Naypyidaw City Lights
In my recent post on the counter-revolutionary city, I pointed to Naypyidaw, the capital of Myanmar since 2005, as an example of one way that autocrats manage public space to discourage protest: moving the capital itself. The New York Times had a nice piece last week on the Burmese capital, with lots of vivid photos and a video of an empty 16-lane highway. The punchline? The only people who live in this sterile city in the middle of nowhere are (a) generals in luxury villas, and (b) those who serve them.
Naypyidaw is an urban-planning failure, in other words. Or is it? After all, the point of moving the capital is to insulate autocrats from public dissent. You don’t have dissent if you don’t have people, and the people aren’t moving to Naypyidaw. This is, in fact, a striking anomaly. Somewhere on my hard drive—here, I found it—is a quick-and-dirty analysis of the effect of capital-city status on urban population, using data from UNPD. Here is the event study using fect (treatment is not only staggered but reversible, as cities both become and cease to be capitals):
Population growth follows political power from one city to the next. In Naypyidaw, however, this pattern breaks down. From that Times essay:
Officially, about a million people live in Naypyidaw. Like so much else in Myanmar, the population figure is a farce. Nobody moves to Naypyidaw who doesn’t have to. And that’s probably just fine with the generals. When the Saffron Revolution broke out in 2007, protesters were far from the nerve center of the military government in Naypyidaw.
If capital-as-fortress works so well, why doesn’t every autocrat do it? One answer is that fostering unpleasant conditions to deter in-migration risks upsetting the civil servants and lower-ranking officers on whom the regime depends. Indeed, rulers often go out of their way to make the capital more, rather than less, pleasant, precisely to reduce the risk of unrest among those who do live there. That, in turn, draws people from the rest of the country, dissipating rents for capital residents—unless migration can be stymied through administrative restrictions, as Jeremy Wallace discusses apropos of China in Cities and Stability.
Ultimately, there is no free lunch. Capitals are dangerous places for those who govern. In building a city in which few want to live—but some must—Myanmar’s generals may have reduced the risk of urban revolution. Unless they actually increased it.