What does theory have to do with anything? Between our theoretical ruminations on “ruralities” and spatial practices at the rural Thai-Myanmar border
Theory vs. Practice in Architecture and Planning
In public and administrative discourse, the notion of rurality is often broadly associated with a residual category rather than defined by the absence of urban features. It oscillates between pastoral and/or traditional landscapes or problematized areas of necessary development and political conservatism and right-wing radicalization – which gained renewed burning relevance during the elections in Saxony and Thuringia in Germany. Based on such relativist descriptions, together with my colleagues at the CRC, we decided to throw together our respective analyses on rurality, hoping to find more descriptive and qualitative insights. In our recent German-language article “Ländlichkeiten – Konstruktionen von ländlichen Räumen und ihre Refiguration in Chile, China, Deutschland, Kanada, Kenia und Südkorea“, Gabriela Christmann, Ilse Helbrecht, Eva Korte, Carl-Jan Diehlmann, Jochen Kibel, and I gathered our observations on ruralities in our different case study areas.
This question had also been haunting me for several years during my practice as an architect in Berlin, but mostly within my practice with Gyaw Gyaw – a locally-run NGO at the rural Thai-Myanmar border concerned with communitarian architecture. I was convinced that I needed more theoretical and empirical substance to understand rural areas beyond the understandings that were specifically cemented into my being during my training as an architect. After all, conceptualizations delineate the horizons of what we can understand and anticipate and therefore even strive for in practice (de Certeau, 1986; Schatzki, 2001).
And while there is a large body of work about practice-informed theory and even practice-led research, the following lines trace possible impacts of theoretical findings on practice along my own experience, exploring linkages between the findings of our paper and Gyaw Gyaw’s practice.
Ruralities: Constructions of rural areas and their processes of refiguration
To inquire about more qualitative and descriptive frameworks that constitute rural areas, it was our basic understanding that it would be inevitable to empirically analyze rural constructions in their respective regional and national discourses. This entailed analyses of rural areas in Canada, Chile, China, Germany, Kenya, and South Korea. This multi-sited endeavor was moreover based on the concept of multiple spatialities (Knoblauch & Löw, 2021). Describing the multiplicity of socio-spatial processes unfolding within globally interlinked processes commonly known as globalization, multiple spatialities offered a theoretical framework that allowed us to formulate comparative thoughts that were still clearly entangled in situated contexts.
Starting from this, my colleagues and I each outlined state-given administrative definitions, dominant discourses, as well as empirical evidence from rural areas. To radically boil it down, three main tendencies seemed to unfold in different capacities and configurations across our analyzed rural areas:
Firstly, rural areas seemed to be administratively considered throughout all case study countries as a residual category without its own arbitrary qualities within state frameworks. In regard to state-centered definitions, rural areas were primarily defined as a residual category of deficiency: Devoid of urban infrastructure, devoid of urban density, devoid of urban proximity. This was also tied to another observed tendency: the political and social problematization of rural areas as fields of necessary action. Mostly strongly encountered in China, South Korea, as well as Germany, rural areas were clearly entangled in power-struggles with central authorities. Instrumentalized as sites of national heritage and culture, on the one hand, rural areas had recently been constituted as symbolic sites of refuge from urban modernity. This often swayed into new waves of rural tourism, going as far as calling it “Rural Healing Tourism” in South Korea.
At the same time, rural areas were outlined in literature and public discourse as multidimensional peripheries from central state perspectives. Their geographical remoteness from urban agglomerations intersected with the political and social remoteness from normative trajectories of economic growth and political integration into central state movements. Constructions of rurality that rearticulate hegemonic registers, moreover, emerged alongside the struggles of indigenous peoples. In Chile, China, and Canada, this manifested in stagnating state infrastructure projects as well as outspoken indigenous protests that shed light on the capitalist and hegemonic/colonial power relationships entangled in land use and ownership.
Meanwhile, Kenya displays a symbiosis between urban and rural areas. This seemed to be influenced by the distribution of fertile soil outside of city proximities but also by the Kenyan experience of colonialism. During the colonial rule of the British, Kenyans’ livelihoods were forced into rural-urban simultaneity: They were required to labor in the cities yet limited to living in rural areas. In contemporary Kenya, rural areas are not only the site of productivity but also a symbolic place of identity and rootedness that complements and informs city lives.
However, the rural-urban power struggle observed in China, Chile, Germany, Canada, and South Korea aligned with broader discourses of spatial justice, fueled by increasing resource scarcity and antagonistic resource extractivism. Rural areas, as sites of service provision and facilitation, were most clearly pronounced in the rural-urban binary administrative system of the People’s Republic in China and in the Republic of Chile. Seeing rural areas as sites of profitable or possible extractability, large-scale and transnational actors have become increasingly involved in land acquisition in these two research cases. The resulting restructuring of rural areas, fueled by the productive pressure to compete in a global market, is observed at the root of plentiful conflicts unfolding in rural communities in both countries. Aside from industrial and agricultural goods, new resources were activated through digital platform economies in service industries. Most famously known through Taobao Villages in China, e-commerce, as well as platform tourism, have become equally big topics in rural Chile and South Korea. Their emergence suggested the formation of new translocal alliances and references that shape contemporary practices and transformations in rural areas.
Overshadowing all of these comparative thoughts, the heuristic frame of nation-states that we frequently used to research rurality told us something crucial about the rural ‘field’ itself across all case regions: Dominant discourses on all our researched rural areas catered to and were arranged around concrete policies or planning endeavors within nation-state institutions. This particular observation finally provoked this very reflection and comparison with the practiced realities and rurality of Gyaw Gyaw as situated and engendered between nation-states.
Rurality of Gyaw Gyaw: At the Thai-Myanmar border
Gyaw Gyaw is the phonetic interpretation of the S’gaw Karen language that my colleagues and most of our communities speak. It means “slowly, step by step.” I joined Gyaw Gyaw eight years ago as an architect, and until today, our practice informs not only my research but also my personal bond to rural and peripheral places.
The backdrop to our practice is the ongoing ethnonational civil war of the Myanmar military regime, the Tatmadaw, against its ethnic civilians under the pretense of nation-state building. Tracing back to the independence of Myanmar from British colonial rule in 19481, the mountainous ethnic state area, where Gyaw Gyaw operates has historically been established as a largely self-administered zone of refuge and resistance made by its own non-state networks and organs. The biographies of my colleagues and leaders are marked by armed conflict, forced displacement, and political limbo, which applies to most people in this area.
In the last 15 years of practice, Gyaw Gyaw has constructed more than 80 communitarian buildings such as toilets, schools, and dormitories within our geographic reach across the rural borderlands. This border today coincides with the stream of the Moei river, nestled between the mountain ranges (see Figure 2).
Trying to think about Gyaw Gyaw’s practice through our paper’s findings on multiple ruralities and their 1) position as a residual category from urban perspectives and 2) contested peripheries bearing social and environmental conflicts that are accelerated by 3) neoliberal metabolisms, a few things aligned in variations: The Thai-Myanmar borderlands describe the interstice between two nation-states. Its rurality thus represents two residual categories in terms of state presence – the two peripheral regions before a nation-state ends and fortifies. Today, the border is embodied by a river that can be crossed through local stakeholders. Furthermore, this rural border area seems to represent two particular spatial typologies that not only imply the absence of the urban but also the presence of something other that superimposes the National border. On the Myanmar side, this implies a refuge to unchecked state terror and the presence of non-state ethnic stakeholders, while on the Thai side, it implies the presence of migration, cheap labor, and a volatile political microclimate.
Therefore, Gyaw Gyaw’s rurality appears as a residual border category that is inseparable from its multidimensional peripheralization (Kühn, 2015), which reads as resistance (Bower et al., 2023) for the people in Karen State. And indeed, our political frameworks consist of self-governed ethnic defense forces, often conceptualized as rebel politics (Brenner, 2019). The peripheralization of our area not only manifests through the presence of organized resistance and the fight for self-determination (Loong et al., 2023). The rugged geography and dense flora of our surroundings have historically served as a defensive layer against state control and its attacks, evoking conceptualizations of state evasion in the transnational highlands of Southeast and Central Asia (Scott, 2009). After decades of fragmentation and migration triggered by war, the established building culture in Karen State uses almost exclusively renewable materials from its surroundings through barter-economies and slash-and-burn agriculture. Our practices and collaborations are marked by a tapestry of local grassroots networks to which we would have no access if our leaders and colleagues were not a firm part of these communities themselves.
Yet, despite our local ecosystems, conflicts around resource exploitation that resonate with distant yet similar instances I reflect on in Chile are increasingly coming closer now. Our area is adjacent to one leg of the Belt and Road initiative launched by the People’s Republic of China. The appeal of high-quality timber stocks and exploitable soils led to a series of cease-fire negotiations and agreements put forth by the Tatmadaw, only to be brutally broken days or weeks later. Since the 2000s, this has been underscored by capitalist-fueled cease-fires (cf. Woods, 2011), describing increasing economic interests intersecting with the struggle for political autonomy. Significantly, this also affected our own practice: After 15 years of sourcing almost all our material needs within our collaborators and landscapes, nowadays, the use of home-grown timber is regulated to feed transregional – and maybe even transnational – needs. This leaves us with higher material costs and waiting times while the timber is growing directly in front of our eyes. In this instance, the unique approach of the Karen people to regard architecture as a resource depository extends beyond mere economic functionality but becomes a practice of resistance.
From Rurality to Agency
So, what difference did this paper make for my reflection on Gyaw Gyaw?
Reading our SFB paper “Ländlichkeiten – Konstruktionen von ländlichen Räumen und ihre Refiguration in Chile, China, Deutschland, Kanada, Kenia und Südkorea” alongsaide my own practical experience with Gyaw Gyaw helped to re-contextualize the landscape of Gyaw Gyaw through the lens of rurality.
Reading about grassroots resistances and negotiations of neoliberal dependencies around the globe built a cognitive bridge between the written word and embodied, shared experiences. It emphasized how underestimating people’s agency in shaping their own trajectories amid the spread of neoliberalism and state-making is possibly the biggest but also the easiest mistake to begin with. How things look to “the outside” and how things are unfolding from each place might look completely different. This aligns with our paper’s final thoughts on multiple ruralities as well as increasing discursive shifts from urban to territorial planning (Sun, 2023) that breaks free from centralized and normative curation. On a broader scale, this recognition of agency, together with the contextualization of Gyaw Gyaw, once more stressed the urgency to rethink our current institutionalized planning practices. This disposition is well represented in the ongoing interest in insurgent planning (Huq, 2020) and the most recent peripheral turn in urban studies (Ren, 2021). As such, academic works ultimately take from peripheral realities to map our unknowns; reading theory might also sensitize and prepare us for broader processes that are re-figuring the world in multiple ways other than the ones we anticipated.
Author Biography: Jae-Young Lee is an architect and researcher at the IRS Erkner and the CRC 1265 within the project B01, ‘Peripheralized Rural Areas’. Since 2016, she has been involved in communitarian architecture practices at the Thai-Burma border with Gyaw Gyaw. Her work focuses on territorial spatial practices amid the spread of digital economies.
References
1 The civil war in Myanmar is considered one of the longest in documented history, lasting since 1962 and re-escalated since the coup on February 1st 2021. For more information on the current situation of Myanmar and at the border, see here:
https://www.theborderconsortium.org/about-us/history/
http://www.frontiermyanmar.com
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