Scenario-Planning in Yangon: Two Futures for an Urban Waterfront

Abstract

This paper presentation presents recent speculative work produced by Valeche Studio, an interdisciplinary design and research studio focused on urban design, landscape and architecture. This paper reflects on developing operative approaches to urban design and landscape planning within the highly volatile context of Yangon. Work discussed in the paper have been shown in the 2013 Bi-City Biennale in Urbanism and Architecture in Hong Kong and will be presented in the Urban by Nature, the 2014 International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam. The projects are situated as following: What is the future of urban Yangon? As designers and planners, we don’t pretend to tell the future or dare to design for it. Instead, we present two plausible scenarios, each based in credible notions of reality and springing from coexistent, yet contradictory histories of the city. We explore these scenarios for the city in general and for its most contested territory in particular: the waterfront. It is there that a range of voices are converging. Will it be preserved or rebuilt, reclaimed or eroded, will it be a space for the public or will it be limited private interests? Will it flood again? If some of these voices speak from a position of entrenched privilege, other voices, still timid, are finding confidence in speaking out. Our dealings with the city, we have come to understand what many locals still feel in their guts: that growth and increasingly sophisticated urban development is not the only possibility for this city. It is possible that reform in the country is de-railed and that the city returns to some other version of ‘development’ that grows out of decay and disinvestment. The first scenario explores a Yangon as the city’s planners and elites imagine it. “Resurgent Yangon” presents a city that leveraged political transformation into continuous growth. Taking it’s subtitle from the Yangon City Development Council’s recent publication: “Yangon 2040: Beloved and Peaceful Yangon: A City of Green and Gold”. In this scenario, the city must balance an expansion of the core with a protection of public space and ecological functionality. The second scenario explores a return to idleness and disinvestment. “Retrograde Yangon” presents a case for a city that can decay gracefully in spite of growth. It takes its subtitle from the kind of languages used in early Western accounts of the city that captured the contradictory feelings on observing the interface between nature and urban ‘civilization’. In this scenario, the city must appropriate small investment for large gains and use natural systems in place of built infrastructures. Ours is not a wish to predict the future, but rather to open a debate into the challenges of urban development at the water’s edge of Yangon and to debate the copious strategies and positions that might arise for the citizen, for the politician, for the planner, for the designer, or for the entrepreneur from the multitudinous hybrid futures that exist between a resurgent or a retrograde Yangon.