Burma's capital: a super-sized slice of post-apocalypse suburbia | Hacker News Reader

Burma's capital: a super-sized slice of post-apocalypse suburbia

theguardian.com

86 pointsVigier32 comments

The is the World Bank's classic scam. Bribe a corrupt government to take massive loans for infrastructure it doesn't need. It goes hand in hand with the United States' New Colonialism policy, because we can then demand drilling rights and military alliance when they default on the loans.

It's just a way for us to siphon off a chunk of developing nations' GDP. That's the World Bank's charter in a nutshell.

The book Confessions of an Econonomic Hitman lays this all out. The only difference here is it appears the Japanese got the ball rolling.

John Perkins is a conspiracy theorist and sort of a nut job. The building of Naypyidaw was done by Burma under the orders of its leadership. The World Bank did not have to twist anyone arms to get this White Elephant built.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perkins_(author)

For many years Myanmar was the sole country on the planet you couldn't drive your own vehicle into.. preventing a trans-europe->se asia trip without shipping your vehicle.

That has all changed in the last 12-24 months, and multiple groups have reported it's now possible.

http://wikioverland.org/Myanmar

(The details are still a little short, but we're getting there)

I'm planning my trip now :)

I live on the Thai border with Burma, and while it's possible it's still tricky. The road from the Thai border to Yangon has one lane total (!) so it alternates directions depending on whether it's an even or odd day.

Why can't you go around Myanmar (China -> Laos -> Thailand)?

China won't let you into the Tibetan Autonomous Region except as part of an official tour party from within China. You can go around further to the north (I went that way by rail a few years ago), but most people on such a road trip would like to see India (and probably also Nepal), and to then have to go back all the way to possibly cross the border in disputed Kashmir or realistically to Uzbekistan is a bit of a detour to say the least.

(Central Asia is fascinating and I do recommend the trip through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan at some point).

You can, but driving your own vehicle in China is extremely expensive, and it's difficult (or impossible) to enter from some countries / borders.

Most people end up shipping from India -> Thailand or Malaysia, and it's still cheaper than driving through China.

ie. see http://wikioverland.org/China the prices have come down a lot lately, but it's still very expensive.

I was in Yangon (Rangoon) last weekend - it was nothing like what I've read about Naypyidaw (didn't have the chance to go). So I would recommend not using this to stereotype the entire country.

Yangon was beautiful, and ridiculously crowded. It honestly felt like a version of Delhi, down to the horrific traffic. Most impressive was that any sort of data was unavailable on AT&T roaming, but there I was standing at the [real] Shwedagon Pagoda, in a country that hadn't been open to the world until a few years ago, and I had an abundance of free wi-fi to check in to Facebook.

    > any sort of data was unavailable on AT&T roaming

Telenor SIM cards are cheap and have data

Reminds me a lot of Pyongyang. Empty, wide roads, few people on the streets, and a whole lot of luxery facilities for the few well-connected.

"Reminds me a lot of Pyongyang"

Or Brasilia. Three cities built on the communist central planning principles of the post-war American suburb reflect, each in its own way, the oppression and alienation that motorcar-oriented planning imposes on humans. [0]

There is an alternative to suburban hell. The traditional city humans have loved for thousands of years is still possible. [1] There are even great accessible, affordable examples in Burma and Brazil. In places like North Korea and the USA, the destruction of traditional free ways of life has been more complete.

Though if you belong to the powerful and monied elite you might be able to afford to live in the few remaining neighborhoods in Pyongyang or San Francisco where traditional city design from decades ago is grandfathered in.

[0] http://kunstler.com/books/the-geography-of-nowhere/ [1] http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/072008.html

"There is an alternative to suburban hell. The traditional city humans have loved for thousands of years is still possible. [1] There are even great accessible, affordable examples in Burma and Brazil. In places like North Korea and the USA, the destruction of traditional free ways of life has been more complete."

This is nostalgia. For most of human existence, we did not live in cities, sipping lattes in outdoor, safe, cafes with clean water. We lived nomadically or in small tribes and villages. The invention of the city brought disease, slavery, slums, corruption, and a whole host of other problems. The "traditional free way of life" was not living in a city where you couldn't be a farmer, but had to work for someone else on someone else's land.

Comparing North Korea to the US is just a non-sequitur.

This reeks of hipster snobby elitism.

You both seem to arguing with extremes ends of human settlement configuration - planned empty mega suburbs like this one in Burma and hunter-gatherer bands before the dawn of agriculture. Sort of a contrived comparison, isn't it?

Re: affordability - I don't know about Burma or Brazil, but in the US, safe, medium-high density neighborhoods with walkable commercial districts and an active civic life are very expensive compared to the car-bound exurban cities in the same metropolitan area. So much that they are only accessible to the upper-middle class to wealthy.

Also, cities didn't invent slavery or bring on disease. These were on the increase from the onset of agriculture due to the demand for labor and the co-habitation of humans and domestic animals.

In fact, there may be genetic evidence of this: There was an article linked on HN yesterday that tried to explain the apparent loss of marker diversity in the Y chromosome after the advent of agriculture to male agricultural slaves being denied the right to reproduce.

"The "traditional free way of life" was not living in a city where you couldn't be a farmer"

This is nostalgia. For most of human existence, we did not farm. We lived in small hunter gatherer bands in very small numbers migrating over vast open landscapes.

But that doesn't invalidate the dream of being a freehold farmer in today's world. It's no reason to prohibit being a small independent yeoman farmer the way North Korea has.

And there's no reason to prohibit building a traditional city and living an urban life the way US central planning has outside a few grandfathered exceptions which have become incredibly expensive because demand rises while supply cannot grow.

Apparently, you didn't read what I wrote "We lived nomadically or in small tribes and villages."

Interference with US city organic expansion is primarily due to zoning regulations and nimbyism, and more than anything it results from people who have a romantic love affair with keeping the city exactly the way it is without accommodating for inevitable growth.

Pretty much the only projects that can get approved are those from huge organizations who have the money and power to overcome years of opposition until they finally can get projects approved.

The average guy who wants to convert an empty building into a cafe, warehouse, or living space, or remodel an area faces excessive red tape.

I beg to differ. Brasilia was built on Modernist principles. It was very much inspired on the work of Le Corbusier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier). It has nothing to do with communism.

Corbu was all about controlling the details of daily life by top-down commands from central authorities. His ambitions were to wipe out and knock down Paris and replace it with orderly and easily controlled towers and sight lines. Traditional cities with their chaos, entrepreneurship, freedom, variety, and individualism didn't interest him.

The tower in the park required hugely expensive (at the time) commitment to motorcars and freeways surrounding and fixing the limits of mobility for the poor and middle class. Centralised government and hierarchical businesses were needed to manage and planned lives of humans in Corbu's city.

Everything about Corbu reflected the totalitarian age in which he lived. His dreams are the same as the communists' and merit the same fate.

Maybe communist urbanism was inspired by Modernism ?

Myanmar is nothing like North Korea. For a start, you can backpack around most of the cities unrestricted. Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, is just like any other South East Asian capital, and again, nothing like Pyongyang.

It's only relatively recently that travelers could visit Myanmar (legally). For a very long time it was very much like North Korea - a hermit kingdom ruled by a brutal military junta under international sanctions and completely dependent on China.

    > It's only relatively recently that travelers could visit
    > Myanmar (legally)

That is simply incorrect.

Yes, you're right. I was generalizing about Westerners, rather than all travel. I had been told that while in Thailand years ago, but apparently there were some (complicated) ways for Westerners to get visas in the past.

It's not even really true about Westerners

Only if you're Westerner. South East Asian can enter Myanmar freely, but Myanmar is the only country that doesn't have free visa for other ASEAN country.

Americans never had a problem with entering Myanmar. All you needed was a visa from the embassy in Beijing (you could probably get one at the consulate in Kunming also).

The artificially built capital is kind of creepy. But other cities are not like that at all. It is authentic, culture-rich and very safe to travel.

All the residential houses are quite expensive and only bought by rich people who don't really live there, making it more empty.

TFA claims it's 6 times the size of NYC but cost only $4 billion dollars to build. How is that possible?

I'm just speculating here, but it's probably 6x NY's footprint in square miles yet with large open areas that are not built up.

The characterization "six times the size of New York City" evokes images of area with the same building density. Actually it seems to be quite sparse

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Republic+of+the+Union+of+M...

I spent 3 weeks in Myanmar about a month ago. Now I regret not visiting Naypyidaw. Everyone I met, including locals, said it wasn't worth my time.

For a second there I thought this was a parody about San Francisco: poor people displaced, privileged people moving in who couldn't care less, pretty looking, empty inside.

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