Naypidaw: A city looking for a purpose | Hacker News Reader

Naypidaw: A city looking for a purpose

lowyinstitute.org

26 pointsThevet12 comments

Artificial capitals are an interesting thing.

Two major 18th century creations were highly successful: Washington and St. Petersburg. (The latter is not the capital anymore, but remains the cultural center of European Russia. Vladimir Putin is from there, which hasn't hurt its standing.)

Washington D.C. seems to have fulfilled its goal as a uniting center of the early USA. Having the capital in New York City would certainly be more convenient for Donald Trump's commute... But I suspect that being so removed from the political epicenter would have made the Southern states secede in the early 19th century, and North America would look rather different today.

Major artificial capitals founded since 1900 are Brasília and Canberra, but they look more like Naypidaw than St. Petersburg -- administrative centers with little real metropolitan life.

I simply can't see why there shouldn't be possible to create large scale artificial cities in the western world. Especially young people do not want to live in suburbs.

When reading about San Francisco's problems with booming real estate prices and gentrifications, you can't help wondering why the state of California simply do not plan some new urban cities? The tech industry needs people and tech people need cities. When a city is full, you build a new one with city with squares, park'n ride and plenty of opportunity for people to meet.

The problem is that the culture is what makes a city appealing, not the architecture.

Simply building a new city doesn't do anything to create a viable culture.

It isn't an issue for the state to handle. It's an issue with where the companies have chosen to locate themselves. Any state could have these new areas, not just California.

The companies cluster around populations of individuals who are highly skilled in the areas the company need.

The individuals cluster around the areas that have a broad population of employment opportunity.

If you want to create a new economic center, you need to influence several major companies to invest in that area as an offshoot. Single company towns(and industry towns) are prone to collapse and are a bit entrapping, so you need redundancy in both companies and industry.

(There is also cultural draw, that cannot be recreated. It manifests from the populace and history of the area. But this isn't as easy to seed and takes more time than corporate sponsorship of an area.)

Washington took a long time to succeed as a city. As late as 1960, it was a minor city with little but Government offices, like Brasilia. The government fit inside Washington proper until WWII; building the Pentagon in Arlington was seen as radical at the time.

There are some purpose-built US state capital cities. Indianapolis, built in 1823 at the center of the state, now the largest city in Indiana.

Not only did the location of the capital lead to greater integration and national unity, but the circumstances of its selection did quite a bit too.

The Residence Act, which set D.C. as the nation's capital, was passed by the first Congress to gain Southern support for Alexander Hamilton's economic plan, which involved the assumption of state debts by the federal government. As Southern states tended to have less debt (and fewer resources to pay debts than Northern states), their support was bought with the Residence Act. This Funding Act laid the groundwork for much of our financial system today, and it was the first major expansion of federal power beyond the enumerated Constitutional powers, paving the way for events like the founding of the First Bank.

Ottawa is another example - it was selected because it had a defensible position, since invasion from Americans was a real threat to young Canada.

While it's a lovely city, it sticks out as being far removed from the major traffic corridor of central/eastern Canada. While Canada is generally sparse, there's a high density corridor running from Niagara Falls around Lake Ontario to Quebec City, and Ottawa is accessible from it but it's a substantial detour.

The reason that older cities such as Washington and Ottawa are successes whereas some newer cities such as Naypidaw and Brasilia are considered failures is due to designers of the time trying to fix urban issues with modern solutions but fundamentally not understanding at all what makes cities liveable. The designers had no concept that their 'fix' would have side effects that would make things worse.

A major issue is that many of these newer cities are designed not at the human scale, but at car scale. The result is massive roads and lengthly blocks that are unwalkable for pedestrians. This results in no street life and a desolate experience. The designers believed that by building wide roads great for moving cars they were fixing traffic problems that traditional cities have, but the unintentional side effect is that the experience for people on the ground is terrible.

Moving a capital to the middle of nowhere defends governments from revolutions. Remember what happened on the Tahrir square in Cairo in 2012? That wouldn't have been just as effective if the entire Egyptian goverment had been located in Aswan.

This is why Brasilia exists, and Islamabad, arguably Canberra but I'm not sure, Astana, and certainly Naypidaw. It's why the world's evilest kleptocrat, Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea[0], is currently building a new capital out in the jungle.

In short, put the capital somewhere remote, move all official and administrative business there, and ensure that the vast majority of the new city's population depends on the acting government for their livelihoods.

Sure, there may still be riots and uprisings like on Tahrir Square, but if they concentrate in the major population centers (eg Yangon), far away from the presidential palace, they won't easily turn into successful coups.

I'm always a bit disappointed when serious reporters fall for the joke that these capital city moves are "vanity projects" of "delusional rulers". The very reason these rulers add a hint of insanity and maybe a statue or two to the mix is so people don't stop to wonder at why this really happens. Make no mistake, it's not easy to remain a dictator, and people who can pull it off for decades tend to have a nose for trouble. The kind of trouble that might happen if your government is located in a major city.

[0] http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/equatorial-guinea-malabo...

This article is a bit inside baseball. For the majority of you who will not be familiar with this national capital, it really is quite an unusual place. There are dozens of sprawling luxury resorts (and a dearth of budget accommodation, unlike most of Myanmar). And a huge western style shopping mall with, of all things, a fancy wine shoppe at the front (this is not scandalous but it sure is conspicuous).

Hillary Clinton visited exactly five years ago. She almost certainly saw little of the country apart from the luxe interior of some government buildings not accessible to regular folks. How can I know this? Because in the new capital there is simply nothing to see, unless you count the capital itself. A paved road of 20 lanes is a must-see in every guidebook but Hillary might have assumed it was completely empty because it was closed for her motorcade. But those 20 lanes are always empty.

It's a beautiful country anyway.

Visited Myanmar over the past few weeks, thoroughly enjoyed my visit, Naypidaw was obviously not on the itinerary, absolutely no reason to go there whatsoever for the reasons listed.

That being said, traffic in Yangon is diabolical, if the idea is to build a new city to absorb some rural to urban migration then I can see the point.

Still, my money would be on Yangon as defacto capital if not the official one.

Ive been to naypidaw.

Its not that great.

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