Myanmar’s commercial capital: The square mile

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

YANGON’S circular railway clacks, rattles and chuffs along a 46km (28.5-mile) loop around the city. On the way to Danyingon—a bustling farmers’ market supplying the vendors who dot Yangon’s pavements—it runs through crowded urban neighbourhoods. Then the scent of exhaust gives way to loam, and ox-pulled ploughs replace cars amid paddy fields and rickety thatched houses.

The journey makes Yangon, or Rangoon, seem small and backward. In fact it is booming. Since 1983 its population has tripled, to 7.4m. It has claimed much of the foreign investment that has flooded Myanmar since political reforms began in 2011. Such investment was just over $900m in 2010, compared with $5 billion forecast for this fiscal year. As for the paddy fields, they are not so much timeless as on borrowed time: many sit on land zoned for manufacturing that has lain fallow for want of industry—which may now begin to come.

In the city’s urban core, the honking of horns has replaced the jingle of trishaws. Bars and restaurants are popping up in restored colonial buildings, as well as in more imaginative places: one is tucked down an apartment stairwell, another in a warehouse on the waterfront by the chocolate Irrawaddy river. Families still cook mohinga, a pungent fish-and-noodle soup, on open braziers and sell 50-kyat (five-cent) cigarettes by the stick from tiny, crammed shopfronts. But office rents are as high as anywhere in Asia. On the skyline, the hilltop gilt of the Shwedagon pagoda still gleams, but cranes loom above rows of rusty, tin roofs.

Some worry about what might be lost. Thant Myint-u, founder of the Yangon Heritage Trust (YHT), says the city’s people ought to discuss the kind of city Yangon should be. “Dense? Sprawling and car-based? What’s the optimal size? These aren’t technical questions, they are questions about what we want,” Mr Thant Myint-U says. His group is leading the preservation of a one-square-mile (2.6-squarekilometre) area in central Yangon jammed with more than 1,000 old buildings. Among them are 140 houses of worship: churches, mosques, Hindu temples, Buddhist pagodas and a synagogue.

Many of these buildings lie at the centre of tangled webs of ownership. Longtime residents may own their own flats, but the buildings and land may belong to others—local mosques, churches or temples, or families bearing 19th-century deeds. Land acquisition and disposal are governed by archaic laws, barely enforced, which hinder investment. Yet land prices in Yangon and across the country are soaring—partly because speculators are holding out for huge payouts, but also because, with no functioning stockmarket and a shaky banking system, Myanmar offers few other places for the wealthy to park their cash.

Rich as old Yangon’s heritage is, it accounts for just a tiny percentage of the city’s total area, leaving ample room for development. Japan’s aid agency, JICA, has put together a “master plan” for Yangon’s development over the next 25 years. The plan has its detractors. Some see it as just an engineer’s infrastructure plan, and others note the immense opportunities it seems to offer Japanese firms. But even controversial urban planning is better than none.

That’s the past; what’s the future?

Htet Myet Oo is a 25-year-old who was raised in north-eastern England, returned to Yangon after university and now owns the chic Rangoon Tea House. He complains that the long-term vision sometimes precludes easier short-term fixes. Instead of building flyovers to ease congestion, Mr Htet Myet Oo says exasperatedly, “just fix the traffic lights”. Similarly, waste management is a huge long-term challenge, “but it wouldn’t hurt anything just to put a few more bins around the city.” A burst pipe near the reservoir left him without water for three days. Reluctant to close, he was using 500 litres of bottled water a day.

The public water supply is patchy throughout Yangon—most residents rely on rainwater, ponds or unregulated private wells, which deplete the city’s groundwater supply. Other infrastructure is little better. The sewers have hardly been upgraded since they were built in 1888. They serve less than a tenth of the city’s population, with the rest relying on septic tanks or pit latrines (at best). Power is unreliable. Even in districts that no longer suffer extended cuts, supply often fluctuates. Khin Sanda Win, who runs one hotel and is renovating an old building for another, compares her enterprise to “running a small city”: business owners must provide themselves services that elsewhere municipal governments provide, such as waste disposal and a steady power supply.

Rich meet poor

Even so, high rents are pushing longtime residents out of the city centre to its outskirts, where they increasingly find themselves living cheek by jowl with new arrivals from the countryside, drawn to the city in search of work: a recipe for a massive increase in slums. Mr Htet Myet Oo worries that Yangon “could go the way of Dhaka or Mumbai, and just become too populated and messy.”

Another risk is that political reforms might stall—or worse—and that investment and aid money might dry up. In other words, in 50 years’ time the YHT could find itself campaigning to preserve the very few glass-and-steel high-rises of the early 21st century—a long gone but fondly remembered period of optimism.

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