I’ve lived in Myanmar a little while; long enough that on the occasions that I leave, I’ve become quite enamoured by things in other countries that I previously would’ve found unremarkable. Whenever I go somewhere else and see a woman smoking a cigarette, I get a weird and unjustified feeling of happiness. There are so many cultural restrictions on female conduct in public places here – what women can wear, where they can go, how they should behave – that a cigarette in the hand of a woman now seems emblematic of gender equality, despite the fact that smoking is one of the single worst things a person can do to their body.





Even if I lived here the rest of my life, as a foreigner I’ll always have a parallax view into this country, its virtues and its problems – and my own cultural baggage will inform that view. My impression of the public good is not the same as the public good. But the reverse is also true for Myanmar people assessing the worth of other societies.

A similar act of cognitive dissonance has been playing out in Yangon since 2011, one in which the cardinal sins of more successful cities are held up as merits while their best qualities are ignored. As a result, the city is choking to death while the architects of its development laud its prosperity.

The junta had no vision for this city when it was in power, save for decamping to its gaudy purpose-built fortress in the middle of the country, leaving public buildings to rot and forcibly shifting troublesome residents to places like Thaketa and East Dagon. When the USDP took over the regional government, Yangon City Development Committee brought back all the people who devised urban policy in the 1960s and 70s, and their benchmarks for success have been defrosted from that era.

What planners and lawmakers are striving toward is the post-war model replicated across the Western world, where the car is the dominant mode of travel and families live in purpose-built subdivisions far away from their places of work and leisure. It’s an experiment in living that has been carried out in thousands of places for 60 years and is being rejected in most of these places. Whatever benefits were found in the policy of urban sprawl, in cities worldwide there is an abundance of evidence of its drawbacks: the stress and deleterious effects of long commutes, social atomisation and a lack of easy access to services.

Most cities with a long history of suburban and exurban growth are trying to contain their outward spread by promoting denser development and urban renewal closer to city centres. But Yangon continues to sprawl ever outward.

The new regional government has given a partial endorsement to the previous administration’s 2040 plan, approving a continuation of the corruption-plagued Southwest City project on the other side of the Hlaing River from Kyeemyindaing township, despite a decade or more to wait for a bridge to connect the project to Yangon proper. Its inhabitants are going to pay a premium to live in a complex with no employment opportunities, no means of transportation and a 24-hour power guarantee that’s worth about as much as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest when they can’t pay for the generator’s gas. Similar monstrosities will be built in Hmawbi, East Dagon, Dala and three other townships where land costs might be low, but amenities are non-existent.

If there’s to be any hope of resolving the already chronic problems facing Yangon’s infrastructure, YCDC and the regional government urgently need to recalibrate their planning policies to focus on developing existing metropolitan townships. While the government’s abilities to fund urban renewal are hamstrung by Myanmar’s structural budget deficit, there’s a wealth of legal reforms available that can bring about a seismic change in Yangon’s downtown with a minimum of expense.





A few weeks ago, Yangon Heritage Trust released its long-awaited heritage strategy for the city. Most of the attention was on the big-ticket conservation proposals – the blocks around Sule Pagoda, leading up to Shwedagon, and turning the decrepit port buildings along the Strand into an open-air riverside park. But the things that have the potential to truly improve the quality of life in this city went unheralded. Liberalising rules around outside dining, removing incentives for cars to come into the downtown grid and managing street vendors to improve pedestrian walkways would revolutionise the downtown area, making it an attractive place to live among people who have come to regard it as squalid and filthy.

The residents of this city need a vision of what can be achieved. Some circumstances have forced communities into a consciousness of public space already. A ward in South Dagon has been battling for months to stop an empty dirt lot once earmarked for a football field – the only public area in a square kilometre and a popular playground despite being completely barren – from being turned into high-rises. Elsewhere, a drive down the streets of Golden Valley is instructive of public apathy: Despite being the wealthiest neighbourhood in the country, its roads are among the worst in the city and civic pride stops at the Lexus parked outside the front gate.

Elsewhere in the world, gentrification has become a pejorative, a synonym for a neighbourhood’s vacuum of character, bourgeois dining habits and inflation of property prices. This city already has a sordid recent history of evictions and slum clearances to appease the interests of crony capitalism or the political mores of the age. But just as Yangon can learn from the mistakes of suburban sprawl elsewhere, enough time has passed to learn from the mistakes of more recent planning trends: Nothing is preordained about a neighbourhood’s affluence coming at the expense of its long-term inhabitants.

It’s easy to look at YHT’s strategy paper and scoff at the illustrations of people sipping coffee on wooden furniture in the shadow of Sule Pagoda. But if this city is to thrive, its people need a reason to aspire to be at its heart, rather than flee to its outskirts.