Phnom Penh

Chapter 10 of the book Edges of Identity: The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities

In this chapter we explore the evolving role of art and storytelling programmes in an inner-city building in Phnom Penh, Cambodia known as the White Building.1 This work represents a tentative exploration into a community of people and their history; their cultural work and their identity. We chart the history of the Building from the late 1950s, before focusing on art and storytelling programmes from 2008 to the present. The underpinning concept of the programmes under analysis has been around establishing a vision for communal transformation and then acting on that vision through an iterative process of action and reform. Within this setting, art and storytelling practices have become a way of articulating pluralistic modes of struggle in a post-conflict society that is dealing with the onset of a new neoliberal order of accumulation and dispossession. Importantly, these practices look both to the past and to the future. Our interests in these practices lie, in part, through applying a Lefebrevian lens to problematize the contested and dominated nature of the space within which these emergent forms of expression take place.

The following is a summary of ongoing research conducted in 2011-2012, funded in part by the Fulbright Program and entitled City of Water: Architecture, Urbanism and the Floods of Phnom Penh. This work documents the relationships between water, architecture, and infrastructure in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The objective of the project is to record the architectural and urban conditions sustained by and subject to the cyclical floods of the city’s rivers and the challenges faced by Phnom Penh as it rapidly urbanizes in a flood plain.

Résumé

Cette thèse de doctorat en géographie urbaine s’intéresse au redéploiement des marchés immobiliers résidentiels depuis le début des années 1990 à Phnom Penh, capitale du Cambodge. Trente ans après la fin du régime khmer rouge, qui pratiqua un véritable « urbicide », le tissu urbain de la ville se transforme rapidement au rythme d’investissements importants de la part de promoteurs locaux et étrangers. La construction de nouveaux projets urbains privés de grande ampleur témoigne de l’intégration de l’économie cambodgienne à la globalisation et aux logiques de production urbaine régionale, portées par des acteurs privés à la recherche de nouveaux marchés immobiliers émergents où investir leurs capitaux. Ces processus cachent cependant une réalité locale plus complexe, où la conquête des espaces urbains s’organise autour d’une compétition acerbe entre différents groupes sociaux et familiaux. En centrant notre recherche sur le marché résidentiel au sein des espaces périphériques, ce travail cherche à dessiner les contours d’une production urbaine locale métissée, qui s’appuie sur des logiques de transfert et de réappropriation de nouveaux modes de construction des villes sud-est-asiatiques. Au sein de ce cadre d’analyse, il paraît nécessaire de considérer l’immobilier comme une activité citadine collective formant un champ socio-économique particulier. En ce sens, la production de nouveaux espaces de vie en périphérie est tributaire des stratégies résidentielles des habitants et de la gestion des territoires municipaux par les autorités locales. L’organisation hiérarchisée des acteurs du champ immobilier apparaît à l’étude des différents capitaux qu’ils sollicitent pour réaliser leurs objectifs. La conquête des espaces urbains par différents acteurs, de l’habitant au promoteur professionnel, transcende ainsi les échelles d’analyse. Il n’est plus question de distinguer le formel de l’informel, le public du privé, mais bien de relever, en considérant l’espace comme une ressource et un capital, les complexes articulations entre les réalités socio-spatiales locales et l’organisation du marché du logement, qui produisent des espaces urbains singuliers à Phnom Penh.

Abstract

The present geography doctorate thesis studies the redeployment of the real-estate residential markets in Phnom Penh, capital city of Cambodia, since the early 1990s. Thirty years ago, the Khmer Rouge implemented a true « urbicide ». For the past couple decade, the urban fabric of the city has quickly evolved with the important investments of local and foreign real estate developers. The implementation of large new urban projects shows the integration of the Cambodian economy into the globalization and the regional urban production logics. They are carried out by private actors looking for opportunities to invest their capital in the new emerging real-estate markets. The big picture hides a more complex local reality: the quest of the urban spaces is the stake of a fierce competition between the different social groups and families. Focusing the analysis on the housing market in the peripheral spaces, this study aims to characterize the hybrid local urban production, based on the transfer and the appropriation of the new ways of building in the towns of South East Asia. In this frame, it appears that the real-estate sector should be considered as a collective urban activity, forming a socio-economic field of its own. In this understanding, the production of new living spaces in the outskirts relies on the residential strategies of its inhabitants and on the management of the municipal territories by the local authorities. The hierarchical organization of the real-estate actors is revealed by the type of capital they use to achieve their strategies. The conquest of the urban areas by different actors, from the inhabitant to the professional property developer, transcends the scales of analysis. The chosen angle is not to wonder whether it is formal or informal, public or private but is to reveal the complex links between the local socio-spatial realities and the organization of the housing market. While considering space as a resource and a capital, those interactions produce some original urban spaces in Phnom Penh.

In this series of paintings from the Phnom Penh Night, I am following in the footsteps of the great German Expressionists, using distortion and extreme colors to dive below surface “Realism” into a deeper, darker more hidden part of the human experience known as the Phnom Penh Night, a setting filled with tragedy and fear but also a certain poignancy and sometimes a ferocious beauty. The Opening Night at Meta House Gallery in Phnom Penh featured a wonderful live concert performance from Phnom Penh’s KROM Band, starring lead singer/composer Sophea Chamroeun, composer/steel guitarist/vocalist Christopher Minko, Side Guitar and Instrumentalist Jimi Baeck and keyboard artist Mao Sokleap. Bangkok Author Christopher G. Moore also gave a short talk on the SE Asia Noir Movement of writers, poets, musicians, artists and filmmakers who make use of SE Asia’s seemingly infinite abundance of noir material as the setting, inspiration and backdrop for their creative vison and work. Appreciation and thanks to Nico Mesterharm, the Cultural Impraesario behind Meta House and all it’s myriad of programs and cultural events.

Democratic Kampuchea (DK) was an idiosyncratic, genocidal state that existed from 1975 until 1979. It is estimated that 2 million Khmers, and other ethnic minorities perished during this time. This included Vietnamese, the Muslim Cham, Thai and Chinese minorities.  Although many perished from physical exhaustion, famine and malnutrition as a consequence of the imposed agrarian lifestyle, clandestine executions conducted under the campaign of terror accounted for a greater percentage of deaths. DC-Cam Mapping estimates 1,386,734 people were massacred in the Killing Fields. 
Evidently the campaign of terror was the most destructive element of DK, however, there is speculation as to why the campaign was initially instituted, why it persisted and what it hoped to achieve. Conventional interpretations explain the cause of the campaign as being predominantly fuelled by external sources, namely Maoism and Marxism. In the past ten years, however, a scholarly orientation has emerged arguing that communist ideology theory alone cannot explain why the campaign of terror persisted. Ben Kiernan proposes the campaign of terror was, ‘an amalgam of various intellectual influences’,  including internal sources such as ‘Khmer elite chauvinism’ and ‘third world nationalism’.  This essay argues that the campaign of terror is best explained as a marriage of both external and indigenous sources. The most influential external source is presented as Maoism. It is analysed how Maoism was implemented domestically. The essay subsequently identifies elements of DK ideology that were legitimized by internal sources. This essay analyses two indigenous elements, Khmer Theravada Buddhism and Khmer nationalism.

We will try in this paper to uncover the role of various local, national and international stakeholders in fostering the rebirth of PPWSA, as well as in resisting the change. This paper argues that the key for success was an acute vision of water management, with rational articulation of the three strategic stakes that need to be combined to foster sustainable development of a water network, with significant support from multilateral and bilateral development agencies.

It is widely considered that there is no critical mass of architecture in a homogeneous style in Ho Chi Minh City, in contrast to Hanoi. This essay seeks to establish Ho Chi Minh City’s architectural heritage as a significant one, by arguing that the city does actually possess a critical mass of cohesive, remarkably well-designed buildings in modernist styles. Highlighted here is a unique feature of these modernist buildings: rounded, curved corners as a recurring motif in a dense urban center. I argue that such buildings, dating from the 1920s through the 1970s, have provided the center of Ho Chi Minh City unique, cohesive, and striking characteristics and that they form one of the great ensembles of modernist architecture anywhere. This essay seeks to re-locate the place of Ho Chi Minh City on the world map of the circulation of modernism, by emphasizing the internal dynamic of the city’s architectural evolution that transcends the colonial-postcolonial divide, and highlighting the evolution of forms revealing a continuity in spite of event-based ruptures in history. The significant presence of modernist buildings with curved corners in Phnom Penh, and their similarities to those of Ho Chi Minh City, suggest that regional circulation also played a crucial role.
Key words: modernism, rounded corners, architectural heritage, Ho Chi Minh City, Streamline Moderne, regional exchange, Phnom Penh

The first English translation of author George Groslier's 2,000 km Mekong River journeys to inspect Buddhist pagodas in 1929 French Indochina. The renowned artist, writer and historian was the quintessential witness to colonial Cambodia. This new fully illustrated edition includes supplemental appendices and the complete original French text.

T h i s wo r k d o c ume n t s t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p s b e twe e n
water, archi tec ture, and inf ras t ruc ture in Phnom Penh,
Cambod ia, r e cords the a rchi tec tural and urban cond i -
t ions sustained by and subjec t to the cycl ical f loods of
the ci t y ’s r iver s , and des c r ibes the chal lenges f aced
by Phnom Penh as i t rapidly urbanizes in a f lood plain.

"The implementation of garment industries builds original periurban spaces in Phnom Penh. The development of this activity accelerates the urban growth and introduces some new socio-economic connections between the city and its peripheral spaces. The discourses, practices and representations of the workers reveal the existence of a homogeneous social group. Their new urban life is mainly structured by the habitat and the secondary street. However, those particular urban spaces are transformed by the conquest of periurban spaces by a new class of urban entrepreneurs. In this article, we would like to show how the industrialization in Phnom Penh transforms the processes of urban sprawl, and how the urban sprawl affects the socio-spatial realities of the workers."

As in many other areas around the globe, enclosed residential spaces have proliferated in Southeast Asia since the 1990s. Recent publications have presented such gated communities as 'porous enclaves', implying multiple sociospatial dynamics of movements through gates and walls. However, the enclave model does not suffice for analyzing the relational dynamics generated by enclosed residential estates. The concept of 'ecotonal space' and social geography are used to show, in the case of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, that the enclosure and its borders are producers and products of multiple social, spatial, economic and political relations, both symbolic and material. Property developers assert their position as an emerging elite in the city's society and politics, a process based on different types of everyday relations they have with the inhabitants of their residential estates and territorial institutions. The enclosed residential estate can serve as a resource for deploying new power relations. Consubstantial with the neopatrimonial nature of the Cambodian economy and politics, this process is a response to the opacity and uncertainty of real-estate markets and urban development.

Why begin a 2012 studio about Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 1972 Las Vegas,
Nevada?
Learning from Las Vegas has not run its course as a radical research practice. Its
techniques and representational strategies have been deeply absorbed into the
North American discipline and its modalities commonplace within that discipline.
However, conditions of architectural education are not global and the influence
of the 20th century canon of architectural literature, including Learning from
Las Vegas has not necessarily reached those places it might now best serve, in
this case the rapidly urbanizing cities of Southeast Asia, specifically Phnom Penh,
Cambodia.

In recent decades neoliberalism has emerged as the ruling economic, political and cultural ideology of our time. Originally construed as an economic philosophy, neoliberalism is better understood today as a broad world view that emphasises free-market policies, deregulation, individualism, self-management and personal resilience at the expense of more collective, social-democratic policies and principles. Neoliberalism is a pervasive ideology that has shaped our lives for more than 40 years, from the wide-ranging organisational structures of our global economy to our most intimate bodily practices.

In this engaging and accessible volume, Jonathon Louth and Martin Potter bring together researchers working in and across Europe, Asia, Australia and North America to elucidate on the manifold ways in which neoliberalism produces our subjectivities. Taking in nations and citizenship, urban transformation, gender, work, (dis)ability, sexual performance and cognitive function, this volume demonstrates the astonishing scope of neoliberalism to inform and delimit our identities on both macro and micro levels of social and personal life. Combining thoughtful theoretical accounts with fascinating fieldwork and spanning areas of inquiry including the UK, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Pakistan, Cambodia, Japan and Australia, Edges of Identity provides a remarkable collection of global perspectives on the impact of neoliberalism in contemporary international contexts.

This tenth volume in the Issues in the Social Sciences series is an absorbing introduction to the practical affects and lived realities of neoliberal ideology that will appeal both to readers encountering neoliberalism for the first time and expert scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

This presentation, set in Cambodia during the period of the French protectorate (1863-1954), examines policies, laws, and practices on prostitution, alongside narratives of sex in the press. I read these sources as a discourse from which to further understand a larger history, that of the entangled politics around women’s bodies. Social scientists and development practitioners have contributed much to the study of subjects such as the commercial sex work industry and sex trafficking in contemporary Cambodia, and Southeast Asia more broadly. Yet there is less scholarship that attends to Cambodia’s colonial past—a period often overlooked by nationalist and post-colonialist research agendas. I move to focus on this era as a critical moment when women’s bodies, engaged in sexual service, became intimately embedded into the interests of states and empires, and the mandates of modern humanitarianism. This development, I argue, constructed indigenous women in Cambodia as hospitality engendered: a space where female sexuality consequently beget another space, that of imperial humanitarian hospitalities, and simultaneously, hostilities. Drawing from archival research in France and Cambodia, I have gathered documentation on French colonial policies, laws, and practices related to the registration and policing of prostitutes, their subjection to health examinations, the regulation of brothels, the attempt to spatialize prostitutional activity in urbanizing Phnom Penh, and the punishments for violations of criminal laws related to the sale of sex. The Cambodian Penal Code of 1924, which was based on laws in metropolitan France and replaced pre-colonial Cambodian criminal codes, is particularly insightful as it reveals how states and empires became deeply invested in the sexual lives of its citizens. In addition to these sources, I have also uncovered articles and commentaries about prostitution that circulated through Cambodia’s newspapers. Collectively, these sources un-entangle how society associated the problems of the day—from venereal disease and social hygiene to national decline and civilizational degeneracy—explicitly through women’s bodies.

In this article, I propose a critical analysis of the Phnom Penh metropolization process by investigating practices and strategies of local police forces. Firstly, I argue that the metropolization process is based on a particular political and economic ordering of the city’s territories, the “ordopolis”. Secondly, I argue that strategies and practices of local police forces rely on different forms of “urban disorders”, which support a rent-seeking police economy. In conclusion, we will see that the metropolitan order has been recently the subject of a “reciprocal territorialization”, which means a renewal of the urban centrality.
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Cet article propose une analyse critique du processus de métropolisation de Phnom Penh au prisme des pratiques et stratégies policières. J’avancerai tout d’abord que le processus de métropolisation procède d’un mode particulier de contrôle et de mise en ordre politique et économique des territoires de la capitale, « l’ordopolis ». Je postulerai ensuite que les stratégies des forces policières s’insèrent dans les interstices de la métropolisation en s’appuyant sur différentes formes de « désordres urbains », qui nourrissent une économie policière de rente. Nous verrons, en conclusion, que l’ordre métropolitain fait l’objet d’une récente « territorialisation réciproque », qui se traduit par une centralité urbaine renouvelée.

L’objectif du rapport est une evaluation des systemes de tarification sociale mis en place dans des contextes differents et s’appliquant aux usages domestiques. Grâce a l’analyse comparative, et en detaillant 9 etudes de cas representant un echantillon significatif des modeles de tarification sociale existants, nous aborderons dans des contextes geopolitiques varies la question d’une eau accessible et abordable pour tous. Ce rapport ne vise pas a apporter des reponses categoriques a ces questions, mais plutot a apporter des pistes de reflexion a la lumiere des diverses experiences deja realisees. Ainsi, la mise en lumiere d’echecs et d’erreurs nous parait aussi enrichissante que les exemples de reussite et de « bonnes pratiques » en termes d’equite sociale et de justice environnementale. L'introduction nous a permis de resituer la question de l’eau et du droit a l’eau dans son large contexte. Dans le chapitre 2, nous proposons un premier tour d’horizon des questions liees au prix de l’eau, ainsi qu’une typologie simple des divers modeles de tarification existants, en en presentant les principes de base. Le chapitre 3 aborde l’etude detaillee de 9 villes d’Asie, d’Afrique, d’Amerique Latine et d’Europe, en fournissant pour chacune une mise en contexte, une presentation des acteurs en presence et une analyse detaillee de la tarification actuelle. Les 9 etudes de cas que nous traitons suivent une structure identique et visent a aborder plusieurs dimensions de l’analyse : nous presentons le contexte national, les modes de gouvernance et les relations entre acteurs, puis nous nous interessons aux politiques tarifaires et aux dispositifs sociaux en place, pour finalement proposer une etude d’impact. Si la structure est constante, l’intitule de chacune des sous-parties revele les specificites de chaque etude de cas. Les titres presentent donc une premiere cle d’interpretation pour le lecteur sur le modele aborde. Le chapitre 4 se propose de d’adopter une approche comparative et thematique, en reprenant point par point chacune des interrogations soulevees dans cette introduction. Enfin, sous le chapitre 5, nous developpons une serie de proposition et de recommandations pour construire des methodes de tarification sociale plus efficaces, tenant compte des nombreux enjeux dont nous souhaitons souligner l’importance. Loin de viser a appliquer aveuglement des « bonnes pratiques », il s’agit au contraire de trouver des solutions adaptees aux contextes locaux pour faire face aux defis sociaux, environnementaux et financiers dans le domaine de l’eau.

The White Building project was a multi-year participatory transmedia project using art as a mechanism for community building and organising in the White Building in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The White Building in central Phnom Penh was built in 1963 as part of a modernist vision of social housing for artists and performers. Following the trauma of the Khmer Rouge, where the city was emptied and an estimated ninety percent of Cambodia’s artists were killed, the intervening Vietnamese-backed government sought to repopulate the building with an invitation to surviving artists to return. In recent years, largely due to government neglect, the building has fallen into disrepair and was demolished in June 2017.
However, behind the fading facade and dilapidated infrastructure there was a complex community of over three thousand people including artists, musicians, community activists and everyday city dwellers. This research project archives and explores the role of recent media, art and creative community projects to document the everyday lives of the Building's inhabitants as both a means of resistance and to enable critical reflexivity among participants. The key question posed at the outset of development of the programs was “can localised creative art and media programs amplify the lived experience of a community and positively impact internal and external perception, identification and position?”
To address this question a number of initiatives across a variety of mediums and media platforms were developed. This included development of the Aziza Film School, weekly art, photography, digital storytelling and community organising programs, events and exhibitions in the White Building showcasing creative works by residents for both internal and external audiences, partnership with local groups such as Sa Sa Art Projects who ran a gallery space and artist in residency program in the Building and fostering the development of the White Building Collective - a group of residents and students at the film school who have created high impact films, photography and online works including the Humans of Phnom Penh series. And in partnership with Sa Sa Art Projects the development of festivals, screenings and exhibitions showcasing the work of residents to the broader community and the creation of a community library and archive and the online archive of whitebuilding.org. Through this diverse range of initiatives, there was a desire to not only celebrate and document the living memory of this unique community, but to push back against government and property developers' interest in the site. The research documents how the dominant discursive acts of the more powerful can be challenged through the expression of the 'lived' and the elevation of everyday life. And that the very perception of the space and the sense of place was (re)produced through these interactions across these new and diverse mediascapes resulting in increased collective identification and action. An online archive for the project is available at www.whitebuilding.org

Garbage piles up in the capital of Cambodia; it lies around in corners, on streets, in fields. COVID‐19, which has led to a global reduction in the production of greenhouse gases considered utopian, has had little if any significant impact within this country, where garbage is produced in the same amounts, likewise burned and buried, or dumped into the rivers. The smelly sewage channels of Phnom Penh run as brown as usual, patterned with flip‐flops, shampoo packaging, diverse plastic particles, and undefinable fragments of rubbish, travelling south‐eastwards into the morning glory fields; passing by buzzing, still active markets, passing urban poor areas, where children play in the thick mud, passing citizens in facemasks. On 10 April, the Cambodian government counted some 120 official cases of COVID‐19 infection among its populace. (...)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1469-8676.12894

Phnom Penh, 19th century: a town on the Mekong Delta, far from the size and density characterizing Cambodia’s capital at present. During the early 20th century, the French carved the settlement into a vision of a modern city. Traces of those colonial-era motifs and structures remain visible across the landscape today. Less palpable is the history of women’s bodies in colonial Phnom Penh, that is, how gender was central to urban planning.

This presentation will introduce a history of gender and urban planning in early colonial Phnom Penh, beginning in the 1880s and continuing into the 1930s. Coincidentally, this period of the capital’s urban development intersected with the emergence of colonial law, policy, and practice that attempted to govern non-white women’s bodies in the city through bureaucracies and cultures like regulating sex work, establishing maternity clinics, and calling out violence against women. Archival materials illustrate how French administrators, police, doctors, feminists, and philanthropists—many who called themselves humanitarians—monitored Asian women in urban spaces, and consequently built a city seeking to control women, in order to protect them.

Today, Phnom Penh is one of the fastest growing cities in Southeast Asia, but there are concerns about equitable life in the city, for women and other marginalized groups. Historical inquiry on the gendered nature of urban planning in Phnom Penh is critical to addressing such contemporary issues, from women’s rural-urban migration and mobility within the city, to access to housing and healthcare, and the right to feel safe and empowered. This presentation invites researchers and practitioners—and the everyday urban dweller—to address these questions from a historical perspective, and think critically about how to let Phnom Penh, and post-colonial cities across the Global South more broadly, become an inclusive space, for women’s bodies and for all.

“Chris Coles paintings and artwork is very striking I guess I would say. They remind me of Zappa lyrics...’gross and perverted, obsessed and deranged’. His colors are so primitive and their throbbing clash on your eyes and senses ooze a sense of darkness, of evil even. Yet, they are almost playful at times and amusing as well. His work reminds me of what I expect to see when I am fairly obliterated and moving aside the thick velvet curtain of the umpteenth ‘next’ gogo bar, the one I know I should not go in, but enter I do. You know, the bar with the katoey mamasan with the garish make-up that glows under the black lights that scares the bejesus out of you as his/her face looms in your drunken blurry field of vision. Coles captures the extra-dimensional feel of the Thailand nightlife. His work occupies another zone of existence. It’s so ugly at times it is intriguing in a perverse way that makes one want to embrace it. If you know what I mean? Maybe not....” -- Anonymous internet comment on Chris Coles’ Paintings from the Bangkok Night.

The 1984 movie The Killing Fields, based on Sydney Schanberg's book The Death and Life of Dith Pran was widely acclaimed by the critics as a film presenting the triumph of hope over fear. However, before drawing the final conclusion, the viewers become familiar with aspects of death in both its forms: physical and spiritual. Read more at http://mihaela-olaru.blogspot.com/2014/12/death-and-dying-in-killing-fields.html.

Cet article se propose de revenir sur la mort, suite à un mouvement de foule qui eut lieu le 22 novembre 2010, de plus de 350 personnes sur le pont d’un grand projet urbain privé actuellement en construction à Phnom-Penh. Il s’agira pour nous, à partir de ce drame marquant, de souligner certaines dynamiques contemporaines de la construction des espaces urbains de la capitale cambodgienne. A travers le grand projet de l’Île des Diamants, nous souhaitons interroger le rôle des grands promoteurs immobiliers dans la fabrication de la capitale. Pour ce faire, nous évoquerons l’internationalisation des modes de construction en Asie du Sud-Est et au Cambodge qui se caractérise par un retrait de la planification urbaine et une multiplication des projets urbains privés. L’exemple de l’Île des Diamants nous permettra d’illustrer certaines grandes tendances de l’urbanisation à Phnom-Penh. Nous montrerons comment l’évolution du discours sur la ville moderne génère des antagonismes au sein de la politique urbaine actuelle, et interrogerons la capacité des grands investisseurs immobiliers à fabriquer des espaces urbains pérennes.