first-ever visit by an American president), hosted the global business
elite of the World Economic Forum, and assumed the chair of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations. National elections in 2015 are the
next step toward civilian governance (though a quarter of parliament
seats will still be reserved for the military). If the transition comes off
without a hitch, democracy itself is coming soon.
Almost by definition, the fall of the junta means the rise of Yangon,
Myanmars principal city and largest port. The military rulers always
hated the metropolis, feared it, stifled it. And yet, despite decades of
repression, they never managed to subdue it. Not in 1988, when they
responded to a democratic uprising by forcibly relocating migrant
slumdwellers. Not the next year, when they placed opposition leader
Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, where she remained for most of
two decades. Not in 1993, when they levelled coffeehouses popular with
the citys activists and intellectuals to construct the luxurious 26-story
Traders Hotel.
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1988 protests in Yangon (then Rangoon). [Gaye Paterson]
Sule Pagoda at dusk as seen from the Traders Hotel (now the Sule Shangri-la). [Andrew
Rowat]
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Now, Yangon is on a path of liberalization, and a speculative wave is

sweeping the city. Since 2010, office rents have increased eightfold;
residential rents in desirable neighborhoods jumped 50 percent in 2013
alone. Meanwhile, an influx of tourists has spurred a hotel construction
boom. In 2012, international arrivals at the Yangon airport topped one
million, a 53 percent annual increase over the previous year. The official
goal for 2014 is triple that figure. This is a tremendous challenge for a city
that has had no experience with comprehensive urban planning in close
to a century. In 1998, the citys population was 2.5 million; now it is twice
that, and by 2040, it is predicted to hit 11.7 million. Barring a concerted
effort by city planners, most of the new growth will be in the form of
shantytown sprawl informal settlements on the outskirts, unconnected
to utilities or transit.
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.
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.
While the transitional government has endorsed the plan and is already
implementing parts, this is the lamest of lame-duck governments a
regime that openly admits it has no legitimacy. And no one knows what
will happen in next years elections.
In this region, its all bad models.

What makes Yangons future doubly unpredictable is that it is taking the
leap into democratization and hyper-urbanization simultaneously. Long
described as the place where China meets India, on account of its
geography, Myanmar now lies between two very different models of
urban development. To the east, there is Chinas model of authoritarian
politics and rapid economic change, where cities sprout up almost
overnight and anyone standing in the way gets moved. To the west, there
is the model of democratic India, where NGOs get a say in planning but
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squatters hold up infrastructure projects and rent control makes

renovation of historic neighborhoods all but impossible. Democracy has
many strengths but municipal transformation in long-stagnant societies
does not seem to be one of them. Unsurprisingly, Southeast Asian nations
like Vietnam and Cambodia have chosen to emulate China.
If Yangon is to develop more democratically than a Chinese city and more
functionally than an Indian one, it will have to write its own script. As
Moe Moe Lwin, the General Secretary of the Association of Myanmar
Architects, told me, In this region, its all bad models. Indeed, in many
Southeast Asian boomtowns, development has come at the cost of
leveling historic downtowns (Hong Kong) or sprawling out into trafficclogged nightmares (Bangkok). The cities that have managed to avert
those fates Hanoi with its heritage preservation, Singapore with its
excellent transit and public housing have done so under authoritarian
rule. With no template for success, Myanmar will have to thrive on its
own terms. Maybe, Moe Moe Lwin mused, Yangon could be the model.
The abandoned Secretariat (Ministers Building), north gate. [via Flickr/Commons]

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A City Up for Grabs

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. The walk
there leads through a manic section of the historic downtown, a New
World-style grid laid out by the British colonialists in a bid to impose
Western order. In this stretch of the city, virtually every storefront is
occupied, many with shiny new establishments like Tokyo Donut, a local
chain that trades on Dunkins graphic design and Tokyos urban cool. But
the real action is out on the sidewalks. Hawkers selling newspapers and
mobile phones commodities that were tightly restricted by the junta
until just recently share space with food stands offering pan-Asian
fusion cuisine, a reflection of the citys cosmopolitan roots. One popular
snack is a fried wonton stuffed with lentils and potatoes, essentially a
spring roll crossbred with a samosa. At dusk, an impromptu night market
breaks out, as fishmongers sell the days catch from woven wicker baskets
filled with fast-melting ice. 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. They dig in at tiny plastic tables set out in
reclaimed parking spaces.
But on the superblock where the Secretariat Building sits, all the action
stops. Back during the height of the juntas power, the Ministers Office
was so heavily guarded that people were afraid to walk alongside the
building on the street. Then, one day, it was suddenly vacant, recalled
Franois Tainturier, a French architect who has lived in Yangon for over a
decade. 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. 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. To this day, no hawker dares set up shop on
the sidewalk abutting the building.
The Secretariat is now ready for a new life, but as with so many other
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Yangon institutions, its rebirth is contentious. In 2011, the building was

privatized, but the auction was open only to bidders with government
connections. The new owner is the daughter of a former minister of
industry. A scheme by foreign investors to convert the building into a
hotel so outraged locals that the government stepped in to stop it.
Current plans call for a cultural center or museum it was here that
armed paramilitaries assassinated independence leader Aung San and six
cabinet ministers in 1947 but many are skeptical. Maybe one section
will be a cultural center or a museum with an entrance fee, Tainturier
predicted, but theyll lease out the [rest] and make money. We spoke in
the lobby of an upscale hotel that was, like just about everything else in
Yangon, undergoing renovations.
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The Secretariat (Ministers Building). [Andrew Rowat]
No one quite knows what is coming soon for the Secretariat and other
underutilized historic government buildings, but it is an ominous sign
that even buildings with perfectly valid public uses are being privatized.
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
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erstwhile courthouse, I learned, was being converted into a luxury hotel.

A few blocks away, the High Court, a red-brick building completed in 1911
that boasts Yangons 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.
A kleptocratic petrostate spinning out billions of natural gas

wealth each year.
Just because the military is ceding political power doesnt mean its
leaders have any intention of ceding economic power. Myanmar has long
been a kleptocratic petrostate spinning out billions in natural gas wealth
each year. 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. Even after the transition to civilian rule, the departing dictators
hope to retain their outsize role in the Burmese economy. The militarys
holding company has no plans to divest its large stakes in banking,
mining, and breweries. 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.
In this strange interregnum between dictatorship and democracy, the
several factions that constitute a loosely-organized opposition are
challenging the junta and its cronies for the right to determine Yangons
future. First among these is the countrys intellectual elite. During the
most repressive decades, persecuted Burmese intellectuals, many having
done time in Yangons Insein Prison, leapt at opportunities to study and
work abroad, in places like Singapore, Thailand, Europe, and North
America. Now they and their children are repatriating to Yangon, hoping
to apply expertise and experience gained abroad. The best known is
Thant Myint-U, the founder of the historic preservation group Yangon
Heritage Trust. The grandson of a former UN Secretary General, he grew
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up in New York City and Washington, D.C., before studying at Harvard,

Johns Hopkins, and Cambridge. 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 Yangons
historic downtown and preserve the grand structures of the citys
colonial past.
Density in downtown Yangon. [Andrew Rowat]
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The transitional government has also welcomed international advisers.

JICA has crafted its master plan for the growing city, and UN-Habitat has
opened a Yangon office to train Burmese urban planners and upgrade
local building codes. Though staffed by earnest internationaldevelopment professionals (including many inspired by Aung San Suu
Kyi), these agencies serve at the pleasure of the current government, so
there are limits to what they can propose. And because Myanmar was
such a closed society for so long, most international experts, by
definition, have little firsthand knowledge of the country. The director of
the local UN-Habitat office at the time of my visit was an American, just
relocated from Germany, who had spent even less time in Myanmar than I
had.
Even as new policies have been proposed and some enacted, there
remains a sense that everything is up for grabs. Signs of political
backsliding over the last year including harsh sentences for journalists
reporting on sensitive issues and slow progress on a constitutional
amendment that would permit Aung San Suu Kyi to run for president
have drawn warnings from foreign diplomats. And even if the democratic
transition takes place on schedule, politically connected developers will
still try to roll back planning reforms. I saw this openly laid out during my
time in Yangon, when the privatized former Ministry of Foreign Affairs
building reopened as high-end apartments. Here, the possibility of
overturning the new height limits had literally been built into the
renovation. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, a spokesman for the
developer, Youth Force Group, told The Myanmar Times, Recently this
area was put into the restricted category for high-rise development so we
changed our plans from a 14-story to a 6-story serviced apartment.
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.
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Sule Pagoda (left) and City Hall (right). [Eugene Phoen]
The Army Major Turned City Planner

Grand plans for Yangon are being formulated in an urban planning office
in City Hall an edifice that embodies the citys cosmopolitan traditions
and its hopes to reconnect with them today. Completed in 1940, the
building opened just before the Japanese invasion that ended Yangons
reign as the crossroads of Southeast Asia. Situated across the street from a
notable Buddhist shrine, the shimmering golden Sule Pagoda, City Halls
simple four-story square-around-a-courtyard structure is ornamented
with details that lend it the grandeur of a palace. The front and rear
entryways and all four corners are topped by traditional pyatthat roofs,
with their three-tiered, spiky decorative eaves. The front entrance is
flanked by a pair of cartoonishly fierce carved nagas (serpents). Inside,
more nagas, these cast in bronze, hold up the light fixtures in the central
stairwells, which are themselves accented with teakwood and polished
marble. Even the elevator bays are decorated with dark carved stone as if
they were the doorways to Burmese temples. British architects had
initially proposed a fully Western-style building, but it was ornamented
with indigenous details at the insistence of Burmese politician U Ba Pe
and Burmese architect Sithu U Tin, who had trained in Bombay.
Construction was carried out by a skilled contractor who was neither
British nor Burmese but Persian.
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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. Dark patches of mildew stained the
tangerine faade. But in mid-2011, as the reform period began, the
building was repainted a pristine white with lilac accents to highlight its
ornamentation, and the interior was painstakingly restored to splendor,
down to the carved wooden public message boards that still read
Corporation of Rangoon, the official name of the colonial municipality.
On the top floor, in a large, sparsely furnished office, I met JICA senior
planning advisor Suzuki Masahiko, the most important foreign expert
crafting plans for Yangons future. Dressed in an open-collar, short-sleeve
shirt, with the window curtain drawn against the tropical sunlight, the
better to see his computer monitor, Masahiko projected an air of quiet
competence. 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 Kyis democracy movement. 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.
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Left: Suzuki Masahiko, JICA planning advisor. Right: Elevator, City Hall. [Daniel Brook]
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. The plan aims to accommodate this
growth while still protecting green space and preserving the colonial
streetscapes and landmarks of the citys historic heart. Today, Old
Yangon, which represents just 2 percent of the metropolitan areas
footprint, accounts for 10 percent of its population and roughly half of its
commercial establishments. The downtown infrastructure is already
groaning from this concentration. To relieve pressure on the city center,
the master plan calls for enforcing strict height limits in the old city and
directing growth to the outskirts.
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). The most important subcenter, a second central business district called Mindama, is slated to be
built 10 miles north of the historic center, near the rapidly-expanding
Yangon International Airport. No doubt, this will be an attractive location
for the international companies that have so fiercely bid up office rents
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downtown and whose executives now have to factor in a long, congested

trip to the airport. But as an office district, the location has a key
downside: buildings can only rise 12 to 15 stories without interfering with
flight paths.
The other key sub-center is Thilawa, a new port and industrial zone being
built a dozen miles downriver from the current port. A joint venture
between major Japanese corporations, including Mitsubishi, and
Burmese concerns, including the militarys holding company, the Thilawa
Special Economic Zone broke ground in November 2013. Its first
electronics and automobile factories are scheduled to open in 2015.
To link all of these developments, the proposed transportation
improvements are suitably ambitious, though most are far from shovelready. In a kind of kitchen sink strategy, the master plan calls for major
improvements in both public and private transportation. It envisions a
ring road encircling the entire region a major engineering challenge,
considering all the rivers and inlets of Yangons delta landscape, to say
nothing of the fact that beltways have become synonymous with gridlock
in much smaller cities.
Sensibly, the master plan also calls for improvements to the Circle Line, a
British-built rail loop that runs through downtown Yangon, linking the
center to the outskirts. Today, the decrepit line is more like a kiddie ride
at an amusement park than a viable public transportation system. Taking
nearly 3 hours to travel a 28.5 mile route, it moves no faster than a bicycle.
Largely abandoned by riders, it accounts for just 3 percent of urban trips,
compared with the 80 percent served by the overburdened bus system
with its fleet of used Japanese imports. (Since the Japanese drive on the
right but the Burmese on the left, the vehicles are jury-rigged to add a
back door for passengers on the drivers side.) With so few passengers, the
Circle Lines main draw is for freight transportation. 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. He groaned audibly as he dropped the
load with a thud in the center of the car. There were so few passengers, no
one even had to move out of his way.
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The Circle Line. [Daniel Brook]
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Daybreak along the Circle Line in the Mahlwagone neighborhood. [Andrew Rowat]
Plans to improve the rail loop with Japanese help are beginning to take
shape. On a recent trip to Tokyo, Myanmar Railways officials rode that
citys circle line, the Yamanote, which was built before Yangons but has
been consistently upgraded and now travels at 55 miles per hour. They
said they want to improve their circle line to be this fast, Masahiko said.
And Japanese industry is happy to oblige. In a recently-negotiated landfor-speed deal, a Japanese firm will gain the right to develop state-owned
real estate along the tracks in exchange for upgrading the train line. The
master plan envisions the improved rail loop linking up with new light
rail and monorail systems at transit hubs, and raising rails share of urban
trips to 30 percent by 2040. These connections will be particularly crucial
for the success of Thilawa since, unlike Mindama, it is located far from
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the Circle Line.

With lucrative opportunities for Japanese industry baked into the master
plan, there is some grumbling in Yangon about whose interests it really
serves. But Masahiko contends that the Japanese interests are more
grandly geopolitical than narrowly economic. He hinted that part of the
impetus behind JICAs involvement is countering China. (If Japan wont
do it, he offered, maybe China will do it for the influence?) Already, he
noted, China has bestowed its own infrastructure improvements on
Myanmar, notably a freight rail link in the north of the country that
supplies China with Burmese fossil fuels. (Last month, Myanmars
government publicly balked at Chinas more ambitious plan to build a
high-speed passenger rail line through Myanmar and other Southeast
Asian countries to link China and Singapore.) Still, there is no doubt the
ring road envisioned by the master plan will be filled with increasing
numbers of cars and trucks made in Japan. And notably missing from the
list of protected historic buildings in Old Yangon is the citys central train
station, a late-colonial landmark much like City Hall that clads a modern
institution in traditional Burmese forms. That may have something to do
with the plan to double speeds along the Yangon-Naypyitaw-Mandalay
railway line, which currently takes a bumpy 15 hours to travel 400 miles,
with a development loan from Japan. Transforming Yangons central rail
terminal into the type of transit-oriented development hub common in
Japan, where major train stations are retail centers, would be made easier
by leveling the old station than by preserving it.
There are also questions of how comprehensively the plan will be
implemented. Some projects, like Thilawa, have broken ground, while
others, like the Circle Line improvements, are just ideas on paper.
Building some parts without others could be a disaster. 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. This
would be a recipe for the kinds of hellish commutes typical in Dhaka,
Bangladesh, where workers often log several unpaid hours a day getting
to and from their sweatshop jobs.
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Toe Aung, former army major, current urban planner for the city of Yangon. [Daniel Brook]
Perhaps the biggest question is who will carry out the plan after the
transition to an elected government. 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. 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. One of the underappreciated aspects of military rule is that
military men end up in positions for which their military training is
irrelevant. Toe Aung was trained to suppress Yangon, not manage it.
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Our urban planning office was founded only two years ago.
This department is under construction, he told me. Our urban
planning office was founded only two years ago. Before then, every
planning decision had come down from the national government in
Naypyitaw. Starting from square one, he said, the office was busy creating
the basic legal framework for rezoning Yangon. As of now, we cannot
change agricultural lands to commercial to residential, he explained, a
major impediment to urbanizing the new sub-centers envisioned by the
JICA plan.
As Yangon grows outward into the greenfields that ring the city, the
farmers who currently work that land are organizing. In the past, the
junta expanded the city limits by fiat, no negotiations necessary, but
today rural people are demanding fair compensation in exchange for
development rights, and activist attorneys have rallied to represent them.
I wondered whether an army officer could make the transition to
democratic city planner. Toe Aung had been retired from the military for
nearly a decade, but he didnt seem to have made his peace with people
asserting their rights. Were facing many problems with the farmers
[who] dont want to move, he complained. Democratization requires
more than just a change in legal framework, or a switch from green
uniforms to blue; the bureaucracy itself has to adopt a new attitude of
public service.
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The Shangri-la Residences, under construction in 2012 and preparing to open in 2014.
[Andrew Rowat]
Tight-lipped as he was, Toe Aung was the most accommodating political

official I met in Myanmar. When I arrived for a scheduled interview with
Dr. Than Than Thwe, the deputy director of urban and regional planning
for Yangon at the national Department of Human Settlement and
Housing Development, she sat me down in her teakwood-paneled, airconditioned office. Imperious in a tailored skirt suit, she insisted I watch
a PowerPoint presentation she had given at a conference in Europe. She
read through the slides word-for-word, studiously ignoring my repeated
prodding for additional details. Then she abruptly dismissed me, saying
she was too busy to take any questions on the presentation or anything
else. Her supervisor, Deputy Chief Architect Hlaing Maw Oo, who had
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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. And she didnt reply to basic and repeated requests for
what should be public information: statistics on the length and cost of the
lavish Naypyitaw road system.
Changing Myanmars haughty political culture is a big part of what
Masahiko and other international advisers are up against. As Masahiko
told me, he had been trying to convince Toe Aung and other government
officials that without social considerations, theres a global
understanding that you cannot implement anything. JICA has asked
YCDC to pay relevant compensation fees if they move [someones] house.
And that it must be done through negotiation [not] forced movement.
Their culture was quite different in the past, so its 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. China, India, Vietnam, Singapore, and Australia, all
have widely varying rules and practices for eminent domain. What
standard practice will ultimately be in democratic Myanmar is a central
question hanging over the country. And the answer is anyones guess.
After leaving Toe Aungs office, I walked by the vast, ornate room where
an elected city council will one day meet. It was packed to capacity with
people waiting in line to get building permits from overburdened clerks.
YCDC staffers paid salaries of just $80 a month often work 15-hour days,
but they cannot keep up with overwhelming demand. Even if they could,
the legal framework is not yet in place to guide them.
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Intersection of Sule Pagoda Road and Anawratha Road. [Andrew Rowat]
The First Gated Community in the Country

Out on the streets of boomtown Yangon, the best-laid master plans
seemed very remote from lived experience. Just one block from City Hall,
a makeshift corrugated metal fence surrounded a vacant lot abutting the
Traders Hotel. When I first arrived in Yangon, I had assumed it was just
another building demolition site. I later learned that, for decades, it had
been a public park in the heart of the city; then it was ceded to the Traders
Hotel, part of the Shangri-la chain based in Hong Kong.
We dont know how they got it, Maw Lin, an architect turned journalist
told me when we met me in his office at The Peoples Age, the English-
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language newspaper where he is editor-in-chief. Wearing the long hair of

a European intellectual and the plaid lungi (summer-weight kilt) of a
traditional Burmese man, he recounted his papers crusades against what
he called the high-rise problem [and the] misuse of public space by the
government.
Now, staring down at the lot from a pedestrian overpass above a broad
avenue (right-of-way being a quaint foreign concept here), I couldnt help
but wonder about the political mechanisms for implementing JICAs
master plan. Here was a public park that could have been a central link in
the chain of green isles, and yet the nominally free press couldnt even
determine how it had ended up in the hands of private developers.
Out on the streets of boomtown Yangon, the best-laid master

plans seemed very remote.
I heard stories of similar land grabs on the rural outskirts. 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. In fact, as activist
Han Shu Win told me over endless tiny cups of tea, the strict new law has
been used against farmers who have had their ancestral plots confiscated
and are then arrested for trespassing on the land they have farmed for
their entire lives.
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. When I spoke with Than Oo, Managing
Director of Mundine Realty Company, in his cluttered downtown office,
he told me he could accept the protection of certain historic buildings,
but the height limits and government regulations around the heritage
buildings that dont let you detract this is rubbish. He informed me
that the trade group of which he is vice chairman, the Myanmar Real
Estate Services Association, was already making our argument to the
government to change this policy, and that it hopes to elect candidates in
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the first free election who will overturn the height limits. There is so
much planning for the center of Yangon but it all depends on the outcome
of the 2015 elections, Than Oo told me pointedly.
To gauge Yangons prospects for the future, I took in its newest and most
luxurious development: the Pun Hlaing Golf Estate, a gated community
located across the river from the city center. After traversing an elevated
expressway that had been privately built by the communitys developer,
the Singapore-listed YOMA Strategic Holdings, my cab passed through a
landscaped, palm-bedecked entryway. Being a foreigner entering a
community whose residents hail from 27 different countries, I had little
trouble talking my way past the guards at the security hut.
Outside the gates of Pun Hlaing Golf Estate. [Daniel Brook]
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7/15/16, 3:06 PM
Outside the gates was Southeast Asia; inside, it felt more like South
Florida. But it was impossible to completely separate the two worlds. In
the restroom of the air-conditioned sales office, the window looked out
onto a hedge. Visible behind it was village of thatch-roof huts on stilts.
As Soe Yan Paing, an eager young realtor with spiked black hair, drove me
around the development, I came to understand that the Estate is
actually several adjacent neighborhoods Rose Garden Villas, Ivory
Court, The LakeView@Evergreen all situated within the same security
envelope. One section was filled with modernist mid-rise condominiums,
a popular form of high-end housing in Yangon, since Burmese law
permits foreigners to own condos but not single-family homes. Another
neighborhood was laid out around a Gary Player-designed golf course,
featuring villas done up in the Spanish colonial style popular in
Americas Sun Belt exurbs. Though owned by wealthy Burmese, the villas
are typically rented out to expatriate businessmen and their families for
around $6,000 per month. (Prices for the homes have appreciated more
than 50 percent in the past two years and now top out near $1 million.) In
the community clubhouse, which boasted one of the only Christmas trees
I saw in Myanmar, the restaurant offered a very un-Burmese turkey with
brown sauce for the very un-Burmese price of $15. Three generations of a
British family sat enjoying their lunch on the restaurants outdoor deck,
the visiting grandparents doting on their grandchildren. A campus of the
English-language Yangon International School is conveniently located
just outside the gates.
Somewhat surprisingly, since the development so clearly caters to
foreigners, the Golf Estate is a joint venture with the Burmese
government. As YOMA CEO Andrew Rickards explained, the government
owns a 25 percent stake. 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.
Rickards was insistent that Yangon would develop smarter than other
cities in the region had. The great thing about being last to the party is
you dont have to make all the same mistakes, he said. But the Golf Estate
Page 27 of 33
7/15/16, 3:06 PM
with its profligate use of land, exurban location, and appeal to wealthy
foreigners seemed to undermine that point. So did his companys claim
to fame: We built the first gated community in the country, Rickards
crowed.
A $440 million Vietnamese development on the banks of Inya Lake, Yangon. [Andrew
Rowat]
In its transition from authoritarianism to democracy, Yangon may get the

worst of both systems rather than the best of both. While there is nothing
unusual about an unelected government speculating in high-end real
estate development the practice is widespread in China as well as
regional imitators, like Vietnam the peculiarities of the
democratization process in Myanmar, ironically, make the government
Page 28 of 33
7/15/16, 3:06 PM
even more brazen. Just outside the grand gate to the Pun Hlaing Golf
Estate sits a shantytown something youll almost never find in China.
There, when the government clears peasants from their land for high-end
urban development, it is, no doubt, authoritarian. But the rulers
invariably rehouse the displaced in modest high-rise apartments rather
than leaving them to build their own informal settlements. For the
Chinese authorities, it is simply a matter of self-preservation; because the
Party is worried about its legitimacy, Chinas rulers feel compelled to
offer some baseline improvements in its citizens lives. But by conceding
power voluntarily, on its own terms and schedule, the Burmese
government no longer claims legitimacy, so there is no need for it to even
pretend to serve its people. 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.
This Is a Test for Us All

Yangon may yet develop smarter than its peer cities in the region, but this
transition period will almost certainly go down as an era of lost
opportunities. A more benevolent dictatorship could take advantage of
the transition by imposing smart growth policies that are easier for
authoritarian governments to enact than for democracies.
Like India, Burma is saddled with a rent control law, passed by British
colonial rulers in 1947, that makes it impossible to raise rents in historic
buildings to levels that would permit them to be maintained. Democratic
India has never been able to reform its rent control laws because tenants
would vote out any politician who dared tamper with them. The result is
that even when individual historic buildings are successfully preserved,
the vernacular architecture of historic neighborhoods is left to crumble.
While democratic Myanmar will likely face Indias predicament, the
unelected government has not indicated any interest in tackling rent
control before it leaves office.
Similarly, authoritarian governments in places like Singapore and China
cap new car registrations to limit traffic congestion a wise urban policy
Page 29 of 33
7/15/16, 3:06 PM
but one that would be very hard to enact in a city where leaders are freely
elected. As one advisor to the Burmese government, a civil engineer who
worked for many years in Singapore, confided to me on condition he not
be identified by name, I spoke to the decision-makers about capping car
registrations, but they are not thinking about that [because] wealthy
[Burmese] who are close to the politicians would complain. As an
alternate solution, the advisor proposed a heavy import tax on foreign
cars, at least for the second and third vehicles imported by a single owner.
That, too, went unheeded. I tried to pursue it but so far Ive been
unsuccessful, he lamented.
Side street off Mahabandoola in downtown Yangon. [Andrew Rowat]
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7/15/16, 3:06 PM
Still, Yangon has assets that other cities in the region didnt have during
their earlier development booms. It has a decent master plan for smarter
development. It has wealthy Asian neighbors happy to invest in its future.
It has the goodwill of the West, eager to aide its transition to democracy.
It has considerable petroleum wealth that could be used to fund
infrastructure and social investments. And it has, perhaps most crucially,
an educated diaspora community returning to the country for a once-ina-lifetime opportunity to contribute. As Thiha Saw, the editor of the
reformist, Burmese-language Myanma Freedom Daily newspaper,
enthused when I spoke to him in his office, Weve been waiting for this
moment for 40 years. Lets go for it!
It is an inspiring spirit. But inspiration may not be enough. Surveying a
region full of cities that struck a devils bargain to grow rich by growing
congested, polluted, and architecturally interchangeable, Moe Moe Lwin
wondered whether Yangon could develop differently and be the model.
What she was saying applies not just to Myanmar, but to all of us in an
increasingly urbanized world. Can we learn from our mistakes and
democratically and judiciously plan a sustainable city?
For decades, the world has pitied and gawked at Yangon as a frozen-inamber vision of the past a city without ATMs or cell phones run by a
brutal holdover from the totalitarian 20th century. Today, we must look
to Yangon with engagement and urgency. For better or for worse, it will
offer a glimpse of our common future.
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ABOUT THE SERIES: HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
Page 31 of 33
7/15/16, 3:06 PM
This is the first article in an ongoing series, History of the Present: Cities
in Transition, supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies
in the Fine Arts and by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.
EDITORS' NOTE
Many of the photographs in this article are by Andrew Rowat, whose solo
exhibition Collision Yangon runs October 426, 2014, at Elaine Fleck
Gallery in Toronto.
# CITE
Daniel Brook, History of the Present: Yangon, Places Journal, September
2014. Accessed 15 Jul 2016. <https://placesjournal.org/article/history-of-thepresent-yangon-myanmar/>
If you would like to comment on this article, or anything else on Places Journal, visit our Facebook
page or send us a message on Twitter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Brook
Page 32 of 33
7/15/16, 3:06 PM
Daniel Brook has published on

architecture and urbanism in The New
York Times Magazine, Harpers, and
Slate, and in his book, A History of Future
Cities.
FULL BIO $
MORE BY DANIEL BROOK
Head of the Dragon: The Rise of New

Shanghai
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