Gabriel Fauveaud

This book explores how productions, activities, and strategies of real estate actors transformed the urban spaces of Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia. It has two main purposes. Firstly, exploring the role of real estate dynamics in transforming social, spatial, economic, political, and cultural dynamics in Phnom Penh. Secondly, proposing an approach of real estate dynamics in social geography. The main argument of the book is that real estate activities changes not only the way that urban spaces are produced, but also the relations between the elements of the process of production of urban spaces.
--
Cet ouvrage examine la transformation contemporaine des territoires urbains de Phnom Penh, capitale du Cambodge, par l’étude de la production, des activités et des stratégies immobilières. Le fait immobilier ne se limite pas à sa dimension économique : il est aussi tributaire des dynamiques sociales, politiques, culturelles et spatiales qui structurent à la fois les formes urbaines produites, le déploiement des activités qui y sont associées et les stratégies des acteurs impliqués. Cet ouvrage propose ainsi une « géographie sociale de l’immobilier » à Phnom Penh, qui semble d’autant plus justifiée par la trajectoire urbaine aussi singulière que tragique de cette petite capitale sud-est asiatique : entre 1975 et 1979, la ville fut totalement vidée de ses habitants par le régime khmer rouge, sous lequel près d’un quart de la population du pays trouva la mort. En ce sens, la réorganisation de la production immobilière participe de la renaissance d’une urbanité partiellement détruite. Cependant, ces processus suscitent d’importantes tensions sociospatiales, qui démontrent à quel point l’immobilier est devenu, aussi bien à Phnom Penh que dans un très grand nombre de contextes urbains, une activité qui génère de fortes inégalités socio-économiques. Ce livre montre ainsi à quel point l’immobilier est le produit de multiples relations de pouvoir où différents acteurs jouent avec les territoires pour s’approprier les ressources qu’ils contiennent.

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.

This paper analyses different forms of “shadow urbanism” in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. I mainly argue that planning actions and urban spaces productions “from above” depend on multiple informal strategies structured by power relationships between public and private stakeholders. I show that current debates about urban planning logic in Global South cities oppose too sharply urban spaces productions from above and from below, as well as formal and informal practices. These dialogical approaches reduce our capacity of understanding the political nature of the relationships between public and private stakeholders, and the fact that their actions also depend on  “actually existing urbanism” that condition their strategies. Firstly, the paper examines how official planners are trying to change the production of a large scale urban project in the city centre. Secondly, the paper analysis how a private developer who is building a condominium project in the periphery failed to impose his will to local authorities. Finally, the article shows that instead of the notion of informality, the notion of opacity is a key concept in the understanding of shadow urbanism practices in Phnom Penh.

The importance of large-scale real estate projects in Phnom Penh’s contemporary development has been stressed in recent research. However, an important part of the local real estate actors, such as small and medium developers, or the emerging elite, has been overlooked. In consequence, important aspects of the reorganisation of the urban spaces production processes after 1980 remain unknown. Using a cross typology of both real estate actors and modes of real estate capital appropriation, I underline the evolution of developer’s actions and strategies since the 1980s. I argue that local real estate actors represent the core of Phnom Penh’s transformations, and have to be studied through a socio-historical perspective. I further argue that an actor-centred approach is necessary to identify the domination structure of the real estate activity. Finally, the article stresses the emergence of new groups of interest (associations of professionals), which will certainly participate to transform power relationships in Phnom Penh’s real estate sector.

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.
---------------------
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.

"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."

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.

L'ancrage occidental historique de la recherche urbaine et l'attention privilégiée portée aux villes européennes et nord-américaines obligent à remettre en question la capacité des cadres théoriques et méthodo-logiques constitués à rendre compte de la diversité entre les réalités urbaines. Si les différences de trajectoires urbaines empruntées par les villes occidentales donnent lieu à de nombreux débats et, dans une certaine mesure, à un important travail épistémologique, les villes situées en dehors du monde occidental restent faiblement mobilisées dans les réflexions portant sur l'évolution des cadres théoriques et méthodologiques de la recherche urbaine. Pourtant, ces villes font l'objet d'une attention croissante depuis les trente dernières années. Cette introduction propose de dresser un état intermédiaire des
connaissances, des programmes, des pratiques et des positionnements
scientifiques – voire de certaines postures éthiques – propres aux
villes non occidentales. Cela permettra de mieux identifier certaines
caractéristiques des recherches urbaines sur ces villes. La dernière partie de l’introduction émettra quelques propositions en faveur d’un décentrement géographique, théorique et méthodologique des recherches urbaines francophones où les villes non occidentales pourraient jouer un rôle de premier plan.

Since the first territorial reforms in the beginning of the 1990s, urban governance evolved under a decentralization/deconcentration process that seek to give more power to local government, and to increase the civil society participation. This process is promoted by international multi-lateral agencies, as in many other developing countries. Many researches already showed that governance became a tool to increase economic liberalization rather than a process that favour citizens participation to economic and political affairs. Governance is thus often considered as a tool of neo-liberalism. In this chapter, I argue that territorial and governance reforms in Phnom Penh generate a reorganization of power relationships between local government, local elites, and the inhabitants that rely on the emergence of new living areas and new residential spaces. I argue that governance process has been at the same time symbolic (the decentralization process did not favour a better transparency and participation of inhabitants), and very effective by giving more power to local elites (local representatives, developers, officials, etc..). Development agencies did not take into account the reality of actors' power relationships in Cambodia, and the fact that the government is at the same time centralized, and very fragmented between different families and clans, and local representatives that are central to an important patronage system.

In this chapter, I will present some of the important political, economic, and social issues raised by real estate markets in Phnom Penh. I will argue that real estate productions, activities, and strategies are structured by political, economic, and social issues faced by the whole of urban society today. In the first part, I will demonstrate that large-scale, real estate projects emphasize the importance of the control of “informational flows” on real estate investments and productions. In the second part, I will show that this opacity also represents a structural factor of real estate actors’ strategies at the local scale. In the last part, I will pay attention to smaller residential projects, which represent the real core of the reorganization of real estate markets in Phnom Penh since the 2000s, and see how they participate in the emergence of new socio-economic dynamics, especially in peripheral areas.

This chapter focuses on the generalization of a new form of residential spaces in Phnom Penh: the "borey". It explores the historical trends that explain the emergence of that particular type of residential space, and explain why it became a "new residential reference" in the capital city of Cambodia. The chapter argues that this type of project showed that the Khmer Rouge were not able to erase completely the urban culture they attend to annihilate. The historical roots of the "borey" can be interpreted as permanence of regional urban forms in Cambodia, in which the "shop house" plays a key role. Since the 1990s, borey and shop houses have allowed local developers to quickly rebuild their own real estate and architectural knowledge, and to professionalize their practices and realizations. The chapter finally proposes an alternative view of the urban space production in South-East Asia, often described as the result of an homogenization of urban projects and landscape that destruct vernacular urban knowledge.

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.