Naypyidaw has been the Burmese capital city since November 2006. As the seat of power, the city hosts the Presidential Palace, the Union Parliament, the Supreme Court, the official residences of Myanmar’s Cabinet and the headquarters of the military and government ministries. It would look like the inhabitants love to sit indoors a lot, as the streets are almost deserted to the average visitor. But that would be too quick a judgement. Naypyidaw is not deserted. It just wasn’t inhabited at all.
Four and half times the size of London, it houses about one million people—some quarters say it’s way less than that. The city is split into residential, ministry, military, diplomatic and hotel zones.
Source: Nic Dunlop/Panos Pictures
A slow drive through it reveals a serene environment with beautiful hotels for tourists that haven’t shown up, residential houses with colour-coded roofs to signify the occupation of occupants, shuttle buses for government workers, an airport, a railway station, five public hospitals, a stadium, six universities and research institutes, restaurants with free, fast Wi-Fi, a safari park, a zoological garden with air-conditioned penguin habitat, four golf courses, reliable electricity and several monuments.
With all these serving about 1 million people, it makes sense to say that Naypyidaw is oversupplied with infrastructure. But for how long? .
Where it all began
Source: cloudinary.com
About 16 years ago, the Than Shwe regime left the teeming city of Yangon and moved 300km north. According to Shwe, the move became necessary because Yangon had become “too congested and crowded with little room for future expansion of government offices.” It took about ten years to convert Naypyidaw from a forest of rice paddies into what it is today. It reportedly cost the government $4bn to construct, with the service of 25 contractors. The sheer scale of infrastructure showed that the government expects a large population from births, tourism and migration in the coming years.
But 16 years after the big move, the new capital still feels like a ghost town with so many pieces of infrastructure serving too few people. One of such infrastructures is the famous 20-lane boulevard called the Yaza Htarni Road, leading to the parliament building. The vast street, which was not designed for pedestrian movement, stretches as far you can see. Although it was used as a parade ground in a grand opening ceremony back in 2006, rumour has it that the road is meant to enable aircraft to land in case of anti-government protests or other political upheavals.
Speaking of anti-government design, unlike cities like Cairo, which has the Tahrir and Salah al-Din square, Naypyidaw lacks wide public spaces that often act as a breeding ground for revolutions and widespread protests. The city was designed to discourage gatherings not approved by the government. The 20-lane boulevard has sparked the international community’s attention in recent years. For instance, in 2014, the @BBC Top Gear was taken aback by the desolate streets when they filmed a special episode in the country.
Was Yaza Htarni built too early?
The Yaza Htarni Road and other spatial empty streets in Naypyidaw may seem like an overkill for a city of about 1 million people or less. However, when we remember that the city only opened up to settlements in 2009, the ghost feeling still makes a lot of sense. Although much of the city is still uninhabited today, the government of Myanmar might be avoiding one major pitfall of many organically developed cities: too little infrastructure serving too many people. It may take a decade or two for the city to measure up with the current population of London (about 10 million people), but that time will come.
As an infrastructure specialist, I have watched with elderly calm how deserted regions morph into major cities in as little as a decade. If Naypyidaw remains the Burmese capital in the successive governments to come, the 1 million population will significantly increase, and the quiet boulevards will gradually live up to their original purpose.
What lessons can we learn here?
- Although the very creation of the city was politically motivated, the sheer foresight that went into its infrastructural design is laudable. Naypyidaw may only be the administrative capital of Myanmar today, but it doesn’t mean it would not attract business opportunities as the population trickles in from Yangon, Mandalay and Mawlamyine. It hosted the 2013 Southeast Asian Games, 24th and 25th ASEAN Summit, the 3rd BIMSTEC Summit and the Ninth East Asia Summit.
- Development follows infrastructure growth. Like we have seen in many infrastructure systems seemingly built before their time, development often follows the presence of infrastructure. For instance, in 1965, when the 19km motorway linking Tema and Accra, Ghana, opened up to the public, the then Kwame Nkrumah administration was heavily criticised for splurging government funds on a motorway that was scantily used at the time. Today, the Tema-Accra Motorway is used by over 30,000 vehicles/day and remains the country’s only motorway.
The arguments I have made here do not apply to all pieces of infrastructure that are underused today. Some, such as the €1billion Cuidad Real International Airport in Spain, are victims of life’s curveballs and would take a miracle to become a success. What differentiates a failed piece of infrastructure from a success-in-waiting, I believe, it is the factors of time and future relevance within the geography that surrounds it.
