ABSTRACT
Since the former president of Myanmar, 1 Thein Sein, initiated national reform in 2011, the country’s cities have been targeted as engines for development and Southeast Asian regional integration. 2 In his speech to inaugurate the opening of Myanmar’s first Urban Research and Development Institute (URDI) in January 2012, the Union Minister of Construction, Khin Maung Myint, expressed his hope that the internationally-funded URDI will “assist the Government’s endeavours of building a new, modern and developed nation” (UN-HABITAT 2012). This statement conflates urban with modern, development and nation, and implicitly accepts international standards as presented by the funding agencies: UN-HABITAT, USAID and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Soliciting international aid and adopting globalized matrices in order to fast-track development is pragmatic for a latecomer country, but this top-down and externally-imposed approach towards cities has a long history in Burma. The two largest cities in the country were both imposed onto the landscape in the 1850s, Yangon by the British colonial empire and Mandalay by King Mindon of the last Burman dynasty. The physical forms and societal norms of both cities were prescribed by rulers who sought to dictate a particular world order, not local residents who sought to organize their own urban way of life. That externally imposed formal order has constrained the formation of urban identities and perpetuated class and ethnic inequalities.
