‘Unintended Cities’ and Inoperative Violence. Housing Resistance in Yangon

Abstract

This paper wishes to build two interconnected arguments: the first, that urban development and city expansion in Yangon happened through the forced resettlement of people from the city toward the periphery, and from periphery to periphery; the second, that resettlement was initiated before the British colony, perpetrated during the colonial period, internalised and expanded by the following post-colonial regimes, and has become by now the main form of statesanctioned space production. We argue that this has been possible thank to the development of laws, orders and policies that justified, legitimised and created the need for dispossession and displacement. Building on Benjamin's and Agamben's essays on violence, we claim that it is possible to interrupt the endless cycle of law and violence by locating violence outside the debate around 'means and ends'. Stemming from the authors' experience and repeated encounters with practices of social mobilisation of women in Yangon over the last five years, we have traced the potential for deactivating the 'signature' of violence in the everyday practices of resistance of urban dwellers in the township of Hlaing Thar Yar in Yangon. Through the incremental occupation, trespassing and building up of peripheral 'vacant' land, organised women's groups are challenging the spatial order established by post/colonial regimes.