In Search of Interactions Across a Divide: The Case of Phnom Penh
Popular and scholarly representations of so-called slum communities and neighborhoods tend to depict life in these spaces as somehow cut off from the regular happenings across the city and even the world. Such a “two worlds” approach to poverty and inequality in cities is simplistic at best, and in the case of life in and around the residential complex of “Building” in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, just not so at all, explains AbdouMaliq Simone in an article entitled, “The Politics of the Possible: Making Urban Life in Phnom Penh.” The article is behind a paywall, unfortunately. I quote at length from a relevant subsection:
An ambiguous legal context coupled with land speculation directly supported at the highest level of the regime led to anticipation that Building’s days were numbered. Still the diverse backgrounds, aspirations and economic capacities of its residents preclude any easy resolution of sporadic negotiations with municipal and national authorities to explore various resettlement schemes. Building’s diversity also provides sufficient ‘corridors’ of connectivity to the rest of the city so that the ruse of development to create a kind of structural claustrophobia, a ‘choking off’, can be practically countered. Among residents there is widespread ambivalence on the wisdom of remaining even if some breathing space is constantly conjured up. The transformation of the built environment across the city produce new imaginaries of what constitutes the signs of really belonging to the city and of what it means to be a ‘normal’ resident. Within the warren of staircases, narrow halls, cramped apartments and densely packed commercial spaces, all rubbing up against each other, the management of everyday transactions and security in Building is labour intensive. There are barely any formal agencies or associations that might lend some predictability or order, yet, disparate agendas and inclinations do manage to interlock through residents’ need and ability to observe what each other does and to render this a matter of conversation, both serious and playful.
The scores of small cafes, inserted in the ground floor openings that had been initially built for flood control and ventilation, are one example of the many local domains for everyday management and the circulation of information. In those mostly frequented by youth, the social scene is usually heterogeneous in terms of who is sitting and talking together. Even though clear demarcations of self-identity are engaged through tattoos, clothing and hairstyles, or ways of speaking, these cafes are not appropriated as the hang-out of any particular group but remain as places for a kind of mutual witnessing and exchange. Thus, youth who are able to attend university or the scores of tertiary-level training programmes across the city will routinely mask where they come from in order not to be shunned; at the same time, they have access to information and points of view that youth who consider themselves chukan (gangsters) and who strongly assert their residential location do not have.
In the cafes then there is great emphasis on an exchange of different interpretations of the rest of the city made possible by these divergent trajectories of engagement. For the chukan do not sit still within Building but also attempt to figure out ways to move across the city, through a field of antagonisms and alliances with other gangs, or by doing the dirty work for syndicates (most often Vietnamese). This exposure generates stories and information that the university students then use as a resource in their zones of operation to communicate a street wisdom that not many of their fellow students possess. At a more concrete level, the cafes and youth become contexts for the advertisement and acquisition of goods and services obtained through theft, bartering, or as the by-product of favours rendered to okhna (‘big men’). For both poor and middle class residents, who struggle to maintain specific levels of consumption, access to such low cost goods are critical. Across the area, this profusion of talk, information exchange, rumours and transactions also take places in the billiard and snooker sheds and over card games.
Building, like Dey Krahom, has been characterized by multiple comings and goings: roughly 40 per cent of the residents in both settlements have never lived anywhere else in Phnom Penh – for low income city dwellers it was crucial to hang on to a place to live at all costs, given the limited land transactions possible for few but the well-to-do. Thus, the social economy of Building continues to find an anchor centred on a wide range of informal trades and individual entrepreneurships, as well as the very identities and particular networks of the performing arts and sex work Household composition, spatial and financial arrangements, gender economies and problem solving outlooks in the sections dominated respectively by sex workers and their associates, and performing artists are markedly different, even if each is regarded with suspicion by the wider society. Even as this divergence provides distinct zones of anchorage, the proximity of these different sections enables them to provide a range of opportunities and supports to each other.
