[For its part, Naypyidaw has still not been truly settled. Civil servants were ordered to move there, but many reportedly kept their families behind in Yangon. Diplomats and foreign aid workers have similarly preferred to travel to Naypyidaw for meetings rather than set down a base. The city has its draws, like fast Internet and widespread WiFi — though the government shut down the Internet across much of Myanmar on Saturday. The development of the city also came at a heavy cost, both in the billions reportedly spent on construction and the communities allegedly displaced from their homes so the military could build its own.]
[Myanmar
blocks Internet amid first large street protests since coup]
The roster of capitals-by-design
dots the globe, from Canberra in Australia to Brasília in Brazil. Even
Washington was laid out for the job of governing. Some countries, — including
Egypt, Indonesia, and Myanmar — have built new capitals in part to shield their
leadership from the people.
Myanmar
Naypyidaw is infamous for its
eerily empty 20-lane highways and high-end hotels, golf courses and spas in a
city about six times the territory of New York City in one of Southeast Asia’s
poorest countries, according to the Guardian. The British paper summarized it
as a “monument to hierarchy.”
Naypyidaw was the brainchild of
Myanmar’s former military leader, Than Shwe, who relinquished power in 2011
when the country began a transition to democracy. Shwe was never publicly
challenged when he said Myanmar needed a new capital because of Yangon’s heavy
traffic and population density. But analysts have described the decision as motivated by a
desire to secure the military’s seat of power from any threat of protests or
invasions.
For its part, Naypyidaw has still
not been truly settled. Civil servants were ordered to move there, but many
reportedly kept their families behind in Yangon. Diplomats and foreign aid workers
have similarly preferred to travel to Naypyidaw for meetings rather than set
down a base. The city has its draws, like fast Internet and widespread WiFi —
though the government shut down the Internet across much of Myanmar on
Saturday. The development of the city also came at a heavy cost, both in
the billions reportedly spent on construction and the communities allegedly
displaced from their homes so the military could build its own.
Egypt
Ten years ago, massive street
protests in Egypt led to the ouster of longtime leader Hosni Mubarak. During 18
days of unrest, protesters gained control of bridges and squares around the
capital, Cairo. The most important of all was Tahrir Square, which became the
beating heart of the revolution. The most important was Tahrir Square, the
beating heart of the revolution. After Mubarak’s ouster, the military stepped
in, but protests and battles for control of Cairo continued. When a year later
the country held its first free presidential election and the military stepped
back, Tahrir continued to be an axis for protests and politics.
No longer. In 2013, the military
retook power in a coup. Under President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, a former general,
Egypt is now more repressive than it was under Mubarak, according to human
rights groups. Tahrir is highly securitized, its revolutionary past whitewashed
away: In the place of protest camps, there’s a new parking lot and a monument
to 2011 installed by the military.
[Two
brothers and the coup in Egypt that came between them]
Cairo is plagued by congestion,
poverty and pollution. Informal settlements, known as ashwaiyaat, make up major
parts of the city. But instead of channeling efforts toward maintaining and
upgrading the existing capital, Sissi plans to move the government’s political
and administrative buildings to an entirely new city some 30 miles away from Cairo,
aided by loans from investors such as the United Arab Emirates and China.
This is accelerating a trend
already underway of keeping the urban poor — and their grievances — separate
from Egypt’s political and economic elite: Upscale communities now fill Cairo’s
exurbs, including Media Production City, where media are incentivized to be
based.
Indonesia
Jakarta, Indonesia’s current
capital, is sinking under accumulative pressures. The city of more than 10
million people is beset by pollution, chronic gridlock and exponential
population growth. It has become a massive strain on the area’s water resources
and, alongside other impacts of climate change, has led the land underneath
to literally
sink.
In 2019, President Joko Widodo
announced a chosen successor: a still-to-be-built city in Kalimantan on
the island of Borneo, more than 620 miles away. Under his plan, Jakarta would
remain Indonesia’s financial and commercial hub.
Construction on the $33 billion
project was supposed to begin in 2021, but in August the government halted
work, saying it had to focus efforts on the pandemic
instead. Under the original timeline, bureaucrats were expected to start moving
to the new capital around 2024.
Nearby Malaysia similarly built
itself a new administrative capital, Putrajaya.
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan was still emerging from
decades of Soviet rule when, in the 1990s, then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev
moved the country’s capital from Almaty to the lesser-known Akmola, since
renamed Astana and, most recently, changed again to Nur-Sultan. Almaty remains
Kazakhstan’s largest city and the country’s commercial and cultural hub.
Officially, the government
justified the move as a way to increase investment in Kazakhstan’s interior and
avoid earthquake-prone Almaty. But analysts at the time said it was aimed at securing a
capital both closer to the country’s oil production and increasing the ethnic
Kazakh population there. As an authoritarian leader, Nazarbayev faced no
opposition.
Nazarbayev stepped down in 2019,
after which the capital was renamed in his honor. Despite periodic unrest in
both Almaty and Nur-Sultan, Nazarbayev’s Nur Otan party remains firmly in control.
Equatorial Guinea
The city of Oyala has a five-star
hotel, golf course and, most important for Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro
Obiang Nguema, barely anyone actually there to challenge his rule in a country
where more than half the population lives below the poverty line.
In 2017, Obiang, who has held power
for more than four decades, officially moved Equatorial Guinea’s government
from the coastal capital of Malabo to Oyala, also known as Djibloho. The
still-unfinished city nestled among rainforests and national parks has been in
the works for years, spearheaded by the president in part as an attractive
haven from military coups or other threats to his power, the
BBC reported.
