Mutations of real estate actors’ strategies and modes of capital appropriation in contemporary Phnom Penh

Introduction

Phnom Penh’s participation in the internationalisation of real estate production has been the subject of recent scholarly work. The multiplication of gated communities, large-scale projects and satellite cities underscores the integration of Southeast Asian secondary cities in the regional metropolisation ¹ process (Goldblum and Franck, 2007), on the edge of important urban centres in the region, from which urban forms and models are transferred (Ho, 2002; Robinson, 2002; Roy and Hong, 2011). This emphasises more generally the growing importance of ‘fourth world cities’ (Shatkin, 1998) in the globalisation of city-making processes. Phnom Penh seems to be a relevant example of this phenomenon.

The few urban studies that have been conducted in Phnom Penh usually stress the most salient effects of the metropolisation process. On the one hand, authors argue that the regional and international transfers of urban planning models, the politico-economic cooperation processes that lead Asian developers to invest in Phnom Penh, the interlaced relationships between public and private interests mainly explain the recent evolution of the urban space production (Fauveaud, 2011; Paling, 2012; Percival and Waley, 2012). On the other hand, some scholars stress that the urbanisation process generates violent forms of urban space production that lead to land grabbing, forced evictions and relocations, and to the marginalisation of a part of the urban population considered as undesirable (Clerc, 2005; Fauveaud, 2014; Springer, 2010a). By focusing primarily on forms, procedures and socio-economic effects of the urbanisation processes, the study of local urban spaces producers’ strategies in Phnom Penh is partly left aside. Thus, this paper seeks to contribute to this recent literature by investigating how local real estate actors in Phnom Penh organised their practices after the 1980s, and by identifying some of the historical and socio-economic factors that structure their actions.

By taking into consideration a large range of actors, from the family investor to the professional developer, I will argue that the contemporary development of Phnom Penh is not mainly driven by local and international large-scale developers, but rather by a large spectrum of real estate actors, who have transformed and adapted their practices and strategies in regard to the rapid evolution of real estate markets since the 1980s. I also argue that actions and strategies of these urban space producers have to be examined through a historical perspective and an actor-centred analysis that will allow us to distinguish several ‘modes of real estate capital appropriation’. This contribution aims to provide new empirical insights into Phnom Penh’s contemporary transformations. In another perspective, by proposing a cross typology of both real estate actors and their strategies of capital appropriation, this paper seeks to shed light on recent debates on the supposed standardisation of urbanisation processes in the Southeast Asian region (Dick and Rimmer, 2009); in other words, this contribution ambitions to ‘reconsider’ real estate actors’ practices in the study of the urban spaces production in Southeast Asia.

This paper is based on semi-structured interviews conducted between 2008 and 2012 with more than 500 households located in three of Phnom Penh’s periurban areas. A little more than 200 of these interviews investigated the residential history of household heads. I also conducted more than 50 interviews with different administrations (Municipality, Ministers), local representatives and various actors involved in the real estate business. Lastly, a part of this research is based on the author’s participatory work undertaken at the Municipality between April and October 2008.

The production of urban spaces: An actor-centred approach

Southeast Asian large-scale developers have been at the centre of many studies that focus on the evolution of urbanisation trends in the region, consecrated by the multiplication of urban mega-projects (Dick and Rimmer, 2009; Olds, 2001; Shatkin, 2011). These new modes of urban space production have been the subject of important scientific debate that stressed the necessity to take into consideration the local conditions of urban development in order to avoid both generalised and reductionistic observations (Shatkin, 2008). However, these debates have overlooked an important part of real estate actors (mainly the small investors, family developers, and local entrepreneurs), and their multiple profiles and origins. They also overshadow the relationships between the different modes of real estate capital appropriation, and the organisation of real estate actors’ strategies and practices. Finally, because these researches have attached more importance to the analysis of urban project forms and of the legal frameworks that condition their implementation, urban spaces producers often ‘disappear’ behind the study of urbanisation processes, or behind the examination of urban socio-economic context evolutions.

In most real estate studies in Southeast Asia, real estate actors are agglomerated in large categories (e.g. governments and public agencies, private developers, professionals and the inhabitants) (see Berry and McGreal, 1999; Shatkin, 2008; Sheng Han, 2005). These large groups do not fully reflect their own inner diversity and make it difficult to identify real estate actors’ social origins, how they formed their economic or social capital, or the different resources on which they rely to develop their strategies. I thus believe that these approaches could benefit from finer disaggregation in order to better identify the articulation between local, regional, and global forces that structure actors’ strategies and practices.

Urban sociologists in Southeast Asia have already proposed different social group typologies in order to represent the socio-economic transformations in the region (among many others, see Higgott and Robison, 1985; King, 2008a; Robison and Goodman, 1996; Rodan et al., 2006), although King (2008b) has shown how difficult it is to define ‘particular classes’ in Southeast Asia by importing Western concepts that do not fully embrace the regional socio-economic dynamics. Some of these actors, such as entrepreneurs and bureaucrats, play a key role in the organisation of socio-economic forces (Clad, 1991; McVey, 1992; Tipton, 2009), especially in urban contexts. Their integration into regional and global economic networks is an important issue in recent political economic research that seeks to qualify the transformation and the plurality of capitalism in the region (Carney, 2005; Steier, 2009).

The particular role of new professionals, bureaucrats or entrepreneurs in the economic changes in Southeast Asia has already been stressed by Evers (1980) and (Korff, 1986), who identified several ‘strategic groups’ and ‘strategic activities’ that accompany the socio-economic mutations in the region. Using a neo-Marxist approach, these authors distinguish different modes of capital appropriation and accumulation in urban contexts (corporate, collective, personal, land rent, etc.), based on the consideration of both the social belongings of individuals, and the professional environment in which they evolve (Evers and Korff, 2000).

However, the construction of social groups typologies is often problematic, because social classifications are often more a view of the researcher than a lived or perceived reality (Bourdieu, 1984). Korff’s typology has been criticised by Askew (2002), who points out the limitations of structural social approaches in Bangkok, which do not consider the ‘cultural dimension of power accumulation’ (Askew, 2002: 99–100). By focusing on the relationships between social group formation and capital accumulation, Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches may overlook the socio-cultural dimension of capital and power distribution in local contexts, but by concentrating on the distribution of wealth, these same approaches underline the unequal access to socio-economic resources that determines and structures power relations.

Besides, usual actor categorisations do not fully consider the complex interrelationships between them, and they reduce their capacity to ‘navigate’ between different social groups, and between different modes of capital appropriations. The strategies followed by these agents transcend, in that sense, the categories in which researchers are trying to classify them, for several reasons: (1) Public and private interests generally overlap; (2) an often important proportion of these strategic agents belongs to several groups (they are state agents but also own a private company; local representatives and entrepreneurs are also inhabitants); (3) socio-economic agents move between categories over time; (4) depending on local economic frameworks, strategic actors are soliciting both what is defined as pre-capitalist practices (usually considered as rent-seeking strategies based on kinship networks, patronage relationships and ethnicity), and capitalist practices (notably based on the private ownership of the means of production and the reinvestment of profits in capital-generating capacity).

On Phnom Penh, scholars generally focus on the most important real estate actors and projects because the scale of this urban spaces production, as well as the modality of the actors interventions represent a whole new phenomenon in Cambodia. However, if the real estate production seems to be mainly structured by few important local and international developers, the professionalisation ² of this activity since the 1980s has accelerated the emergence of what might be called ‘intermediate developers’. These represent a large group of local small and medium sized developers, enriched through diverse activities, who became more and more specialised in real estate activities through their progressive professionalisation in the sector. Even if several large-scale projects are currently under construction in Phnom Penh, smaller residential projects mostly developed by modest Cambodian developers are much more numerous, and represent the real driving force of the real estate production (see Fauveaud, 2013). The role of new small and medium sized investors and of the emerging elite is particularly absent of researches dealing with the ‘production of space’ in Cambodia. For example, Springer (2009, 2010b, 2012), who stressed the violent forms of capital accumulation in Cambodia especially since the (neo)liberalisation of its economy after the 1980s, often oppose ‘private investors’ to the ‘civil society’ or to ‘inhabitants’. By focusing on the evolution of ‘primitive accumulation’ and on the generalisation of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (see Glassman, 2006), the author does not detail the different forms of ‘capital appropriation’ that led to such politico-economic mechanisms. The distinction between ‘capital accumulation’– which represents one of the basis for capitalism – and ‘capital appropriation’– which refers to actors’ actions and strategies to gain and accumulate capital – might be useful, especially to investigate the hierarchical structure that organises the relationships between the actors of the urban spaces production in Phnom Penh.

To draw a typology of urban spaces producers and modes of capital appropriation in Phnom Penh remains, however, complex. First, it appears difficult to classify real estate producers because they may be at the same time state workers, partisans or members of the dominant political party (the Cambodian People’s Party), and local entrepreneurs or professionals (if not them directly, then members of their families). They can also be simultaneously rent-seekers and capitalist entrepreneurs, and their strategies can be based on different modes of capital appropriation used concurrently or independently.

Second, the recent and tragic history of Phnom Penh reconstruction generates fast changes in local economic practices. Cambodia still bears the stigma of more than 20 years of civil war, and of almost 4 years of what is today considered a genocide (1975–1979). In a little over 30 years, the country experienced economic autarky, socialism and capitalism supported by a strong (neo)liberalisation of its economy (Hughes and Un, 2011). In consequence, the social structure of the population (Procheasas, 2005) has evolved tremendously since the 1980s, especially in urban areas, which have been emptied during the Khmer Rouge regime in the name of the agrarian revolution. In consequence, the reorganisation of real estate practices after 1979 goes with the necessary reconstitution of the ‘urban knowledge’ lost during the Khmer Rouge regime (Fauveaud, 2012a). Thus, the ‘actor-centred’ approach proposed in this article will have to be deployed in what might be called a ‘socio-historical analysis’, which will consider the historical background that conditioned the social patterns of the real estate activities reorganisation in Phnom Penh.

From opportunity to strategy: The residential business as a key economic sector

The contemporary reorganisation of the modes of real estate capital appropriation in Phnom Penh is largely dependent on the city repopulation process after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979.

When the Vietnamese army entered the emptied city of Phnom Penh in January 1979, it closed the doors of the city in order to control the flow of population running from the fighting in the countryside. In the very beginning of the fall of the Khmer rouge government, hundreds of thousands of people were settled along the main roads on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (Gottesman, 2003; Slocomb, 2003; Yao, 1997). From January to June 1979, the National Union Front, composed of Cambodian officials trained in Vietnam, Vietnamese civilian and military administration and technical staff and Russian experts, regulated the repopulation of Phnom Penh in order to prevent a spontaneous and uncontrolled return to the city. Those families allowed to re-enter the city were people with particular skills, mainly in the administrative sector, but also people with technical skills needed to maintain and operate urban infrastructures.

Residential areas reserved for state workers were attached to each administration, in order to prevent an ‘anarchist’ reappropriation of urban spaces by the first families who were allowed to resettle in the city (Carrier, 2007: 166). Having a job in the administration became a central stake in the return of the urban population. Carrier (2007) talks about a ‘race for state employment’, where people used different strategies (showing or inventing various skills, claiming family relations with other people already employed in the city, etc.) to get a place to live inside the various administrations’ residential perimeters (Carrier, 2007: 192).

However, with this system of control, the repopulation of Phnom Penh was too slow. At the end of June 1979, Phnom Penh reopened its doors, and the population was allowed to settle in the city (Clément-Charpentier, 2008: 101), but not in the perimeters reserved for each administration. From June 1979 onwards, the repopulation of Phnom Penh followed the principle of ‘first come, first served’, whereby the canniest and strongest households could dominate the others. The residential acquisitions of new urban inhabitants between 1979 and 1981 would become strategic when the real estate business accelerated during the second part of the 1990s. As a woman declared, many people did not even try to recover their previous accommodation:

When I returned to my hold neighbourhood, my house had already been taken by another family. Because I was a single woman, I did not try to recover it. Many persons were in the same situation. […] Most of the time, people just took another home. (Interview with an inhabitant, Chbar Ampeul 2, 1 July 2009). ³

Over 90% of 48 families who were living in Phnom Penh before 1975 interviewed in 2009 declared that they could not recover their previous home when they returned to Phnom Penh. Indeed, this moment in the reappropriation of residential spaces was partly characterised by the ‘survival of the fittest’ law, as many informants declared:

I remember that larger families were able to take more land and houses than smaller ones, just because they were able to put members of their family on properties to look after them, and also because they were better able to defend themselves against other families. (Interview with an inhabitant, Teuk Tla, 19 September 2009)

When I arrived in Phnom Penh in 1982, I came to the area where one of my cousins lived before Pol Pot. I did not find her family, but I met a person I knew from Kampong Thom. At that time, his husband was working for the Vietnamese as village chief. He found a house for me, where I have since lived. (Interview with an inhabitant, Teuk Tla, 14 September 2009)

If the first interview stresses that familial solidarity represents an economic force, the second one shows the advantage of having connections with officials and local representatives. The resettlement of the population generated some inequalities from the very beginning of the return process. These statements also show how unpredictable the access to property was after the reopening of the city. Households had to use the few resources they had: family, social networks or their privileged position in an administration (interviews with households located in peripheral areas in 2009). Isolated individuals – especially women – and people who had never formerly come to Phnom Penh had a much lower chance to get advantageous land and housing.

In consequence, the employees of the administrations were some of the wealthiest urban inhabitants during the first half of the 1980s, which is one of the reasons why some social inequalities were already obvious during the 1980s (Chandler, 2008; Simon-Barouh and Tan Kim Pho, 1990). The opening of the Vietnamese economy in 1986 (the Doi Moi) accelerated the informal transfer of lands and housing. However, according to respondents, the real estate capital accumulation during the Vietnamese administration was mainly a capital appropriation through opportunity, driven by tactics rather than strategies, implemented ‘on the spot’, and which depended on local conditions and particular situations. But even so, this situation laid the foundations for a future unequal access to real estate capital that benefited to few socio-economic groups.

The main transformation of real estate capital appropriation between 1989 and the mid-1990s was the transition from opportunity to strategy of enrichment through residential business. In 1989, property rights established prior to 1975 were abolished, and a cadastral registration system was implemented. The private ownership system voted in 1989 represented the formalisation of an informal system of urban property business that existed during the Vietnamese administration (Carrier, 2007: 336). Concomitantly, Cambodia’s reconstruction was accompanied by a liberalisation of its economy in the early days of the country’s reopening (Gerles, 2008; Népote and de Vienne, 1993) that favoured the arrival of foreign capital, notably through the development aid sector. The presence of the international community certainly represents one of the most important factors in the rapid transformation of the relationship between Phnom Penh’s inhabitants and their real estate markets.

Between 1991 and 1993, more than 20,000 international employees working for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) arrived in Cambodia, ⁴ and one of the largest contingents of NGOs in the world (Tranin, 2005) opened new offices. This new foreign community mostly settled in Phnom Penh, and their presence greatly accelerated the reorganisation of Phnom Penh’s real estate markets. During the first part of the 1990s, the Cambodian economy was still very weak. The subsistence economy and the primary sector were preeminent compared with the industrial, financial and tertiary sectors. For urban dwellers, the new habitat needs and the weak residential market provided them new opportunities to derive benefits from their own real estate capital, which they had acquired during the 1980s:

For example, in Boeung Keng Kang or in Tuol Kork, ⁵ many people started to rent their home to international workers, or even to international institutions that needed spaces for their offices. Some families got rich quickly and bought other houses in the neighbourhood. […] It is also during this time that conflicts increased, because property became a potential resource for families. (Interview with a Cambodian architect, 12 August 2008)

Families who were living in or who possessed a villa in the city centre were advantaged. They rented a part or the totality of their residence when they were able to live in another house or to buy another property. State employees had special access to the international cooperation sector – because they were often involved in aid development projects – and to lucrative opportunities in the real estate market because they had privileged access to information as members of the government. They were able to set up deals with international organisations and with individuals to lodge them. Also, different administrations could rent or even sell entire buildings to international cooperation agencies and institutions (interviews in the Phnom Penh Municipality, April–October 2008).

The development aid sector definitely contributed to the emergence of important Cambodian real estate actors. Some large current Cambodian real estate companies started their business at the beginning of the 1990s by collaborating with United Nations institutions, ⁶ and gradually acquired dominant positions in the real estate markets. For example, at the very beginning of the reopening of the Cambodian economy, one of the most profitable activities was the transportation logistics inside Cambodia but also for transborder and international trade (interview with a Cambodian company director, 27 April 2012). These local logistics companies became privileged partners of international development aid organisations based in Phnom Penh because of their need for equipment and transportation (interview with a local logistics and transportation company, 30 April 2012). An important part of these companies became important real estate actors in Phnom Penh.

With the increased specialisation of local companies in the real estate business, this activity became increasingly a strategy of real estate capital appropriation for administrations, state workers, local companies and a part of the urban population mainly located in the city centre. To work with or in local administrations, to develop partnerships with foreigners and to increase the social connections with the territorial administration represented (and still represents) an important part of these strategies.

The departure of the UNTAC administration after the successful 1993 general elections did not interrupt the impact of development aid capital flows on the local residential market. When the construction needs of the real estate business became more important during the 1990s, some of these logistics companies saw in these activities the logical extension of their own business, as they already owned equipment and infrastructures (mainly trucks and warehouses) and often some business relations all over the country. Little by little, some of these local companies specialised in construction and engineering activities, and in real estate investments. At the end of the 1990s, the first gated communities were built by some of these actors in downtown areas, with international standards of modernity and design.

Rent-seeking and speculative strategies, and the fragmentation of the production process

Between the 1990s and the 2000s, real estate markets evolved in a way that opened up new opportunities for real estate actors. The new local housing needs and the periurban development corresponded with an increase in land speculation. Concomitantly, the modes of real estate goods production evolved, with the arrival of foreign professionals and international companies. Inner-city areas represented the core of the real estate market reorganisation between 1979 and the middle of the 1990s. But since the end of the 1990s, peripheries offer new opportunities for urban households and developers in search for cheap land and space for their residential projects. Beside the large-scale projects built by local and foreign property developers, smaller local projects and family investments started proliferating. In consequence, new rent-seeking – which corresponds in this context to the benefits derived from the possession of a real estate good rather than to its utilisation in a process of production – and new speculative strategies emerged.

First, the increase in land speculation benefited some owners in peri-urban areas, who saw the price of their residential or agricultural land increase tremendously. Some of them chose to sell their property and move to live in rural areas or in other parts of the city. Other owners decided to sell portions of their plot or to build dwellings in order to sell it, or to rent it (interviews with land owners in peripheral areas between 2008 and 2009). Furthermore, the opening of the Cambodian economy and the return of foreign investments generated the installation of garment factories in Phnom Penh’s peripheral spaces. This industrialisation process provoked the arrival in the capital city of workers from the countryside in search of cheap accommodation close to their factory. This new labour force opened new enrichment opportunities for land owners located in industrial sectors (Fauveaud, 2012b). Some of them started to build precarious housing units for workers on their rice fields or on parts of their land plots. Thus, the arrival of cheap labour in peripheral areas represented opportunities for local owners to become annuitants, and in some cases to drop their previous occupation (interviews with land owners in peripheral areas in 2008).

Second, the speculation pushed some city centre inhabitants to invest in peripheral areas, which emphasised the emergence of new family investors in the real estate business. The comparison of 1998 and 2008 censuses shows that an important part of the city centre lost density when the population of some peripheral areas multiplied by two times or more (National Institute of Statistics and Ministry of Planning, 1999, 2009). An important part of this population became owners in the new residential projects built by local developers. Other households from the inner-city chose to buy land and build housing themselves in order to resell it or to rent it. Some of them moved into a dwelling that they kept for themselves on the same plot, or into a place nearby (interviews with inhabitants of peripheral areas in 2009). These small family investors have multiplied since the end of the 1990s, and some of them, whether originally from peripheral or inner-city areas, became important real estate actors in their neighbourhood, which sometimes increased the land concentration in the hands of few owners.

Third, the new enrichment perspectives through real estate activities and land speculation in Phnom Penh favoured the specialisation of important Cambodian families in the real estate business. These households had previously become wealthier in the 1980s or the 1990s through various activities such as the trade of precious woods and stones, transborder trade or diverse illegal activities (Global Witness, 2007; Hughes and Un, 2011), and are often involved in the civil or military government and in the Cambodian People Party. These families used their social capital and privileged information to take advantage of an opaque real estate market (Licadho, 2009; Fauveaud, 2012b). Part of them are involved in land grabbing and violent evictions, sometimes with the support of the state (in which they generally have a position) and local territorial authorities.

The generalisation of new modes of real estate capital appropriation (rent-seeking and speculative strategies) made the production system of urban spaces more complex and diversified. But the evolution of these modes of real estate capital appropriation also transformed the production system itself. The growing demand for new real estate goods, the enrichment of a small part of the urban population, the evolution of residential needs and aspirations, the increased competition between real estate stakeholders – who became more numerous on the market – and the arrival of large investors from the Asian region led to a fragmentation of the production process of real estate goods. In consequence, some of the real estate actors developed their real estate capital appropriation through the professionalisation of their previous activities.

If developers had integrated most of the steps of the production process of residential goods before the acceleration of real estate activities evolution in the 1990s, the production process became more fragmented and complex after the end of the 1990s. As a medium family developer declared during an interview, his real estate practices differ from those of the previous generation:

My dad was doing everything. He was hiring builders, leading and controlling works, etc. … He designed the buildings himself, even if the design was simple. […] My mother and my sister helped him with accounts, and for the selling also. […] Neither I nor my competitors work like that. Now, even if I involve my family in my business, I hire project managers or technicians […], and brokers. (Interview with a family developer, Teuk Tla, 13 October 2009).

The growing competition multiplied intermediaries, such as brokers, that play middleman for land transactions. In addition, the new needs for more professional and diversified skills, the increasing experience of local stakeholders, their growing association with foreign professionals (from the diaspora or not), and the arrival of specialised regional companies accelerated the transformation of the real estate sector. The emergence of professionalised companies and of professional investors (such as local banks), the normalisation of the legal framework, and the political stability gave confidence to foreign investors and companies. Moreover, the increasing financialisation of the Cambodian economy led to a better cooperation between banks and local developers in the setting-up of real estate operations.

Meanwhile, the growth of the demand for new residential areas since the end of the 1990s encouraged the opening of architecture companies by foreign professionals who arrived in Phnom Penh during the 1990s, the return of architecture companies who had left Cambodia before 1975, ⁷ and the inauguration of subsidiaries of international architectural companies. This accelerated the training of local architects and stimulated in return the local demand for new types of residential buildings. According to the Cambodian Department of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction, the number of construction and architecture companies registered in late 2012 was 1205 (932 local and 273 foreign) (Soeun, 2013), whereas they were less than a hundred 15 years ago (interview with a Cambodian architect, 11 May 2012). Besides these activities which directly concern the residential business, the engineering sector developed widely during the 2000s. The growing investments in infrastructure and the multiplication of large-scale projects required new skills in engineering, planning and design. Progressively, international and local building companies specialising in particular tasks such as foundations or complex structures entered the Cambodian market. For example, Korean, Thai or Chinese firms are more specialised in substructures or complex glass structures, while Singapore or Hong Kong engineering companies tend to specialise in project management. At the end of the production process, the marketing and selling operations are generally carried out by the developer himself with the possible help of real estate companies, banks and a multitude of middlemen.

Since the 1990s, the major transformations of real estate practices and strategies favoured the emergence of a strong hierarchical socio-economic structure in the real estate business, where dominant actors maintained their positions by developing social and clannish networks. In order to gain better positions in this hierarchical structure, smaller real estate actors recently began to reorganise their activities for gaining more power and better economic opportunities. In consequence, a recent evolution of real estate actors’ strategies can be noticed, mainly related to the increased integration of real estate activities in the regional economic environment.

Associations of professionals and new power relationships in the real estate business

An association of real estate professionals in Phnom Penh corresponds to a formalised and institutionalised group of actors involved in the same task of the production process (e.g. design, construction, management) of real estate goods. On the one hand, this represents new domination strategies set up by important developers, who are facing increased competition in the real estate markets. But on the other, it represents new perspectives for intermediate actors to circumvent the hierarchical structure of the real estate business environment. Real estate capital appropriation through associations represents an important factor in the current reorganisation of real estate practices and strategies.

Since the end of the 2000s, important political, economic and institutional figures in the real estate business regrouped in different associations such as the Cambodian Valuers and Estate Agent Association or the Cambodia Construction Association. ⁸ These groups pushed the government for a better regulation of their activity (interviews with Cambodian developers between 2009 and 2012). For example, since 2008, real estate agencies have the obligation to present a license delivered by the Department of Commerce and Finance to officially conduct their operations. In consequence, an important proportion of small agencies, who were not able to obtain a license, have been excluded from the market. This allowed the important figures of the real estate markets to become more prominent in this economic sector and to keep a better control of it. The arrival of well-known regional and international real estate agencies such as CBRE, Knight Franck or DFDL Mekong, and of international builders such as GS E&C brought new resources of domination for local companies generally owned by influential state employees, because they spread skills and knowledge through business cooperation, notably within the association of professionals (interview with urban planners and architects from the Phnom Penh Municipality between 2008 and 2012).

This association movement also relied on new business initiatives led by dominant actors in order to increase their visibility at the regional and international levels, and in order to diversify their business networks and cooperation opportunities. The organisation of numerous international conferences in Phnom Penh highlights this process (e.g. the 17th Association of South-East Asian Nations Valuers Association pre-congress meeting in July 2011, the 35th ASEAN Constructors Federation in November 2012, or the International Construction and Cambodia Property exhibition in September 2013). Diamond Island, a large-scale project located in the city centre and built by the OCIC (Overseas Cambodian Investment Company), ⁹ hosted most of these events. Associations of professionals, new real estate projects and the exhibition are complementary, and contributed to raising (virtually or not) Phnom Penh’s development on the regional scene. Regional organisations such as ASEAN play an active role in the formalisation of the Cambodian real estate market by encouraging local developers to organise such events, and to participate in diverse regional federations. But those prominent stakeholders are not able to control all segments of real estate markets. In the shadow of their domination, intermediate actors gradually emerge on the market, relying on other resources, but following the same strategies.

The creation of the Cambodian Society of Architects at the end of the 2000s represents an initiative of the new generation of Cambodian architects and developers. These new architects and developers belong to intermediate socio-economic groups from Cambodia and from the diaspora. Their families have been enriched through various economic activities of secondary and tertiary sectors, and through the land business (interview with a Cambodian architect, 4 November 2010). The arrival of foreign architects and their increasing collaboration with local actors accelerated this process.

The creation of associations of professionals by some of these architects corresponds to the same strategy as that of dominant developers. It is a way to change the scale of their collaborations, to expend their social networks, and to find new architectural inspiration (interview with a Cambodian architect, 24 November 2010). The participation of the Cambodian Society of Architects in the ASEAN Architects Council is one of the results of these strategies (interview with a foreign architect, 24 November 2010). But in another perspective, these young stakeholders’ strategy is an answer to the excessively constraining hierarchy that structures the real estate activity, and to the generation gap that block some of the young generation’s aspirations:

You have to understand that most of the architectural knowledge has been lost during Pol Pot’s regime. Today, the demand for housing is mainly based on what they see in Thailand, Malaysia, or China. It is very difficult for us to come up with new styles, new projects, or to be creative. […] The older generation in the government or in the real estate business in general just wants to make money. They do not really want to change their habits. They hire cheap architects that copy [buildings] from other residential projects. It is important for us to create our own projects, to show that other kinds of constructions are possible. (Interview with a Cambodian architect and state worker, 24 November 2010)

This type of discourse does not emphasise a wish for a complete change: this is a segment of the intermediate socio-economic groups that want ‘a piece of the cake’. These new aspirations come with a transformation of the socio-cultural references that partly determine architectural aspirations, and more broadly real estate practices. These changes are notably generated by two factors. First, an increased internationalisation of the education of urban production specialists – real estate actors, but also urban planners, who reuse their skills in the real estate production – reinforced by the return of the Cambodia diaspora who mainly graduated, as I observed, from French, Australian and North American universities. Universities from the region also welcome Cambodian professionals through regional scholarship programmes (interview with a Cambodian architect, 11 May 2012), and local professionals benefit from bilateral agreements between Cambodian and foreign universities on the one hand, and between the Cambodian government and foreign governments or multilateral agencies on the other (interviews with state employees from the Phnom Penh Municipality between 2008 and 2012).

Second, the courses in architecture and construction have become more diversified and of better quality. In Phnom Penh, architecture and urban development programmes offered by Norton University (specialised in design and engineering) and by the University of Fine Arts (which offers courses in heritage conservation) are some of the most popular (interviews with Cambodian architects between 2008 and 2009). Local universities benefit from expertise and knowledge disseminated by a part of this young generation evoked above. The latter also seems to be much more open to new technologies than the older generation. Internet has become a very important vector of new residential references and practices (interview with a real estate broker, from 17 November 2010). Intermediate actors are increasingly using this tool to advertise their projects, their company or their association, and new technologies accelerate the spread of information in the public arena, which may facilitate the emergence of new actors in real estate markets.

Conclusion

In order to provide a broad and exhaustive overview of the different real estate actors who structure the urban space production in contemporary Phnom Penh, I have argued that a socio-historical approach is indispensable. It reveals the plurality of the practices and strategies of real estate actors, who faced a rapid evolution of the Cambodian socio-economic environment since the 1980s. More broadly, I also argued that the evolution of the urban spaces production in Phnom Penh corresponds to the general evolution of local capitalist practices in the real estate business. In this sense, this paper emphasised four interconnected dynamics of real estate capital appropriation that have appeared progressively since the 1980s, and which currently coexist:

The identification of these different modes of capital appropriation have allowed us to distinguish different types of actors that can be classified in three main categories and eight subcategories:

Because large-scale developers in Phnom Penh draw an important part of the researchers’ attention, I have finally argued in this paper that local smaller developers and ‘intermediate actors’, who represent a ‘melting pot’ of local entrepreneurs, merchants and professionals who have focused on real estate production since the end of the Khmer Rouge era, are playing a major role in the evolution of the urbanisation process since the 1980s. They represent the articulation between upper and lower levels of the real estate business, they accelerate the diffusion and the evolution of new socio-economic practices and representations, and they may challenge the hierarchical structure of the urban space production process. In consequence, real estate production is expected to evolve rapidly and to generate contentious situations which would oppose dominant powerful actors to intermediate ones who aspire to take their place.

On that particular issue, a systemic approach on the deployment of power relations in Phnom Penh could give us important information on how clannish networks and patronage relations (see Bayart, 2004; Kiernan, 2007; Un, 2005) condition real estate practices in Phnom Penh. However, the structure of the real estate activity might change in the next decade, on account of the evolution of the socio-political environment in Cambodia. The mutation of real estate capital modes of appropriation will certainly depend on the emergence of new struggles between well-established dominant actors, medium developers who are looking to take their places, and an urban population who denounce the political violence, land grabbing and forced evictions; the recent raise of protests in Phnom Penh has opened new perspectives for intermediate actors, who are definitely waiting take advantage of any political change.