In 2007, writing for Himal Southasian magazine, Siddharth Varadarajan called Naypyidaw, the underpopulated capital of Burma, built by the military regime, “dictatorship by cartography, geometry”:
Vast and empty, Burma’s new capital will not fall to an urban upheaval easily. It has no city centre, no confined public space where even a crowd of several thousand people could make a visual – let alone political – impression.
The building of cities is a massive infrastructural undertaking, a spasm that reflects and requires the concentration of political, economic and affective power. Are cities where there is no “right to the city” by the people cities at all? Materially perhaps but not in intangible, virtual terms: While constructed like cities, they lack urbanity, the quality of the urban.
Rob Shields (University of Alberta)