City of Speculation

In 2018, amidst a celebrated political transition, Myanmar's first democratically elected government since 1962 proposed a built-from-scratch "new city" just outside Yangon, the country's former colonial capital and current economic center. 20,000 acres of once-barren rice fields became the site of extraordinary developmental dreams. Farmers on Yangon's outskirts traded cultivation for speculation on land and property, betting on uncertain futures and weighing what, exactly, was worth risking for a chance at transformation. As plans for the new city stalled amid political turmoil, economic liberalization, a pandemic, and a military coup, speculation became both a source of hope and a means of survival when urban dreams faded. Drawing on three years of site-based fieldwork and digital ethnography, Courtney T. Wittekind shows how speculation reshapes citizens' contemporary demands and forward-looking dreams - for themselves as well as their country - in times of crisis. Adopting the lens of "vernacular speculation," she reveals how ordinary people create value, interpret ambiguity, and act on possible futures, even as the promises of democracy and development collapse around them. A powerful account of how hope, anticipation, and uncertainty reconfigure everyday life, City of Speculation captures what it means to imagine - and gamble on - the future in the wake of profound upheaval.