My doctoral research pursues two lines of inquiry linked to urban development and economic insecurity in contemporary Myanmar (Burma). The primary component is an ethnographic study of the politics of planning amidst uncertainty in southwest Yangon, a region undergoing rapid transformation as a result of the ambitious New Yangon Development Project, which aims to extend the city’s limits by over 20,000 acres. A second avenue of inquiry probes Myanmar’s broader political transition, proposing that local responses to the delays and deferrals of a large-scale, state-led development project may reveal related stances toward nascent reforms, with the pursuit of a “new nation” and a “new city” experienced as intimately interlinked.
Since the global outbreak of COVID-19, Yangon’s real estate sector has moved online, as established land brokers transition from negotiating sales face-to-face in the city's tea shops to advertising on social media. As a subpart of the broader dissertation research, a short-term project funded by the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative aims to collect data on online land transfers, as well as about the brokers, buyers, and sellers involved in a new social media based “land rush.”
Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Report
Urban Development, Social Media, and Speculation in Peri-Urban Yangon
Digital platforms such as Zillow, Craigslist and Airbnb have challenged the ways property is bought, sold, rented, regulated and valued, across the globe. Yet despite scholarly and public interest in American tech companies, less is known about how digital tools are shaping the development of informal and often unconventional land markets in the global south. Through Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative-funded research, I explored how buyers, sellers and brokers use digital platforms—and specifically, Facebook—to expand and enact Myanmar’s emerging land market. While the data collection process was my own, the results of this research will be published in a co-authored article with Dr. Hilary Faxon, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, UC Berkeley. The paper is preliminarily titled “Digital Land for Sale: Making Markets on Myanmar Facebook.’
Drawing on digital and in situ ethnography from sites across Myanmar, our paper traces the boom-and-bust cycles of 2020-2021 through a period of international investment, political crisis, and pandemic emergency. We show that potential buyers, sellers and brokers use Facebook not only to represent land as available for sale and desirable to buy, but also to establish their credentials, share expertise, connect with clients, and posit—and propel—market trends. We argue that Facebook plays a key role in creating a new kind of (capitalist) land market, one characterized by volatility and speculation, as well as a shift from relationships of personal trust to networks that function to publicly affirm the validity of individual investments. Our analysis highlights the ways tools of platform capitalism are reappropriated and redefined in particular contexts while also underscoring technology’s role in the making of expansive, if short-lived, markets within longer trajectories of capitalist development.
In addition to the paper described above, this research will also be shared in collaborative spaces at Harvard and through other institutions. First, we will present the results of this research as part of a panel entitled “Digital Media, Democracy, and Exclusion in Myanmar” at the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) Annual Conference. We will also participate in a series of interdisciplinary workshops at Harvard (Political Economy/Political Anthropology Working Group) and at Berkeley (Digital Geography Working Group).
Finally, this research also undergirds a chapter of my PhD dissertation on the long-term effects of infrastructural development in Yangon’s peri-urban Southwest. Specifically, the chapter that aligns with the digital research I conducted on Facebook under this HMUI grant explores the timing of land sales in an area set to be developed into a “New Yangon City.” Tracking fluctuations in pricing and discussions about shifting interests, it introduces the multiple factors at play in decisions to convert agricultural land into land available for investment, including seasonal sequences, political cycles, project timelines, and market fluctuations.
More information is availble via China Made Brief #9.
Researcher: Courtney Wittekind
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