Myanmar
New Fields

'Urban beautification' has always been an Orwellian euphemism. In the urban Third World poor people dread high-profile international events - conferences, dignitary visits, sporting events, beauty contests and international festivals - that prompt authorities to launch crusades to clean up the city.
(…) The most totalitarian 'urban beautification' programme in Asia in recent times was undoubtedly the preparations for 'Visit Myanmar Year 1996' undertaken by the heroin-financed Burmese military dictatorship in Rangoon and Mandalay.
One and a half million residents - an incredible 16 percent of the total urban population - were removed from their homes (frequently by state-sponsored arson) between 1989 and 1994 and shipped out to hastily constructed bamboo and thatch huts in the urban periphery, now creepily renamed the 'New Fields'. Urban neighbourhoods were replaced by projects like the new Rangoon Golf Course, aimed at Western tourists and Japanese businessmen. In the 'New Fields,' former urban residents squat in the mud and muck and watch their children die of dysentery.

(“A clean sweep”, Mike Davis, in Socialist Review, December 2005)