Thick mapping in almost post-authoritarian times: co-designing with the urban poor network in Yangon, Myanmar

This article traces a three-year co-design process with Bedar Social Development Group and Yangon’s Urban Poor Network to examine the forms of agency facilitated through thick mapping. Across two interconnected projects – Community Housing Project and Eviction Impact Assessment – in Hlaingtharyar, a peri-urban industrial township in Yangon, Myanmar, we undertook co-design as a democratising process that can empower participating stakeholders. In an almost post-authoritarian Myanmar where the military instigated the country’s fourth coup d’état in February 2021, our thick mapping was a participatory spatialisation and temporalisation of thick description that facilitated consensus building in the identification of shared urban problems and transformed some ‘squatters’ into autoethnographic researchers in the production of urban knowledge.