Understanding formal and informal relationships in settlement upgrading for planning just and inclusive cities: the case of Phnom Penh, Cambodia Johanna Brugman Alvarez Master of Science in Urban Development Planning Bachelor of Urban and Regional Planning with Honours

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Queensland in 2019 School of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Abstract

Since colonial times a formal/informal divide entrenched in systems of urban planning in Phnom Penh, Cambodia has been used as a governmental tool by the state to marginalize and exclude informal settlements. This tool has also been used to impose a market-oriented model of urban development that is insufficient in progressing the aspirations, needs, and claims to justice of people living in these settlements. In fact, this model has led to the development of a highly unequal and unjust city.

This problematic touches on a key aspect of planning knowledge which affects many other cities of the global south. Binaries are a characteristic of western thought and capitalism. This way of thinking reproduces a hierarchical worldview with a privileging pole and unequal power relationships by making divisions between formal/informal sectors, public/private property, ordinary/global cities, and individual/collective ways of life. Binaries turn the merely different into an absolute other and exclude and marginalize the reality of difference in cities. Despite growing evidence of formal and informal relationships in cities, most research has tended to concentrate on understanding these systems separately. My research addresses this knowledge gap.

In this thesis I explain how formal and informal relationships are composed in the context of informal settlement upgrading practices in Phnom Penh with emphasis in three dimensions: a) land access, b) finance for housing, infrastructure and livelihoods, and c) political recognition. I use a case study of one informal settlement in Phnom Penh to evidence how the state is implicated in informality and how these relationships produce social and spatial inequalities. I also explain how formal and informal relationships are characterized by a negotiability of value of citizenship rights, were collective action plays a key role as a mechanism that vulnerable groups rely on to legitimize their claims and secure land, housing, infrastructure, livelihoods and political recognition. This research is guided by theoretical propositions on social and spatial justice, specifically processes of accumulation by dispossession that result from the financialization of land and housing. Within this framework, the concepts of space, power, and collective action are used to transcend exchange value and illuminate the use value of cities.

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I argue that market-led solutions to urban informality ingrained with binaries obscure collective action, support networks and sources of power that the urban poor use to negotiate value in the city and resist state and market-led dispossession. Maintaining these sources of power is particularly important in Phnom Penh where the state uses informality to its advantage and to satisfy the needs of local and foreign investors at the expense of the urban poor. I argue for the need to open the space for collective action in planning, and shape social and spatial interventions able to incentivise and maintain collective action within vulnerable groups. This is necessary to progress social and spatial justice by increasing the chances that vulnerable groups have to secure their rights to the city in Phnom Penh and other rapid growing cities of the global south.

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Declaration by author

This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis.

I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, financial support and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my higher degree by research candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award.

I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the policy and procedures of The University of Queensland, the thesis be made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 unless a period of embargo has been approved by the Dean of the Graduate School.

I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material. Where appropriate I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis and have sought permission from co-authors for any jointly authored works included in the thesis.

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Publications included in this thesis

Book chapters

Brugman, J. (2017). The role of community-driven finance in bridging formal and informal practices in housing: insights from Vinh, Vietnam in Graham, C; Artopoulos, G & Day, K. (Eds), From conflict to inclusion in housing: perspectives on the interaction of communities, residents and activists with the politics of the home. London: UCL Press - Incorporated in part in Chapter 3.

Peer-reviewed conference papers

Brugman, J. (2018). The implications of individual titling in the wellbeing and tenure security of the urban poor: a case study from Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Land Management in Asia: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, 10-11 December 2018. Asian Development Bank Institute. Tokyo-Japan. Incorporated in part in Chapter 9.

Brugman, J. (2017). Living in a ‘gray space’: reflections on the interface between formal and informal land use practices in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in Whose Land is it Anyway? Urban Symposium. Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Melbourne, Australia. 14-16 November 2017. Incorporated in part in Chapter 7

Brugman, J. (2015). The role of community-driven finance in bridging formal and informal practices for securing affordable housing in South East Asia in AMPS Conference Proceedings: Future Housing: global cities and regional problems, Swinburne University of Technology, Centre for Design Innovation, Melbourne, 09- 10 June 2016. Incorporated in part in Chapter 3.

Conference abstracts

Brugman, J. (2018). Learning as a force of change and process for alternative politics in the urban global south. Institute of Australian Geographers and New

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Zealand Geotechnical Society Conference. Auckland, New Zealand, 11-14 July. Incorporated in part in Chapter 8

Brugman, J. (2017). Transgressing legal/illegal borders: critical perspectives on urban informalities and development practice. Institute of Australian Geographers Conference. Brisbane, Australia. 11-14 July. Incorporated in part in Chapter 2 and 3.

Submitted manuscripts included in this thesis

Book chapters

Brugman, J. (in publication). Beyond title: Social, political and economic considerations for securing land and well-being of the urban poor and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In Yoshino, N., Tiwari, P., & Paul, S. (Eds), Land Management in Asia: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Tokyo, Japan: Asian Development Bank Institute – Incorporated in part in Chapter 9.

Other publications during candidature

Research Reports

Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR). (2017). Community finance in five Asian Countries. A study on community development funds in five countries in Asia by ACHR’s community networks with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Bangkok: ACHR. Available online: http://www.achr.net/upload/files/ACHR%20CDF%20Study%20Final%2015%20July.p df

Contributor Statement of contribution Johanna Brugman (Candidate) Grant writing (30%) Data Collection (20%) Coordination (50%) Asian Coalition for Housing Rights Grant writing (70%)

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Data Collection (80%) Coordination (50%) Report writing (100%)

Contributions by others to the thesis In producing this thesis, I have gained substantial inputs from my supervisors Dr. Sonia Roitman and Dr. Peter Walters. They both guided me in conceptualizing, designing, executing, and examine the research data for the research project.

I received editorial support from Karin Hosking.

Statement of parts of the thesis submitted to qualify for the award of another degree None

Research Involving Human or Animal Subjects This project complies with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research and associated regulations of the University of Queensland. Ethics approval to conduct this research project was obtained by the Ethics Officer of the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management (now School of Earth and Environmental Sciences) in February 2016 - Approval Number 20160202.

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Acknowledgements

From the start, this PhD journey required me to take very important decisions with professional and personal implications. Because of this, I have grown immensely as a professional and as a person. Now that I see the final result I feel grateful with life and God to have given me the opportunity and the task to contribute knowledge towards many efforts that exist to improve the lives of people that suffer because of experiencing exclusion and marginalization.

Thank you to my supervisors Dr. Sonia Roitman and Dr. Peter Walters. Sonia, thank you for offering your support since the start of my research. I value your dedication and commitment, in particular supporting me with narrowing down my research focus and ideas, and conceptually grounding my study. Peter thank you for encouraging me to open my research design so that it could be flexible and accurate in providing a picture of the complex reality of Phnom Penh, as well as your comments on my methodology and overall contribution of the study.

Thank you to my colleagues in Cambodia because without your support this research would not have been possible. This includes the participants of the study, who I thank for opening and sharing their lives and experiences with me. Thank you to friends and mentors at the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights who since 2012 when I first went to Thailand with the DPU, your work has served a source of inspiration to me, that clearly shaped my views on planning and development. Thank you to my colleagues in Australia, in particular Leila Macadam, Marta, Farrah, Andri, Reden, Jason, Jaime, Lata, Gillian, Tope, Deti, Rusli, and Temi. Thank you to Karin Hosking for providing editorial support to the thesis.

Finally, but most important I want to thank my husband Mark Kelton for teaching me how beautiful selfless love is. You are the greatest gift life has given me. Thank you for your unconditional support and encouragement during this process and keeping me grounded to what is most meaningful in life. Thank you to my family and friends in Colombia who are always in my heart, and support and celebrate with me from far away. I love you all.

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Financial support This research was supported by an Australian Research Training Program Scholarship.

The research field work was supported from a grant from the School of Geography Planning and Environmental Management (now School of Earth and Environmental Sciences) at The University of Queensland.

The Graduate School of The University of Queensland supported the dissemination of research findings through a Candidate Development Award (CDA).

Keywords Urban informality, collective action, urban planning, social justice, informal settlements, informal settlement upgrading, land access, housing, tenure security, recognition.

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC)

ANZSRC code: 160514: Urban Policy (40%) ANZSRC code: 120505: Land Use and Environmental Planning (30%) ANZSRC code: 120501: Community Planning (30%)

Fields of Research (FoR) Classification

FoR code: 1205: Urban and Regional Planning (40%) FoR code: 1604: Human Geography (30%) FoR code: 1605: Policy and Administration (30%)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Research problem and background ...... 1

1.2 Research Questions ...... 4

1.3 Why Cambodia? ...... 6

1.4 Introduction to subsequent chapters ...... 9

Chapter 2 The problem of binaries for justice and urban informality ...... 12

2.1 Introduction ...... 12

2.2 Social and spatial justice in cities ...... 13

2.2.1 Accumulation by dispossession ...... 16

2.2.2 Power and collective action ...... 21

2.3 Urban informality and planning ...... 27

2.3.1 Defining urban informality ...... 27

2.3.2 The problem with binaries for urban informality and planning ...... 30

2.3.3 Formal and informal relationships and their implications for planning in the global south ...... 32

2.4 Conclusion ...... 35

Chapter 3 The implications of the formal/informal dichotomy for informal settlements upgrading ...... 38

3.1 Introduction ...... 38

3.2 Definition of informal settlements ...... 38

3.3 Upgrading as social and spatial transformation ...... 41

3.4 Debates on land formalization ...... 43

3.5 Debates on access to finance for informal settlements upgrading ...... 49

3.6 Debates on citizenship, belonging and recognition in upgrading ...... 56

3.7 Conceptual Framework ...... 62

3.8 Conclusion ...... 65

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Chapter 4 Research methodology ...... 67

4.1 Introduction ...... 67

4.2 Research Questions ...... 67

4.2.1 Principal Research Question ...... 67

4.2.2 Secondary question 1 ...... 68

4.2.3 Secondary question 2 ...... 68

4.2.4 Secondary question 3 ...... 69

4.2.5 Secondary question 4 ...... 69

4.3 Justification for the use of qualitative research enquiry and case study method 70

4.4 Case Study Design ...... 72

4.5 Field trips and site visits ...... 74

4.6 Data collection methods ...... 75

4.6.1 Document Reviews ...... 75

4.6.2 Semi-structured face-to-face interviews ...... 76

4.6.2.1 Sampling ...... 77

4.6.2.2 Interviews with residents of informal settlements ...... 77

4.6.2.3 Interviews with participants from civil society, government, private sector and international development organizations ...... 79

4.6.2.4 Direct observation and photographs ...... 81

4.6.2.5 Forums and Workshops ...... 81

4.7 Ethics ...... 82

4.8 Data analysis ...... 83

4.9 Research limitations ...... 83

4.10 Conclusion ...... 84

Chapter 5 The understanding and policy responses to urban informality in Phnom Penh ...... 86

5.1 Introduction ...... 86

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5.2 Key historical, political, and socio-economic structures influencing the understanding and responses to urban informality in Phnom Penh ...... 86

5.2.1 The introduction of neoliberalism in Phnom Penh and its impact on urban development dynamics ...... 91

5.2.2 Urban planning and governance in Phnom Penh ...... 93

5.3 Practices of informal settlement upgrading in Phnom Penh ...... 98

5.3.1 Characteristics of informal settlements ...... 98

5.3.2 Upgrading interventions led by governments, private sector and international donors ...... 106

5.3.3 Upgrading interventions led by civil society ...... 111

5.4 Conclusion ...... 117

Chapter 6 Case study overview ...... 121

6.1 Introduction ...... 121

6.2 Welcome to Phka ...... 122

6.3 Characteristics of residents of Phka ...... 123

6.4 Land tenure in Phka ...... 124

6.5 A walk through Phka ...... 125

6.6 Financial Investments of residents of Phka ...... 132

6.7 Collective action in Phka ...... 134

6.8 Conclusion ...... 136

Chapter 7 Formal and informal relationships in land use practices in Phnom Penh ...... 137

7.1 Introduction ...... 137

7.2 The origins of urban informality in Phka ...... 138

7.3 Place and belonging in Phka ...... 143

7.3.1 Individual and collective struggle for place in Phka ...... 144

7.3.2 Belonging to place in Phka ...... 148

7.4 Exclusion of Phka from systematic land registration (SLR) ...... 156

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7.5 Conclusion ...... 162

Chapter 8 Formal and informal relationships in planning and governance in Phnom Penh ...... 166

8.1 Introduction ...... 166

8.2 Urban citizenship and legitimacy in Phka ...... 167

8.3 Learning collective action in Phka ...... 171

8.4 Strategies to make claims to land and citizenship visible to government authorities ...... 179

8.5 Strategies to gain political recognition ...... 185

8.6 Conclusion ...... 189

Chapter 9 The implications of market-led planning solutions to informality for spatial and social justice in Phnom Penh ...... 193

9.1 Introduction ...... 193

9.2 Individual financial practices of residents of Phka ...... 195

9.3 Gentrification and social change in Phka ...... 204

9.4 Limitations of SLR in securing social and spatial justice in Phnom Penh .. 211

9.5 Conclusion ...... 216

Chapter 10 Conclusion ...... 221

10.1 Introduction ...... 221

10.2 Formal and informal relationships in informal settlements upgrading in Phnom Penh ...... 224

10.3 Thesis contribution to planning knowledge and social justice in the global south 229

Chapter 11 : Bibliography ...... 233

Appendix 1 : Ethics Approval Letter ...... 262

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 5.1 Phnom Penh’s urban expansion from 1958 to 1968 ...... 88 Figure 5.2 Example of one housing arrangement developed by the urban poor ...... 90 Figure 5.3 Example of land commodification in Phnom Penh ...... 92 Figure 5.4 Phnom Penh International, a gated community in Phnom Penh ...... 94 Figure 5.5 Development affecting the Olympic stadium in central Phnom Penh ...... 94 Figure 5.6 Municipality of Phnom Penh’s master plan and vision for the city ...... 97 Figure 5.7 Map showing the number of informal settlements in Phnom Penh ...... 102 Figure 5.8 Example of an informal settlement in Phnom Penh where people occupied a graveyard in a central district of Phnom Penh ...... 105 Figure 5.9 Example of an informal settlement on the outskirts of Phnom Penh ...... 105 Figure 6.1 Approximate location of Phka in Phnom Penh ...... 122 Figure 6.2 Phka in the 1980s ...... 125 Figure 6.3 Map of Phka based on the community understanding ...... 126 Figure 6.4 Lake bordering Phka in the north-west ...... 127 Figure 6.5 Phka in 2016 ...... 128 Figure 6.6 Gated houses in the wealthy side of Phka ...... 128 Figure 6.7 Example of a structure built on rented land in Phka ...... 129 Figure 6.8 Example of a house developed incrementally in Phka ...... 130 Figure 6.9 Examples of women’s home-based businesses in Phka ...... 130 Figure 6.10 Example of a house without upgrading in Phka ...... 131 Figure 6.11 Examples of rental spaces and families in Phka ...... 131 Figure 7.1 Example of Phka resident’s soft title ...... 139 Figure 7.2 Example of hard title issued by the Ministry of Urban Planning, Land Management and Construction ...... 140 Figure 7.3 Life story of Devi and Arun, residents of Phka ...... 151 Figure 7.4 Collective upgrading of the access road in Phka in 2010 ...... 152 Figure 7.5 A child with his grandfather and mother on the road at Phka ...... 153 Figure 7.6 Children playing in the road in Phka ...... 153 Figure 7.7 Residents’ plants and decorations using the road in Phka ...... 154 Figure 7.8 Development trajectory of the lake near Phka from 2003 to 2017 ...... 158 Figure 7.9 Construction of mall over the Lake ...... 158

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Figure 7.10 Condominiums constructed over the Lake ...... 159 Figure 8.1 Phka’s representative facilitating a meeting ...... 175 Figure 8.2 Informal Settlement near Phka ...... 176 Figure 8.3 Resident’s hand-drawn map of Phka ...... 183 Figure 8.4 Cleaning activities in Phka ...... 183 Figure 8.5 Document given to residents after SLR in January 2016 ...... 187 Figure 9.1 The risks of becoming a home owner ...... 198 Figure 9.2 Waiting for formal title to sell land ...... 200 Figure 9.3 The White Building in Phnom Penh ...... 215

LIST OF TABLES

TABLE 6.1. Sources of finance used by residents of Phka ...... 133

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE THESIS

ACCA Asian Coalition for Community Action Program ACHR Asian Coalition for Housing Rights ADB Asian Development Bank AEIS-2 Special Areas of Social Interest in Brazil AusAID The Australian Development Agency CDF Community Development Fund CDFound Community Development Foundation CEDT Community Empowerment and Development Team CIDA Canadian International Development Agency CIP Commune Investment Plan CLIFF Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility CMA Cambodian Micro-Finance Association CMDP Community Managed Development Partners CODI Community Organisation Development Institute CPP Cambodian People’s Party CSNC Community Saving Network of Cambodia CVS Community Volunteers for Society EC Equitable Cambodia EDC Electricité de Cambodge GHD General Department of Housing GIZ Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit HRTF Housing Rights Task Force JICA Japan International Cooperation Agency LANGO Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organisations LASED Land Allocation for Social and Economic Development LASSP Land Administration Sub Sector Program LICADHO Cambodian League for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights LMAP Land Management and Administration Program

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MFI Micro finance Institution MLMUPC Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction MPP Municipality of Phnom Penh NGO Non-governmental organization ROSCAs Saving groups, Rotating Savings and Credit Associations SACCOs Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies SDGs Sustainable Development Goals SDI Slum Dwellers International SLR Systematic Land Registration SUPF Squatter and Urban Poor Federation STT Sahmakum Teang Tnaut UN United Nations UNDP United Nations Development Programme UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund UN-HABITAT United Nations Human Settlements Programme UNTAC United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia UPF Urban Poor Funds UPDF Urban Poor Development Fund UPWD Urban Poor Development Women URC Urban Resource Centre US Aid United States Development Agency WB The World Bank WVC World Vision Cambodia

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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research problem and background Despite countless efforts in planning theory and practice to achieve more socially and spatially just cities, justice continues to be a central concern for contemporary planning (Simone & Pieterse, 2017). For instance, inequality as an indicator of social justice, is increasing at national and global scales in both the global north and south (Vieira, 2012; Oxfam, 2015; UN-ESCAP, 2018). Inequality has become a major urban issue, as the gap between the rich and the poor in most cities of the world is at its highest levels (UN-HABITAT, 2016). The urban divide between the rich and the poor both stigmatizes and excludes large groups of the urban population, preventing them and future generations from advancing in society at large. This shows that inequality is about power inequality; a fact that explains why global wealth in general is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a small wealthy elite (Oxfam, 2015; UN-ESCAP, 2018).

The continuous growth of informal settlements in the global south is one face of urban inequality and injustice, particularly because of the insecurity that residents of informal settlements face due to the lack to secure tenure (UN-HABITAT, 2015). Nearly one quarter of the world’s urban population, or 883 million people, live in informal settlements; 520 million of these people are in Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa, over half of city dwellers live in informal settlements and in Latin America and the Caribbean the estimate is twenty-one per cent (United Nations, 2018). Despite the growth and conditions of informal settlements being a serious issue that requires urgent attention, the major problem is the inability of our current economic, political and planning systems to offer alternatives and solutions to provide secure tenure, adequate housing, fair living conditions, economic and social opportunities, and spaces of genuine political recognition that give enough decision-making power to the people living in these settlements (United Nations, 2013; 2018). Instead, planning, economic and political systems purposely create informality and social and spatial inequalities in cities to benefit powerful elites (Roy, 2005; 2009). This shows that one way for addressing inequality and achieving social justice in cities is to address the power

1 inequalities that exist between powerful actors and those who are excluded and marginalized because of living in conditions of informality.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia is recognized for being home to a great number of injustices toward informal settlements throughout its development. Estimates suggest that 29,358 families (146,790 persons) were evicted in Phnom Penh between 1990 and 2011, over 12,000 families were under threat of eviction in 2014, and 77 eviction sites were identified in 2016 (STT, 2014; 2016). The long trajectory of evictions and marginalization of informal settlements in Phnom Penh is one example that shows the problematic associated with binary thinking in cities of the global south, and how dichotomies are used by powerful actors to exclude and marginalize what is considered informal. This problematic points to a knowledge gap in the understanding of formal and informal relationships in cities of the global south, and the need for research to transcend dualisms in urban informality as a valuable contribution to planning theory and practice, and social justice (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012; Acuto, Dinardi & Marx, 2019).

Binaries are a characteristic of western thought and capitalism, portraying the world as having a privileging pole, meaning that one side or category prevails over the other (Varley, 2002; Blomley, 2004; Robinson, 2005). Binaries reproduce power relationships by making divisions between masculine/feminine, public/private property, individual/collective, informal resistance/formal neoliberal control, ordinary/global cities, and formal/informal sectors (Varley, 2002; Blomley, 2004; McFarlane & Waibel, 2012; Marx & Kelling, 2018; Acuto, Dinardi & Marx, 2019). Thus, binaries turn the merely different into an absolute other, and are used to exclude and marginalize what does not comply with the dominant model of development (Young, 1990). In the context of urban informality, binaries have created a formal/informal dichotomy that undermines the informal by placing the formal as more desirable and superior to its informal counterpart (Acuto, Dinardi & Marx, 2019). Within the formal/informal divide there is also a collective/individual divide as most formalization efforts imply a conversion toward individual property rights (Porter, 2011; Rolnik, 2015).

Efforts to understand formal and informal relationships in planning show the complexity on how actors negotiate access to resources and political power in the city,

2 pointing out that power needs to be a point of departure for the analysis of formal and informal relationships in cities (Watson, 2009a; 2009b). Various authors highlight the need for research to focus on the structural conditions influencing formal and informal relationships, in particular power struggles over resources. This requires understanding and documentation of the interface between formal and informal practices, spaces, actors and mechanisms in development processes (Acuto, Dinardi & Marx, 2019; Martinez & Roitman, 2019). In the context of informal settlements upgrading this involves understanding formal and informal relationships in the context of land access, finance for housing, infrastructure and livelihood and political recognition. Also, understanding the details and role of collective action within formal and informal relationships is essential, as most responses to urban informality are driven by market values that perpetuate individualism, such as individual property rights. Thus market-led solutions to urban informality obscure the collective forms, support networks and sources of power that vulnerable groups such as the urban poor use to negotiate value in the city and resist state and market-based dispossession.

This happens even when collective relationships to land, housing and place, and various forms of collective action exist in cities, giving more importance to the use value of the city rather than its exchange value (Mathivet, 2014; Rolnik, 2014; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2015; Cabannes, 2017). These collective relationships to place and forms of collective action explain how agency, social capital, and citizenship can emerge out of ordinary life and the lack of control from governments, and in the case of informal settlements, out of the struggle that many people experience to make a decent life and claim rights to the city (Bayat, 2000; Holston, 2009). Also, for informal settlers, collective action arises as the key mechanism to build power and expand this power to resist and negotiate the various forms of exclusion, marginalization and dispossession they face for being considered ‘informal’ (Castells, 1983; Boonyabancha, 2001; Archer, 2012; Beard, 2012; 2018; Rolnik, 2014; Levy, 2015; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2015; Roitman, 2019). Thus, binaries and dichotomies reproduce power relationships used to, on the one hand, marginalize and exclude the informal to make room for what is considered legitimate in cities; and on the other hand, impose an individual and market-oriented model of urban development that commodifies land and housing, and continues to create inequalities and dispossession in cities (Porter, 2011; 2014; Mathivet, 2014; Rolnik, 2015). Because of this

3 understanding formal and informal relationships is necessary to inform planning knowledge for social and spatial justice in cities of the global south.

This thesis contributes knowledge to planning and social and spatial justice in cities by explaining how formal and informal relationships in the context of informal settlements upgrading are manifested in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and exposing the limitations of using binaries to understand and shape planning responses to urban informality. My intention is to contribute toward improving the lives of people living in informal settlements in Phnom Penh, by explaining how the state is implicated in informality, and how binaries in planning responses to informality obscure collective relationships to place and collective action. The understanding of formal and informal relationships in Phnom Penh has the capacity to contribute to planning knowledge for social and spatial justice, which can serve to inform planning responses to urban informality in the global south. This is particularly important considering the criticisms given to the planning profession in the global south (Roy, 2005; Watson, 2009a; Yiftachel, 2009; Porter, 2014; Rolnik, 2015). Rather than planning being used to progress social and spatial justice in cities; it is easily coerced by powerful actors to fulfil their interests at the expense of vulnerable groups. Thus, the understanding of formal and informal relationships is a contribution towards efforts to progress social and spatial justice through shaping appropriate planning interventions able to influence the spatial, political and socio-economic structures of power that generate social and spatial injustices in cities.

1.2 Research Questions The research problem and background presented in Section 1.1 support the need to conduct research into formal and informal relationships in the context of informal settlements in Phnom Penh and explain their contribution to planning knowledge. In this thesis planning is understood as a wide spectrum of city-making practices led by a plurality of actors that go beyond and interact with dominant and official planning practices such as those enabled by the state (Apsan Frediani & Cociña, 2019). This understanding of planning is based on Lefebvre’s (1974) social production of space that recognizes everyday practices and other forms of social production of space beyond traditional and official planning actors and approaches. I use justice in my thesis as the overarching framework guiding the research questions on urban

4 informality with the aim of contributing knowledge on the capacity of planning systems to progress social justice in cities. The research questions guiding this study are:

 Principal Research Question: How can the understanding of formal and informal relationships in settlement upgrading in Phnom Penh inform planning knowledge for the development of just cities in the global south?

 Secondary question 1: How do historical, political and socio-economic structures shape the understanding and practices toward informality in Phnom Penh?

 Secondary question 2: How are formal and informal relationships manifested in land use practices, and what are the implications of these relationships in the production and reproduction of social and spatial injustices in Phnom Penh?

 Secondary question 3: How are collective practices of urban poor communities used to legitimize their claims to land and citizenship in Phnom Penh?

 Secondary question 4: How do market-led solutions to informality threaten the tenure security and recognition of the claims to justice of the urban poor in Phnom Penh?

To answer these questions, I used a single case study methodology of one informal settlement in Phnom Penh, named here as Phka. I used a case study methodology to generate context-dependent knowledge about the formal and informal relationships experienced in this particular settlement. I also contextualize the experience of this informal settlement within the city and the historical, political, social and economic characteristics of urban development in Phnom Penh. In order to understand this broader perspective, the case study was informed by the experiences of different informal settlements’ residents, civil society organizations, and government and private institutions involved in urban planning and informal settlements upgrading in Phnom Penh. I collected qualitative data using multiple social research methods including document reviews, face-to-face interviews, direct observation and photographs, and notes from attending workshops and forums in Phnom Penh. I obtained funding and ethical clearance from the School of Geography, Planning and

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Environmental Management at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, to conduct this study.

1.3 Why Cambodia? As an urban planner I find the urban dynamics of South East Asia fascinating, in particular the vast and dynamic urban informality that characterizes most cities. My interests in doing research in Cambodia grew from my experience learning from and working with urban poor communities not only in Cambodia, but also in Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. I worked hand in hand with various groups learning and supporting their initiatives to get organized and develop strategies to address their housing, infrastructure and livelihood needs. I learnt how many communities, as a response to the lack of formal support, developed informal collective support systems, with support from other groups with experience, and non- government organizations working on the ground. I also learnt from government and non-government initiatives that recognized and supported these systems to scale up, creating innovative policy responses for the provision of housing, infrastructure and livelihoods, and most importantly recognized the great contribution that urban poor communities can make to development processes.

Despite this, during my work in Cambodia and other South East Asian cities I continued to be aware of the various inequalities and marginalization that people living in informal settlements face, and the complex political contexts in which they operate. Even when legal frameworks and planning interventions are in place, these are hard to implement and do not necessarily guarantee secure rights to vulnerable families in cities which are in constant transformation. Thus, I saw great value in conducting research and contributing knowledge to how the planning profession can be more informed and have a broader perspective when developing interventions and responses to urban informality and social justice. My research is complemented by my experience working in community-led interventions for upgrading informal settlements, financed and supported by grassroots organizations and international donors, as well as the knowledge I have from working as a planner for various government departments in Australia. Even when the context is very different, working within government helped me to understand how planning operates within the structures of power, and thus, the actions and strategies that can be developed, within the language

6 of planning, that can offer more inclusive and appropriate responses to urban challenges such as urban informality.

I chose to conduct research in Cambodia because, thanks to my previous work experience in the country, I had established networks and an understanding of the situation of informal settlements. Also, I was motivated because during my work and life in Cambodia I witnessed suffering and injustices faced by many urban poor families and communities and I had a desire to contribute knowledge on how planning can be better informed to improve the lives of informal settlers. In addition, Cambodia interested me because of having its unique historical and political contexts, such as the destruction of all land records in the country by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, and the political context of the country characterized by a ‘disjointed governance’ (Paling, 2012) in which state-private informal alliances and relationships bypass any form of urban legislation, making formal and informal relationships more evident. Also, despite the authoritarian political context of the country, there is a vibrant civil society which uses different forms of collective action to negotiate their citizenship rights with the state. Thus, unpacking the formal/informal dichotomy and evidencing the relationships that exist between formal and informal systems in Cambodia is valuable to inform planning knowledge, and support the development of appropriate responses to urban informality in Cambodia and other cities of the global south.

Based on a broad conceptualization of planning my research is important to inform the knowledge of civil society, government departments and international donors working in securing land, basic services, housing and political recognition for the urban poor in Phnom Penh. Because of the legacy of the civil war, most of the attention of planning in Phnom Penh (and Cambodia overall) has been in rebuilding a land administration framework and conducting land registration programs, such as Land Allocation for Social and Economic Development (LASED) (formerly known as the Land Management and Administration Programme (LMAP) and Land Administration Sub Sector Programme (LASSP)). Even when these activities can be seen to fall into ‘land administration and registration’ categories, I considered these an essential part of planning and city-making practices in the context of Phnom Penh because of the point in history in which the country finds itself rebuilding its institutions after the civil war and the variety of responses that arise from the urban poor and civil society to secure

7 a land and a place to live in the city. Despite progress in land registration in the country, such as the registration of 2.2 million land parcels in 2016, only 134,067 land parcels had been titled under systematic land registration (SLR) in Phnom Penh (Keo, Bouhours & Bouhours, 2015; GIZ, 2016). There have also been many criticisms arising from a lack of transparency in the implementation of these programs and the benefits for vulnerable populations (Grimsditch & Henderson, 2009; Bugalski & Pred, 2010; Grimsditch, Kol, Sherchan, 2012; Keo, Bouhours & Bouhours, 2015; GIZ, 2016). As a result, at the time of my research all donors in Cambodia had pulled out their support to land rights programs.

This context provides opportunities to question the ‘formalization fix’ (Dwyer, 2015) in Cambodia, and in general cities of the global south, that assumes formalization (and private property rights) as the only solution to informality and the avenue to reduce poverty and inequality in cities (de Soto, 2000). This happens without considering the impact that the financialization of land and housing, rapid rates of urban growth and weak governance systems can have, not only in implementation but also in the effectiveness of formalization programs in securing land and housing for vulnerable populations (Deininger & Feder, 2009; Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013). These limitations are still not voiced by residents of informal settlements, NGOs, and development agencies. Instead most of these actors relate their struggle of land rights to receiving land title through SLR without critically considering the impacts and disadvantages of these systems (Grimsditch, Kol & Serchan, 2012; Keo, Bouhours & Bouhours, 2015). Other studies in Cambodia have started to point out structural dimensions within the design of tenure laws disadvantaging residents of informal settlements that are not so evident and widespread within the public (Flower, 2018). Thus, there is a need for research and evidence into the limitations of these systems such as the problematic associated with the formal/informal and individual/collective dichotomies that market-led solutions to informality reproduce.

While conducting my field work and interviewing representatives of informal settlements in Phnom Penh, I witnessed the great impact that removing financial and technical support from land rights programs had for some of these communities. For example, some leaders expressed that they had lost credibility among community members as many of the efforts that they went through to develop information through

8 collective enumerations (e.g. demographic surveys and mapping) had not materialized. Also, relationships between people living in informal settlements and district and commune governments had deteriorated. In general, people on the ground had been left with not much hope and support and continued to face great vulnerability in the city. Despite this people continued to develop their own strategies to make a living in the city and improve their ways of life without having tenure security and/or support from government authorities. In this light my thesis also contributes in highlighting planning practices that occur outside the state with the hope that these ate better understood and recognized by the state and the planning profession.

1.4 Introduction to subsequent chapters This thesis is organized in ten chapters. After this introduction (Chapter 1), Chapters 2 and 3 present the literature review and conceptual framework of the study. In Chapter 2, I address the problematic associated with binaries in planning and urban informality, and their implications for social justice. I discuss the concepts of space (Lefebvre, 1976), power (Foucault, 1976a; 1976b; 1982) and collective action (Castells, 1983; Beard 2018) and explain their importance in the study of formal and informal relationships. In Chapter 3, I discuss the implications of the specific formal/informal dichotomy for practices of upgrading informal settlements in cities of the global south. I explain how the formal/informal dichotomy is embedded within the definitions of informal settlements, and how these definitions are used by planning to exclude and marginalize these settlements by encouraging forced evictions and relocations; and assuming that their only solution is to be formalized by receiving land title and individual property rights. I identify and discuss the key debates regarding land formalization (de Soto, 2000; Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013), access to housing finance (Rolnik, 2015; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2018), and citizenship (Holston, 2009), belonging and recognition in upgrading (Rolnik, 2014; Balaton-Chrimes, 2017).

In Chapter 4, I explain in more depth the research questions and gaps informing this research, and the methodology used. I justify the case for using qualitative research enquiry and a case study method, and explain the epistemological paradigm informing the study, the theoretical underpinnings of the case study, and the case study design, including criteria for selection. In this chapter I also explain the research methods used in the research, the strategies used to recruit participants in the study, and the

9 characteristics of these participants. I also explain the difficulties I experienced conducting research in Phnom Penh and the strategies I used to overcome these, and ethical considerations for the research.

In Chapter 5, I answer secondary research question 1 and introduce the city where the case study takes place. The aim of the chapter is to evidence urban informality in Phnom Penh as structural (Rakowski, 1994), recognizing power as central to understanding formal and informal relationships. I unpack historical, political, social and economic factors that have influenced the understanding of urban informality in Phnom Penh and explain how the formal/informal dichotomy has been used by powerful actors as a governmental tool (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012) to pursue a particular model of urban development in favour of their interests. I explain the different practices from civil society in Phnom Penh to legitimize the ‘informal’ and the tensions that exist within the negotiability of value (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004) of these relationships.

In Chapter 6, I introduce the characteristics of the informal settlements used as a case study site in the study. I introduce the location and socio-economic characteristics of the settlement, the situation of the residents in relation to land tenure, the types of collective action found in the settlements, the development process and level of poverty of residents, and the financial investments that residents had developed to improve their housing, infrastructure and livelihood conditions.

In Chapter 7, I answer secondary research question 2. I explain how formal and informal relationships are manifested in land use practices in informal settlements and planning in Phnom Penh, and the implications of these relationships for social and spatial justice. I explain the origins and meaning of urban informality associated with Phka, and the vulnerabilities associated with the settlement in relation to land legislation, planning frameworks, and the state. I discuss the collective relationships that residents of Phka had with their place of residents and how these were obscured by planning and land legal frameworks. I also discuss how the state is implicated in producing and reproducing urban informality through processes of de-regulation and exclusion and highlight the range of social and spatial inequalities reproduced by planning instruments, governance structures and powerful actors in Phnom Penh (Roy, 2009).

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In Chapter 8, I answer secondary research question 3. I explain how formal and informal relationships in the governance of cities are constituted by a negotiability of value (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004) and the importance of collective action for vulnerable groups to leverage power within formal and informal relationships. I explain how collective action was used as the principal mechanism for residents of Phka to negotiate value and make their land claims visible and recognized by the state, and explain the key conditions that led residents of Phka to organize themselves successfully in the complex urban context of Phnom Penh.

In Chapter 9, I answer secondary research question 4. I explain the causes of market- based displacement experienced by residents of Phka based on their individual financial practices and a process of gentrification experienced in the settlement. Further to this, I explain how SLR intensified market-based dispossession, already experienced under conditions of informality, because of the financialization of land and housing and the lack of support toward maintaining residents’ collective support systems. Furthermore, I explain that even though SLR and obtaining land title was important for residents of Phka, their claims for recognition and social and spatial justice went well beyond receiving title. Thus, I argue that for social justice to truly be achieved in Phnom Penh planning needs to provide opportunities for collective action to flourish, and guarantee political recognition of people living in informal settlements.

Finally, in Chapter 10 I present the conclusion of the thesis. In this chapter I summarize the key findings of my research. This entails explaining how formal and informal relationships are manifested in my case study and Phnom Penh overall, and the meaning of these relationships for planning knowledge social justice in Phnom Penh and other cities of the global south.

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Chapter 2 The problem of binaries for justice and urban informality

2.1 Introduction Binaries are a characteristic of western thought and capitalism (Varley, 2002; Blomley, 2004). This way of thinking has been ingrained in systems of planning since colonial times (Robinson, 2005; Varley, 2013). Binaries are both gendered and hierarchical as one side is characterized as masculine and the other as feminine, with the masculine side being socially valorized (Lacey, 1998). Various authors across the global north and south have shown the limitations of using binaries for understanding urban life as these present an inaccurate picture of the urban world (Varley, 2002; 2013; Blomley, 2004; Roy, 2005; Robinson, 2005; Porter, 2011; McFarlane & Waibel, 2012; Marx & Kelling, 2018; Acuto, Dinardi & Marx, 2019). Binary thinking reproduces neoliberal logics, discourses and power by making divisions between masculine/feminine, public/private property, ordinary/global cities, formal/informal sectors, and individual/collective ways of life (Varley, 2002; Blomley, 2004; Marx & Kelling, 2018). Thus, binaries turn the merely different into an absolute other, and are used to exclude and marginalize the reality of difference in cities (Young, 1990). This includes the exclusion of alternative relationships and values that individuals and groups experience in the city, which transcend exchange value and the neoliberal model (Porter, 2011). In the context of urban informality, the formal/informal dichotomy undermines the informal by placing the formal as more desirable and superior to its informal counterpart (Acuto, Dinardi & Marx, 2019). This happens even when formal and informal relationships are recognized in cities (Roy, 2005; McFarlane & Waibel, 2012). The formal/informal dichotomy has led to a tendency in planning practice to exclude and/or formalize the informal, with negative consequences for social and spatial justice in cities of the global south. In Section 2.2 I address the problematic associated with binaries in cities by discussing the concepts of spatial and social justice and their relationship with processes of accumulation by dispossession. In Section 2.3, I contextualize the discussion on social and spatial justice within the problem of binary thinking, specifically in urban informality and planning. I discuss the concepts of space, place, power and collective action and explain the way these

12 concepts help in moving forward binaries in planning theory and practice. I end the chapter with a conclusion in Section 2.4.

2.2 Social and spatial justice in cities Justice has been and continues to be a central concern for contemporary planning in cities of the global south in the context of neoliberalism (Simone & Pieterse, 2017). Understandings and debates of what justice constitutes for the city have evolved from ideas rooted in liberal political philosophy (Rawls, 1971; Habermas, 1987; Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2003), political economy (Fainstein, 2010), Marxism (Harvey, 1973; Castells, 1983) and post-structuralism (Young, 1990; Sandercock, 1998a) among others. There is not a single definition of what justice constitutes in the city, as what is just or not varies according to different interpretations of individuals, groups, and contextual circumstances of cities and countries (Young, 1990). A growing interest in using space for analyzing questions of justice has been sparked as part of the spatial turn in the humanities, and concerns arising from the transformations that society has experienced due to rapid urbanization and the restructuring of the global economy (Rolnik, 2001; Watson, 2009a; Soja, 2010; Winkler, 2012; Lemanski & Marx, 2015). These transformations are seen by many as being directly associated with increased inequalities, social exclusion, and the proliferation of oppressive geographies in cities and regions, caused by the neoliberal economic paradigm (Young, 1990; Merrifield & Swyngedouw, 1997; Pieterse, 2008; Fainstein, 2010; Soja, 2010). These social injustices exposed in space make the spatial dimension an integral aspect of justice itself. Thus, space facilitates an interpretive perspective and a framework for the analysis of how justice operates in the urban form (Soja, 2010).

Providing an understanding of how justice can be analyzed in the city is important and necessary to inform planning theory. Fainstein (2010) argues that the development of an operational definition of justice helps to de-centralize the discourse on neoliberalism and economic competitiveness in contemporary cities, and places justice as the ultimate goal of urban planning and development. Fainstein (2010) explains that placing social justice as the governing norm in planning and urban policy is value laden; however, it does not negate the importance of other values and priorities such as efficiency, effectiveness and economic growth, but rather requires planners and policy makers to ask: efficiency, effectiveness or economic growth to

13 what end and for whom? Based on this, justice is used in this thesis as the overarching framework guiding the research questions on urban informality, with the aim to contribute knowledge to the capacity of planning systems to attain social and spatial justice in cities.

Theoretical discussions on justice have emphasized an institutional and a distributional dimension of justice (Harvey, 1973; Young, 1990). These two dimensions arise from two complementary, but different, conceptualizations of justice rooted in Marxist and Post-structuralist ideology. Harvey (1973) examines and analyses the history and logic of urban development to demonstrate how the inequalities produced by the capitalist system are projected in spatial forms and reproduced by social and economic orders. Harvey argues that space and social processes cannot be considered separately in urban development processes, but instead the city needs to be considered as a complex dynamic system in which space and social processes are in constant and mutual interaction, shaping each other. This relationship is used as Harvey’s foundation to explain how the capitalist system perpetuated today under neoliberalism (which inherently produces an unequal order based on the maintenance of scarcity for the functioning of the market system) produces and reproduces inequality.

For Harvey (1973), this inequality is explicitly evident in the unequal spatial distribution of resources. Thus, for Harvey, there is a need for an overall strategy to deal with urban systems that ‘contain and reconcile policies designed to change the spatial form of the city (by which is meant the location of objects such as houses, plants, transport links, and the like) with policies concerned to affect the social processes which go in the city’ (Harvey, 1973, p. 50). Harvey considers justice as a set of principles that aid equal distribution of the benefits and allocation of the burdens in the city and among society. More specifically, ‘a principle which will allow us to evaluate the distributions arrived at as they apply to individuals, groups, organisations, and territories, as well as to evaluate the mechanisms which are used to accomplish this distribution. We are seeking in short a specification of a just distribution justly arrived at’ (Harvey, 1973, p. 117). For Harvey, social justice must be able to alter the existing capitalist structure within which income and wealth are generated and distributed. Harvey focuses on

14 outcomes rather than process, evaluating the outcomes of actions as they affect society without theorizing the process that produces these results.

The Marxist approach has been criticized for its focus on class and failure to recognize the particularities, needs and aspirations of different groups in society based on gender, race and/or ethnicity (Young, 1990; Fraser, 1999; Sandercock, 2000). The single focus on class assumes that the economic system is the prevailing interest of all groups in society, obscuring the voices and priorities that other groups might have as well as their own claims on social justice (Fainstein, 1997). Also, the almost mechanical analysis made by the distributional idea of justice supported by Harvey highlights the causal connections between economic form, urban development, and social injustice, and obscures the opportunities to create transformational change based on different strategies than that of altering the existing capitalist structure (Fainstein, 2010).

Young (1990) claims that a distributive approach to justice (as proposed by Harvey) is not enough for engaging with questions of justice in the city as it does not engage with the institutional context that determines unequal distributive patterns and the recognition of differences in society. Thus, for Young (1990), justice forms part of a broader political and institutional context that includes all aspects of institutional rules and relations, such as decision-making power and procedures, the division of labour, and culture. Young (1990) argues that justice should ‘have the power to awaken a moral imagination and motivate people to look at their society critically and ask how it can be made more liberating and enabling’ (Young, 1990, p. 35). Young argues that for a social condition to be just it must enable all groups and individuals in society to ‘1) meet their needs and exercise their freedom by developing and exercising one’s capacities and expressing one’s experience and 2) participate in determining one’s action and the conditions of one’s action’ (Young, 1990, p. 37). These two general values are used by Young to refer to the two social conditions that define justice: domination and oppression. Thus, in addition to the need for redistribution, Young argues that oppression, domination, and the way these processes are (or are not) sustained in existing institutions, urban policies and decision-making processes are central in understanding justice in the city. Justice is produced by the redistribution of resources and transforming the structural conditions of society by its institutions with

15 the aim of supporting citizens’ self-development and self-determination. Based on this, Dikec (2001) proposes a dialectical formulation between the spatiality of injustice (the spatial face of justice seen, for example, in uneven distributional patterns) and the injustice of spatiality (the existing structures/institutions that produce and reproduce injustice through space). Thus, in order to analyze justice in the city it is helpful to analyze both urban distributional patterns carried out in time and space, and the institutional practices and power relations that define the structure of those patterns.

The discussion on justice is relevant to the problems of binaries in cities. Urban post- structuralists consider the city as being manipulated by a specific order, usually favouring white and male individuals. This order reproduces binaries, which are both gendered and hierarchical, and used to impose a specific way of living through institutions and the mechanisms of city planning (e.g. zoning) on the diverse groups that make up parts of the city, obscuring their cultural differences, needs and priorities (Fraser, 1999; Sandercock, 2000). Thus, urban post-structuralists advocate for the empowerment of the least powerful not only in economic terms but also in cultural, political and spatial terms, as well as the recognition of differences in society on the basis of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality (Fraser, 1999). This involves the de- construction of binaries to erode the power of hierarchically ordered dichotomies, and providing opportunities to shape institutions and space in the city as part of a liberating political program as Young (1990) proposes. In the context of neoliberalism, binaries are not useful for social and spatial justice as these favour and reproduce a particular model of urban development driven by logics of commodification, privatization, market discipline and individualism. This model exacerbates processes of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004) through the commodification of land and housing, as explained in the next section.

2.2.1 Accumulation by dispossession Accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004) is not a new process; it has existed since imperial times and colonization. However, it continues to be one of the principal processes of social and spatial injustice caused by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism rests on the belief that open, competitive and unregulated markets, liberated from state interference and the actions of social collectivities, represent the optimal mechanism for socio-economic development (Peck, Theodore & Brenner, 2009). This belief

16 carries a series of logics that have been imposed over society to reproduce the neoliberal ideology. Such logics include binary and hierarchical thinking, market discipline, privatization and commodification of space and public assets, financialization, competition, and individualism (Blomley, 2004; Peck, Theodore & Brenner, 2009; Rolnik, 2015; Marx & Kelling, 2018). These logics directly influence development practices in cities such as enabling market-oriented policies, and have deep antipathy to forms of social and institutional solidarity (Peck, Theodore & Brenner, 2009). Cities have become increasingly central to the reproduction, extension and mutation of neoliberalism (see for example Pirez, 2002).

Accumulation by dispossession is exacerbated by logics produced and reproduced by the neoliberal ideology driving the development of cities. Under neoliberalism, financial institutions and their operations have resulted in the financialization of land and housing. Financialization is a process where housing and land as social goods are transformed into a commodity and financial gain (Rolnik, 2015). The process is a result of the connection between domestic and global markets, and the appropriation of the housing sector by the global financial market. In this process, there is a domination of actors, markets, and financial practices and discourses at multiple scales resulting in the structural transformation of economies, businesses, governments and family groups. Rolnik (2015) explains that through land markets and the implementation of urban regulations, the financialization of land and housing also implies the financialization of urbanization and the restructuring of cities. Financialization has deep impacts in how cities are designed and in the lives of their citizens. Citizens are replaced by consumers and players in the market and there is stimulation and creation of a financial system through loans and credit to incentivize the purchase of land and housing as a commodity in the private market (Rolnik, 2015). This enables accumulation by dispossession in the form of appropriation of assets, including housing, natural resources, and particularly land grabs (Harvey, 2004). Here the financial system, in compliance with the state and powerful actors in cities, is critical to coordinate the dynamics of capital accumulation through uneven geographical development. This demonstrates that even when neoliberalism aspires to create a utopia of free markets, liberated from state interference, it has in practice entailed the intensification of coercive and disciplinary forms of state intervention that impose

17 versions of market rule, generating new forms of social polarization and uneven spatial development (Peck, Theodore & Brenner, 2009).

To understand the process of accumulation by dispossession it is necessary to understand how accumulation works under capitalism and the phenomenon of overaccumulation in recent times. Overaccumulation within a given territorial system means a condition of surpluses of labour and surpluses of capital that cannot be disposed of without financial loss (Harvey, 2004). In this regard, physical infrastructure is capable of absorbing massive amounts of capital and labour, particularly under conditions of rapid geographical expansion and intensification. Here the role of financial and state institutions and their capacity to provide credit is essential, as this fictitious capital is then allocated away from current consumption to future-oriented projects. In this scenario, the need for land to re-invest the surplus value of labour and capital becomes essential, giving rise to processes of accumulation by dispossession. According to Harvey (2004), accumulation by dispossession is particularly driven by the commodification and financialization of land and housing, which not only results in the forceful expulsion of vulnerable populations but includes the conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, and state land) into exclusive private property rights, suppression of rights to the commons, commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative, indigenous, forms of production and consumption (Harvey, 2004).

Within accumulation by dispossession processes it is important to discuss the concept of space. Under neoliberalism, space is seen as an empty, neutral, and passive object detached from social and power relationships (Lefebvre, 1974). Therefore, the commodification of space is possible, in a way in which land and housing in cities become property and a profitable asset with direct links to financial markets. This conceptualization of space assumes exchange value as the principal value, without consideration of other relationships and social values inherent to their existence (Rolnik, 2014). The commodification of space is reproduced in cities by the ownership model and favouring private property over other forms of tenure. As Blomley (2004) explains, the ownership and private property models have become hegemonic, affecting legal deliberations, social discourse and governmental interventions shaping the possibilities of social life, the ethics of human relationships and the ordering of

18 economic life in cities. In particular, the ownership model has given the power to exclude one another in cities, by perpetuating binary and hierarchical thinking, dividing property into categories such as private/public and formal/informal, privileging one over the other. This thinking has its roots in the powerful capitalist order of law, society and power (Blomley, 2004). The centrality here is on the individual and any other forms that relate to property; in particular, those that are collective in nature are seen as threatening. This understanding of space as an empty object is central to enabling processes of accumulation by dispossession of land and housing in cities (Rolnik, 2014).

Lefebvre (1974) emphasizes the need to move from conceptualizing space based on its exchange value to its use value. This means that space is not a neutral container but dynamic and composed of social and power relationships. Space is created through social relations that Lefebvre (1974) characterizes as a triad of spaces composed by a) spatial practice, b) representations of space, c) spaces of representation. Spatial practice is the space directly perceptible through the senses and includes the physical, material city and its routine maintenance, major urban redevelopments in the context of neo-capitalist and state power structures, and daily life. Representations of space include the rational and intellectual conceptions of urban areas for analytical, administrative and property development purposes, produced by technocrats such as architects, engineers, and town planners. Spaces of representation include urban everyday space as directly lived by inhabitants and users in ways informed by cultural and emotional factors (see Leary-Owhin, 2015 for further explanation). These multiple spaces suggest that the production of space is filled with tensions and competing versions about what space should be and whose reality it constitutes, making power intrinsic to the production of space, and an imperative condition to understand questions of justice in the city (Lefebvre, 1976). Similarly, Massey (1991) argues that space is a dimension of multiplicity where social differences based on gender, race and other social characteristics constitute the relationships through which space is lived and shaped. The broader and dynamic conceptualization of space transcends binaries and dichotomies and provides opportunities to resist processes of accumulation by dispossession.

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Here the concept of place is important to discuss. Place is a dynamic, heterogeneous process constructed in space by social relationships, giving space a social meaning, emphasizing its use value and openness to constant change and evolution (Massey, 1991). Place involves emotional attachments that people form with particular spaces, based on different uses, meanings and values (Cresswell, 2004). Place is also constructed through day-to-day lived experience (Tuan, 1977). Places reflect multiple identities and social relationships and thus a relationship with power (Massey, 1991). This opens up the possibility for contestation and conflict among different understandings of places, emotional attachments, values, and interests. Place is central to the creation of a sense of belonging of people in cities and the recognition that there are different forms to relate to the city, land and housing which transcend their economic value (Rolnik, 2014). Kennan (2010), for example, defines property as relationships of belonging in which a subject or person relates to property based on their identity and social networks, and thus property is experienced in complex and overlapping ways, not solely as determined by property law. Blomley (2004) acknowledges that the ownership model is not absolute but that a variety of claims are made to urban space that are more collective in orientation, and this can lead to different models of land tenure and administration that reflect different relationships to land rather than the exclusive relationship of private ownership. In this light, the concept of place is important as it helps to have a broader view of urban space that transcends exchange value and recognizes a variety of user values to urban space.

In this sense, the concept of place helps in transcending binary thinking (Lombard, 2015). Also, the broader conceptualization of space and the concept of place help to challenge processes of accumulation by dispossession through the recognition of a variety of alternative ways to relate to cities, which engage with the reality of difference in cities. These alternatives transcend binary thinking and propose different models and logics to live and experience urban life that are more aligned with principles of social and spatial justice. However, as the concept of place explains, for these alternative models to be recognized there needs to be engagement with power relationships. Here collective action becomes central within debates around justice in the city as an avenue for citizens to be empowered, resist processes of accumulation by dispossession and develop alternative models that move forward logics of neoliberalism, as discussed in the following section.

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2.2.2 Power and collective action A discussion of the concept of power is necessary to understand how social and spatial justice can be progressed in cities through collective action. Power is key to understanding who is included and excluded from the institutions and processes that seek to re-distribute resources in cities, the role of the state in reducing or producing urban justice, the possibilities for citizens and the dispossessed to resist processes of accumulation by dispossession, and the overall possibilities that are available for citizens to produce ways of life in the city that include their diverse relationships with places and ideas of justice. One important question is how citizens can build power in the context of the great inequalities caused by neoliberalism. The way power is conceptualized helps move forward these possibilities.

Foucault (1976a; 1976b; 1982) proposes a discursive conceptualization of power composed of knowledge and discourse. This means that for Foucault (1976b) power relations in our society are tangled with knowledge and the production of truth, which are themselves established and implemented through the production and functioning of a particular discourse. Foucault explains that the maintenance of a discourse is in fact the maintenance of a specific knowledge and world view, as well as a spatial order in a particular place and time (Foucault, 1982). What is theoretically significant from the Foucault’s conceptualization is that he considers power not as a fixed force centralized in a particular source (e.g. the state) but as something fluid that circulates among all individuals and/or groups. This means that when power is exercised it is done over subjects with agency with possibilities to transform this power through behaviour, reaction, strategies and tactics (see also De Certau, 1984). This conceptualization presents power not only as a negative force capable of generating repression, coercion and domination, but also as a productive, transformative and positive force (Foucault 1976a; 1976b; 1982).

Foucault’s conceptualization of power differs from interpretations of power as centralized and concentrated within the economy and political system, and a source of domination, coercion and repression exercised through institutions and imposed over those less powerful. Within these ideas Lukes (2005) proposes a conceptualization of power in which there is a direct one-way relationship between those that exert power and those on whom power is exerted, even when this power is

21 not made visible. This conceptualization resembles power with domination and coercion, in which those who are dominated act and make decisions based on a system that works against their interests, and thus are condemned to accept and re- enforce a powerless position. In questions regarding justice in cities the conceptualization of power presented by Lukes (2005) is useful to understand the power vulnerabilities associated with the oppression and domination that vulnerable groups are subject to, due to power inequalities between them, the state and other powerful actors in cities. However, Foucault’s ideas are important in explaining that there is agency and the possibility to exert power within these vulnerable subjects and highlight the understanding of the city as a complex web of actors where power relationships are at play in the negotiation and constitution of social and spatial justice.

Thus, in the context of social and spatial justice in cities there is a need for agents to collectively build power and use this power to transform the political, economic and social structures that are in place (Castells, 1983). Here the concept of ‘power with’ (Ife, 2016) emphasizes the principle that we do not act alone but together in solidarity and opens up the possibility of collective rather than individual power. This notion is different from the idea of ‘power over’, which suggests individual forms of domination and hierarchy, and power over other people or groups (Ife, 2016). In the context of the global south, the concept of ‘power with’ is associated with collective action recognized in the literature as an avenue for marginalized citizens to build ‘internal power’ (Boonyabancha, 2001; Mitlin, 2008) or ‘power from within’ (Roitman, 2019) and expand this power to progress their struggle for the inclusion of their ideas of justice in the city (Mitlin, 2008; Rolnik, 2014; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2015).

Theoretical propositions on collective action arise from the literature on resource management (Olson, 1965; Ostrom, 1990) and social movements (Tilly, 1978; Castells, 1983). Within the resource management literature collective action can be found in collaborative resource management practices such as co-management, community or collaborative natural resource management, joint-management of resources, grass-roots ecosystem management, and agreement making. Traditional critiques of these processes include the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin, 1968) suggesting that people use collective resources to their advantage without considering the overall benefit to a group or society, leading to resource depletion. As well as ‘the

22 freerider problem’ (Olson, 1965) where group members prefer that another member pays for the entire cost of working together. Despite this, collaborative resource management practices have been recognized for providing good understanding of internal processes of community organization, including how individuals use collective agency to create agreements, institutions and systems of management (Ostrom, 1990). In the literature collective resource management practices are recognized for generating social learning by transforming relationships between stakeholders and enhancing their capacity to work together by building a common framework for understanding (Mandarano, 2008). Also, collaborative processes are able to generate social capital and improving the governance and conflict-resolution capacity of stakeholders to produce effective collaborative processes and environmental outcomes (Frame, Gunton & Day, 2004). Key factors affecting collaborative processes are the imbalances of power between stakeholders, fundamental ideological or value differences between stakeholders, resistant to change, lack of trust, the lack of resources to implement effective processes, and weak accountability of collaborative processes to the public interest (Frame, Gunton & Day, 2004). Despite these processes being focused on natural resources management, their lessons can be applicable to processes of collective action in informal settlement upgrading in the global south (Beard, 2018).

The literature on social movements has been important to engage theoretical discussions on collective action with structural processes causing injustices in cities (Beard, 2018). Within this literature I find useful the ideas of Castells (1983), who defines collective action as the autonomous and organized action of social agents in cities and the available mechanism that ordinary citizens can use to transform spatial, political and social structures. Castells (1983) shows in the analysis of his case studies that wherever collective action occurred, it had three goals in mind. First, to achieve redistribution of resources in the form of collective consumption of urban resources and services. Second, to maintain and/or create an autonomous local culture; and third to increase citizens’ self-determination by demanding decentralization and urban self-management, in contrast to centralized state administration. He explains that urban society is inherently structured around conflicting positions which define alternative values, interests, and ideas of justice. For Castells (1983), collective action arises from these conflictive values when urban actors mobilize toward specific goals,

23 usually as a reaction to a crisis created by the economic order. Thus, collective action manifests itself in different ways according to the particular historical, spatial and political context of the organized agents.

A range of planning concepts have arisen to explain the different ways in which collective action is manifested in development processes. Community-driven and community-based development are used when beneficiaries of development projects are included or directly control development projects (Mansuri & Rao, 2004). Also, collective self-help strategies (Mitlin, 2008a) refer to more organic forms of collective organization where residents of a neighbourhood (and other groups facing a common need) organize together to provide collective goods and services. Co-production (Mitlin, 2008b) is another concept explaining how citizen groups and social movement organizations build effective relationships with state institutions to address basic needs and use collective action to gain power to negotiate greater benefits to improve living conditions. Covert planning (Beard, 2012) is conceptualized as a form of planning that, on the surface, appears non-confrontational but that works in subtle and undetected ways to transform power relationships. Covert planning is particularly important within restrictive political settings, resulting in social learning processes that serve as incremental steps to achieve social change and alter power relationships (Beard, 2003; 2012).

Furthermore, the concepts of radical and insurgent planning (Sandercock, 1998a; Miraftab, 2009) explain how collective action is used by citizens to mobilize and claim their rights, usually in opposition to the state. Miraftab (2009) makes a distinction between radical and insurgent planning, explaining insurgent planning as being concerned with the history of colonialism and domination in the global south, and thus the need for citizens to use collective action to determine their own terms of engagement with the state using invented spaces of participation (Miraftab & Wills, 2005; Miraftab, 2009). Invented spaces of participation are spaces created by citizens to challenge existing power relationships and gain recognition. Invented spaces differ from invited spaces of participation (Miraftab, 2009), defined as those spaces within formal structures and state-led planning processes that do not challenge power relationships and/or the status quo. Despite this, invited spaces of participation are

24 also able to influence power structures when they are used strategically by vulnerable groups to put forward their claims to justice and recognition (Miraftab, 2009).

Supporters of collective action within development processes argue that these processes not only result in more contextually appropriate development solutions, but also are key for social and spatial justice by empowering vulnerable groups to become key actors in development processes able to move forward their ideals of justice at scale (Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2015). However, research into collective action within development processes explains that collective organization is not always autonomous, but can be captured and manipulated by powerful actors, and re-enforce oppressive political activities and systems (Mansuri & Rao, 2004; Dasgupta & Beard, 2007). Mitlin (2008b) explains that social movements move between autonomy and dependence on party politics and/or clientelist relationships, and back again in a context that is often fluid. Also, community-driven and community-based projects have been criticized for allowing the state to relinquish its responsibilities to provide goods and services to disadvantaged groups (Mansuri & Rao, 2004). Furthermore, collective action can result in exclusionary forms of association due to power relationships within citizens (Ward & Mouyly, 2013) and can be ephemeral and delicate rather than endure over time (Archer, 2010). Thus, collective action does not occur in isolation of the structures and systems of power of cities and needs to be analyzed within a context of difference, as well as the dominant neoliberal and individual model characterizing urban development, in particular systems of land and property (Rolnik, 2015; Beard, 2018). These debates make it relevant to understand how collective action plays out within the complexities of neoliberal cities and its capacity to challenge the structures that create dispossession and injustice in cities (Beard, 2018).

In this thesis I use the ideas of Castells (1983) and Beard (2018) to define collective action as ‘a broad range of social phenomena in which social actors engage in common activities for demanding and/or providing collective goods’ (Beard, 2018, p. 3) and the available mechanism that ordinary citizens can use to transform spatial, political, economic and social structures (Castells, 1983). When discussing collective action, the concept of learning is important to highlight (Boonyabancha, 2001; Beard, 2003; Boonyabancha & Mitlin, 2012). In the literature on social movements in cities of the global south, learning is considered central to how activists and movements of the

25 urban poor incrementally develop forms of collective action, organization and political strategy that can lead to the transformation of power relationships (Beard, 2003; Boonyabancha & Mitlin, 2012). Here, Sandercock’s (1998b) concept of a thousand tiny empowerments is useful to explain that collective action, as a form of insurgent planning, does not necessarily begin with grand, overt acts but instead with smaller actions that can lead to transformations of structural conditions of power and inequality.

Conceptualizations of learning, in the context of planning, explain learning as a process which actors, either individually or collectively, engage with in order to pursue a particular action (Friedmann, 1987). Learning involves the processes, practices and interactions through which knowledge is created, contested and transformed (McFarlane, 2011). This is a complex, time-dependent process that involves, in addition to the action itself, political strategy and tactics, theories of reality, and the values that inspire the particular action. The literature on collective action from the global south explains that collective action needs to experience a process where people learn to develop trust and community cohesion in order to develop social and political capital, to address their basic needs but also to have a chance to transform power relationships (Boonyabancha, 2001). Thus, learning is considered a process of potential transformation central to political strategies and tactics of resistance that seek to consolidate, challenge, and/or alter dominant sources of knowledge and systems that create dispossession and injustice in cities (McFarlane, 2011).

The concept of collective action constitutes the background to the idea of the right to the city originally formulated by Lefebvre (1968 [1996]). This concept is closely associated with social and spatial justice and entails the highest form of rights in the city, such as the right to difference, and the right to live and experience cities based on their user value rather than solely exchange value (Kofman & Lebas, 1996). The right to the city is a collective right that does not entail a right to be distributed from above to individuals, but a way of actively and collectively relating to the political life of the city. In the context of informality, the right to the city has been useful in progressing a global voice of organized groups of civil society and urban poor communities that use different types of collective action to seek recognition of their citizenship rights and to access land, housing, infrastructure and political participation

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(see for example Fernandes, 2007; Sugranyes & Mathivet, 2011; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2015). This explains that the right to the city, in the context of urban informality, needs to be defined and redefined through collective action and political struggle (Dikec, 2001). Within this struggle, there is a need to move forward binary thinking in urban informality and planning, to dismantle the discursive divisions between formal/informal sectors and individual/collective development models.

2.3 Urban informality and planning In this section, I contextualize the problem of binaries for urban informality. I trace how the understanding and definition of this concept has evolved from a binary conceptualization to acknowledging the interconnectedness between formal and informal systems. I sustain the formal/informal dichotomy as produced by power relationships and discuss the implications that this dichotomy has had for planning theory and practice. Further to this, I discuss key literature and concepts that have helped to move forward the formal/informal dichotomy and analyze the relationships that exist between these systems. I also discuss collective action in the context of planning and the role that it has within formal and informal relationships in cities. The discussion I present in this section is contextualized in the frame of social and spatial justice and processes of accumulation by dispossession discussed in Section 2.2.

2.3.1 Defining urban informality Urban informality is associated with human settlements and trade or exchanges that occur outside of formal legal structures and processes (Porter, 2011). However, understandings and definitions of urban informality vary and it remains a multi- dimensional concept. There is a growing academic debate and explanations about what urban informality is and how it is manifested in different contexts (Roy, 2005; Yiftachel, 2006; Porter, 2011; McFarlane, 2012; Watson, 2014; Lombard, 2015). For example, urban informality has been associated with ungovernable development practices (Recio, 2015); with autonomy and creativity opening up development opportunities for those excluded (de Soto, 2000); with survival practices of the poor (Watson, 2009b); with forms of organization (De Cácia Oenning da Silva & Shaw, 2012); with resistance against authority and elite norms (Bayat, 2000); with embodying varying degrees of power and exclusion (Roy, 2005); and with alternative modes that

27 bring new knowledge to the ways cities are seen and understood (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012).

Traditional views have considered informality as synonymous with poverty. Hansen & Vaa (2004) explain that there are frequent claims about the relationship between poverty, informal housing, and informal income generation. Yet, even when these concepts overlap, poverty (expressed by low incomes and substandard shelter) and informality of income generation and housing are two distinct phenomena. For example, not all informal workers or people who live in informal settlements are poor, in fact studies have argued that some people living above the poverty line live in informal conditions (Roy, 2005). Also, people engaged in formal work or who live under formal conditions (e.g. in social housing or on land with formal titles) can be poor. Thus, even when there is a relationship between poverty and informality (Marx, 2009; Lombard, 2015) informality does not necessarily imply poverty.

Furthermore, conventional views have conceptualized urban informality as a separate sector, non-compliant with formal rules and regulations, supporting a dichotomy between the two (Bunnel & Harris, 2012). Questions regarding the informal/formal divide have appeared in the literature since the late 1970s (see for example Bromley 1978); however, most of this literature refers to the ‘informal sector’ as economic activities responding to the first definitions of this concept by Hart (1973) and the International Labour Organization. More recent literature and debates questioning the informal/formal divide have appeared over the past decade (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004; Hansen & Vaa, 2004; Roy, 2005; McFarlane, 2012; Varley, 2013; Marx & Kelling, 2018; Acuto, Dinardi, & Marx, 2019) extending this question to various aspects of the city and urban development, as well as the state and governance processes. These arguments are further discussed in Section 2.2.3.

The legacy of the binary conceptualization of urban informality in the context of planning supports an association of informality with illegal, uncontrolled, and inefficient development, fundamentally different from the ordered, regulated, and efficient notions of planned land use and settlement (Porter, 2011). This re-enforces an association of informality with the local and everyday, and formal with state planning, giving the latter a more authoritarian and powerful status (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004). Because of this, in the context of planning, informality is seen as ‘the other’ and

28 something different and detached from the traditional notions of planning, and thereby perceived as an urban policy problem (Watson, 2009a; Porter, 2011; McFarlane & Waibel, 2012; Marx & Kelling, 2018; Acuto, Dinardi, & Marx, 2019).

This binary conceptualization of informality is inadequate, because as Rolnik (2015) explains, the divisions between legal/illegal fail to represent the plurality of systems and relationships that operate within a single territory such as those legislated by the state, but also many others developed in juxtaposition such as under traditional and customary law and informal records that are formalized over time. Also, this understanding of informality fails to acknowledge that planning is a wide spectrum of city-making practices led by a plurality of actors that go beyond and interact with dominant and official planning practices such as those enabled by the state (Apsan Frediani & Cociña, 2019). This understanding of planning is based on Lefebvre’s idea of the social production of space discussed in Section 2.2.1 that recognizes everyday practices and other forms of social production of space beyond traditional and official actors and approaches. By considering this broad and extensive view of planning it is then inadequate to label and divide planning practices as formal and/or informal (Lombard, 2015).

Further to this, the discussion highlights the importance of considering urban informality as a structural condition that is an expression of the uneven nature of capitalist development (Rakowski, 1994). This particular understanding recognizes power inequalities in society as the root cause of urban informality, as well as the political dimensions that produce and reproduce informality in cities. This structural understanding of urban informality differs from a legalistic understanding, which uses definitions provided by legal and planning frameworks to classify informality as an external condition of what is formal. This problematic is evidenced in policies that inherently divide formal and informal categories based on their compliance or lack of compliance with the particular prescriptions of the law. These legal systems perpetuate a singular, exclusive and hierarchical understanding of the formal system that gives it superiority over its informal counterpart (Rakowski, 1994; AlSayyad, 2004; Roy, 2005; Marx, 2009; McFarlane & Waibel, 2012; Marx & Kelling, 2018). The next section discusses, in more depth, the implications of the formal/informal dichotomy for planning theory and practice, and social and spatial justice.

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2.3.2 The problem with binaries for urban informality and planning Permeated by colonially inherited planning systems (Yiftachel, 2006; Varley, 2013; Watson, 2014) planning as traditionally understood has not been able to respond to the growing challenge of informality in the global south. This challenge is augmented by the influence of the neoliberal ideology, directing planning efforts toward competition, privatization and the creation of world class cities (Hasan, 2011). Also, authors have recently acknowledged the role of ambiguity in planning (Roy, 2009; Yiftachel, 2009; Rolnik, 2015) and how this is used by powerful actors as a political strategy to purposely use informality as a mechanism to benefit their economic interests. Thus, the planning literature in the south is not only preoccupied with the inadequacy of planning models and assumptions being transferred from the north to the south, but also with the fact that these same systems are producing social and spatial injustices that benefit those in power (Roy, 2005; Watson, 2009b; Khan & Swapan, 2013; Lemanski & Marx, 2015). Roy (2009) argues that planning, as it is in the south, is not equipped to solve the crisis of urbanization as it is deeply implicated in the production of this crisis. Based on these arguments it is clear that in order to progress social and spatial justice in cities through planning, there is a need to conceptually and in practice bridge the formal/informal divide (Marx & Kelling, 2018).

The formal/informal dichotomy and the power relationships that constitute this divide have informed most traditional planning responses to informality. In the context of informal settlements, planning responses have been traditionally characterized by forcibly evicting unauthorized settlements, supporting involuntary resettlement, or attempting to control their expansion using planning’s available tools such as land use regulations, zoning, building standards and formalization of land and property (UN- HABITAT, 2003). Also, Watson (2009a) argues that planning regulations inhibit the poor’s access to affordable land and housing, determining their place to peripheral and disaster-prone urban areas of cities (see also Rolnik, 2001). Roy (2009) argues that planning regulations offer protection to powerful groups who use them in opportunistic ways to benefit political and economic interests. Devas (2001) demonstrates how building standards directly impact housing affordability and the livelihoods of the urban poor.

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Thus, it is clear that the formal/informal divide ingrained in planning systems not only is used to exclude and marginalize what is considered informal, but makes planning a mechanism to be coerced by powerful actors in cities to fulfil their interests at the expense of vulnerable groups. In this light, McFarlane & Waibel (2012) explain that the formal/informal divide can be used as a ‘governmental tool’ in which the categories of formal and informal are often deployed by the state as an organizational device that allows particular domains and forms of intervention. It is here that informal settlements and labour become targets, such as in the form of forced evictions or relocation. This governmental framing of the formal/informal divide contributes to the representation of informality as a developmental problem and the exclusion and marginalization of informal practices.

Also, the formal/informal divide perpetuates the tendency to formalize the informal (Acuto, Dinardi, & Marx, 2019). In the context of informal settlements, this approach perpetuates an individual/collective dichotomy by formalization imposing an individual model of property rights through titling programs, without careful consideration of social and power relationships within space. Many authors see formalization as an attempt to impose market logics by powerful actors in cities through the imposition of individual property rights designed to make land markets efficient (Porter, 2011; Rolnik, 2015). Thus, formalization can be seen as a liberal attempt at restructuring property relations for accumulation and control, rather than an attempt to seek urban justice as further discussed in Chapter 3 (Porter, 2011).

Further to this, many authors (Boonyabancha, 2001; Watson, 2003; Pieterse, 2008; McFarlane, 2012) point out the significant gap that the formal/informal divide creates between planning (institutions and practice) and the realities of those surviving and living under conditions of informality, usually low-income groups and the urban poor. Watson (2003) conceptualizes this as a ‘conflict of rationalities’ between the logic of governing and the logic of survival. For Watson (2003) the logic of governing is attributed to the notion of control and development held by most planners, government administrators, and the private sector (grounded in the rationality of western modernity), and the notion of survival is referred to as the rationality which informs the informal strategies that low-income and the urban poor use to survive in cities. This gap marginalizes and excludes the informal strategies that vulnerable groups use to

31 seek recognition in cities in governance processes. Among other problems such as corruption and weak government institutions, the conflict of rationalities is recognized as a central limitation of planning to effectively respond to problems associated with injustice in the global south (Pieterse, 2008).

2.3.3 Formal and informal relationships and their implications for planning in the global south Moving beyond dualist interpretations of urban informality provides opportunities to advance planning theory and social and spatial justice in cities by legitimizing informal practices’ contribution to planning and urban development, as well as acknowledging that the ‘collective’ has an important role to play in urban development. Different concepts such as ‘hybrid arrangements’ between formal and informal, or a ‘formality- informality continuum’ indicate a desire among scholars to move beyond the formal/informal divide in theoretical discussions (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012). A key point in the literature trying to de-construct formal and informal relationships has been to evidence the implications of the state in producing and reproducing informality (Roy, 2009). Roy’s (2005; 2009) concepts of the ‘state of exception’ and ‘informality from above’ explain how the state uses processes of un-mapping and de-regulation that create informality, to purposely meet their individual interests, usually at the expense of vulnerable groups and individuals. This shows how urban informality is tangled with complex structural power relationships that define which urban development practices, models and citizens are legitimate and illegitimate in cities, and decide which of these models are recognized or unrecognized (McFarlane, 2012).

Another key point that helps move beyond the formal/informal divide is the re-definition of urban informality. Here, Roy’s ideas (2005; 2009) are useful in calling for informality to be understood as a mode of urbanization. These arguments consider that informality is an organizing logic and a system of norms that govern the process of urban transformation. Thus, informality should not be considered as the ‘other’ sector but rather as a series of transactions that connect different economies and spaces to one another. In this light, McFarlane (2012) proposes formality/informality as practices rather than sectors or modes. This perspective is useful as it moves forward the understanding of informality and formality as fixed categories to acknowledge the different flows taking place between them. In McFarlane’s words: ‘As practices,

32 informality and formality exist as a kind of meshwork, an entanglement between different ‘bundles of lines’, representing the different flows and practices of the urban world. The meshwork stresses the fact that the urban is not ready-made, but always in formation. From this perspective rather than viewing informality and formality as fixed categories, or as mutually exclusive, the two appear as lines of changing practice and movement, taking place not above or in advance of urban life, but within its unfolding’ (McFarlane 2012, p. 101).

This understanding of informality has a political meaning as it recognizes not only the possibilities of the state producing informality, but also the agency embedded in the practices of different actors in cities, including vulnerable groups and the need to recognize these as being part of planning of cities (Lombard, 2015). This makes reference to the understanding of planning as a wide spectrum of city-making practices led by a plurality of actors that go beyond and interact with dominant and official planning practices such as those enabled by the state (Apsan Frediani & Cociña, 2019). These arguments make all types of development activity valid in the production of urban space; challenging the reality that what is ‘informal’ continues to be marginalized when defined against state and authority prerogatives. Here it is also important to recognize the expansion of the urban political system from 'government' to 'governance' and the involvement of a range of non-state actors in the process of governing (Watson, 2009b). This has been a major topic of planning and development theory for a long time, touching on questions of urban governance, participation and state-society interaction (see Davidoff, 1965; Arnstein, 1969; Chambers, 1997; Healey 1997; Sandercock, 1998b; Safier, 2002; Innes & Booher, 2004; Fainstein, 2010). In this context questions of negotiability of value in the global south relate to how vulnerable groups such as the urban poor use collective action to build power internally and externally and claim rights to land, housing and citizenship in different forms as explained in Section 2.2.2.

Further to the re-definitions on urban informality, the concept of ‘the interface’ has been central to conceptualizing formal-informal relationships in the context of planning. Watson (2009b) sees ‘the interface’ as the point at which state practices of urban development and modernization (e.g. provision of formal services, housing and tenure systems), urban administration or political control (e.g. tax collection), and market

33 regulation, are met (or confronted) by their ‘target populations’ in various complex ways. Thus, what characterizes ‘the interface’ is a zone of encounter and contestation between conflicting rationalities. For the less powerful such as the urban poor, the interface represents a zone of resistance, evasion and/or appropriation inherently shaped by negotiation and power (Watson, 2009b). In support of these arguments, Roy and AlSayyad (2004) explain that formal and informal relationships are defined through a ‘negotiability of value’ expressed in the ‘ever-shifting relationship between what it is legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate and authorized and unauthorized’ (Roy, 2009, p. 80). This highlights that the relationship between formal and informal practices is not neutral but characterized by a constant negotiation about what urban space should be and whose reality it constitutes.

A concept that expresses well the operation of informality’s negotiability of value is Yiftachel’s (2009) gray spaces. The concept of gray spaces is directly related to the spatiality and politics of urban citizenship and the pervasive existence of informality in contemporary cities (Yiftachel, 2015). This concept advances the binary understanding of informality by explaining how most residents of the global south live in conditions that are neither formal nor informal but in a gray space between the whiteness of legality/approval/safety and the blackness of eviction/destruction/death (Yiftachel, 2009). This acknowledges how informality is many times characterized by a state of ‘permanent temporariness’ (Yiftachel, 2009) created ‘from above’ by the state and spatial planning regimes, reinforcing power inequalities between marginalized citizens and powerful actors in cities (Roy, 2009). In this light, gray spaces form the foundation of a new urban and political order which frames the practices and struggles of urban citizenship, and highlight the structural processes that sees many or the majority of residents of contemporary cities confined to inferior citizenship status due to their economic or identity regimes, and because of living in unrecognized, illegal, temporary, or severely marginalized conditions (Yiftachel, 2015). Furthermore, Yiftachel (2015) argues that gray spaces are spaces of possibilities and a phenomenon that is mobilized ‘from below’ where marginalized groups use different forms of resistance and citizenship to negotiate the value of citizenship. Thus, gray spacing adds a systemic and long-term dimension to the concept of urban informality and, as a stark contemporary manifestation of the

34 interaction of power and space, should make its way into the heart of urban and political theory (Yiftachel, 2009; 2015).

Overall, the efforts to understand formal and informal relationships in planning in the global south show the complexity embedded in how actors negotiate access to resources and political power in the city. This points out that power imbalances within actors needs to be a point of departure for the analysis of formal and informal relationships in cities (Watson, 2009b). In this light, Martinez & Roitman (2019) highlight the need for research to focus on the structural conditions influencing formal and informal relationships, in particular power struggles over resources. This requires understanding and documentation of the interface between formal and informal practices, spaces, actors and mechanisms used in development processes (Acuto, Dinardi & Marx, 2019). Here, understanding the details and role of collective action within formal and informal relationships is essential. This is particularly important as most responses to urban informality are driven by market values that perpetuate individualism, such as individual property rights. Thus market-based solutions to urban informality obscure the collective forms, support networks and sources of power that vulnerable groups such as the urban poor use to negotiate value in the city and resist state and market-based dispossession in neoliberal cities. Thus, producing evidence of formal and informal relationships, and the limitations of the individual/collective dichotomy in urban informality is essential to inform planning knowledge for social and spatial justice in the global south.

2.4 Conclusion In this chapter I explained the relationships between binaries, urban informality and social and spatial justice in cities. The review of the literature that I present shows that even when my research focuses specifically on the problem of binaries in urban informality, this problematic is much broader than that and touches on an aspect of knowledge production reproduced by western thought and capitalism that has widely influenced systems of planning since colonial times. Binary thinking enables the idea that space is an empty container detached from social relationships, and thus a commodity that can be traded based on its exchange value. This has led to processes of accumulation by dispossession in cities enabled by the financialization of land and housing. This sustains the importance of contextualizing my research questions within

35 their contribution to planning knowledge and spatial and social justice in cities and points out why the recognition of difference is a key dimension in the progression of spatial and social justice in cities.

Binaries classify urban space into fixed and hierarchical categories. This is clearly the case in the formal/informal dichotomy, which undermines the informal by placing formality as more desirable and superior. This has led to the marginalization, criminalization and exclusion of informal practices in cities, even when in many cases informal systems serve as support mechanisms for vulnerable populations (Watson, 2009a; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2015). Further to this, in the context of urban informality binaries have perpetuated an individual/collective dichotomy as most formalization efforts imply conversion toward an individual model of property rights. Thus, it is fair to say that the use of binaries excludes and marginalizes collective (and other alternatives such as rentals) living arrangements and relationships to place in cities. This points out how the formal/informal dichotomy can be used as a governmental tool (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012), by the state and other powerful actors, to exclude and marginalize informality, and at the same time impose values and logics in favour of the neoliberal model.

In this chapter, I also presented progressive conceptualizations of key concepts used in this thesis including space, power, collective action and urban informality that help move away from binaries. I defined space as dynamic and composed of social and power relationships, and closely associated with the concept of place, which gives space an intimate social meaning which needs to be negotiated among various actors and interests in cities. This points out the importance of power and collective action in giving possibilities to vulnerable groups to negotiate meaning and interest in places in cities, and resist processes of accumulation by dispossession. These arguments help to sustain the conceptualization of urban informality as a negotiability of value (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004) and point to the need to understand how relationships between legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate, authorized and unauthorized, and collective and individual are negotiated in cities.

The conceptualization of urban informality as a governmental tool and a negotiability of value highlights the structural nature of urban informality, and the need to recognize power inequalities within actors in cities as a key dimension for the analysis of formal

36 and informal relationships. By acknowledging the structural nature of urban informality and making power relationships central to understanding formal and informal relationships, research can contribute to planning knowledge for social and spatial justice in cities. This necessarily gives visibility to how the state is implicated in informality, as well as to different forms of planning and actors that collectively organize themselves in the face of exclusion and marginalization to negotiate their value in the city. In this sense, collective action becomes an important dimension to be understood in the study of formal and informal relationships, in particular, the capacity of collective action to empower vulnerable groups and challenge the structures of power that create injustice and dispossession (Castells, 1983; Beard, 2018). The next chapter presents the second part of the literature review, focusing on the particular topic of upgrading informal settlements, and the conceptual framework of the study which I used to develop my research questions.

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Chapter 3 The implications of the formal/informal dichotomy for informal settlements upgrading

3.1 Introduction In Chapter 2, I explained that the problem of binaries, such as the formal/informal dichotomy, is broad and touches on aspects of social and spatial justice, as well as knowledge production of western thought and neoliberalism which influence systems of planning and responses to informality. In this chapter I discuss the implications of the formal/informal divide for practices of upgrading informal settlements in the global south. I provide evidence on how the formal/informal dichotomy is embedded within the definitions of informal settlements, and how these definitions are used by planning to exclude and marginalize these settlements by, on the one hand, encouraging forced evictions and relocations, and on the other hand proclaiming that the only solution is to be compliant with dominant formalization policies, in particular titling and individual property rights. I identify and discuss the key debates regarding land formalization, access to finance, and citizenship, belonging and recognition in upgrading. Further to this, I identify concepts that help move forward formal/informal divisions in the practice of upgrading informal settlements that I use in the analysis and discussion of my research findings in subsequent chapters. The last part of the chapter presents the conceptual framework that I used to develop the research questions of my study.

3.2 Definition of informal settlements In the global south, the concept of informal settlements has been used interchangeably with terms such as slum, squatter settlement, illegal settlement, and low-income community by government agencies (see for example UN-HABITAT, 2003). While the UN Agenda 2030 refers to ‘slums’, many authors and policy makers argue for the use of the term ‘informal settlements’ as it is more aligned with human rights values (Gilbert, 2007; UN-HABITAT, 2015; United Nations, 2018). The coverage of settlement types that the term encompasses is broad and complex as the different words used to refer to this concept vary around the world based on local political and administrative contexts. UN-HABITAT (2015) defines informal settlements as residential areas where 1) inhabitants have no security of tenure vis-à-vis the land or dwellings they inhabit,

38 with modalities ranging from squatting to informal rental housing, 2) the neighbourhoods usually lack or are cut off from basic services and city infrastructure, and 3) the housing may not comply with planning and building regulations and is often situated in geographically and environmentally hazardous areas. Informal settlements range from constantly displaced homeless encampments in the most affluent countries, to massive communities in the global south with modalities ranging from squats in abandoned buildings, to improvised homes in containers, tents or boats or shacks made of insecure materials, durable housing of bricks and mortar, and informal rentals (United Nations, 2018).

The definition of informal settlements highlights multiple dimensions associated with these settlements including physical, political, social, economic and environmental. These multiple dimensions are related to the multi-dimensional understanding of urban poverty. Satterthwaite (2002) explains that urban poverty represents multiple aspects of deprivation including inadequate income; inadequate, unstable or risky asset base; inadequate shelter; inadequate provision of public infrastructure; inadequate provision of basic services; limited or non-existent safety nets; inadequate protection of rights and operation of the law; and voicelessness within political systems and bureaucratic structures. In addition, Lemanski & Marx (2015) argue that poverty has a spatial dimension, by being multi-sited in the way that people experience deprivation and impoverishment in many different spaces of their lives, ranging from the workplace (in terms of low-paying and insecure jobs), to educational spaces (in relation to inability to access good quality education) and housing (in the form of insecure tenure or location). Recognizing that urban poverty is not a uniform or singular experience also implies that poverty varies in its manifestation over time and space (Parnell, 2015). Identifying the relationship between informal settlements and poverty is important even when, as explained in Chapter 2, poverty is not necessarily synonymous with informality. However, a multi-dimensional and multi-sited understanding of informal settlements and its relationship with poverty is important to acknowledge the need for interventions that go beyond physical aspects and engage with political and power dynamics.

Although advances have been made to the theoretical understanding of informal settlements (see for example Gilbert, 2007; Lombard, 2015), in practice these are still

39 subject to high levels of marginalization. What is key to the definition of informal settlements is that these are defined against what is considered formal, and thus automatically carry negative connotations as they do not comply with formal regulations such as land legal frameworks, land use plans and building standards (Gilbert, 2007). This fact shows how urban informality is a product of formality, and a response to exclusionary formal systems created and exacerbated by the imposition of a particular system of laws, private markets, planning and resource allocation (Roy, 2005). Based on this it is easy to use planning and land legal frameworks, embedded with binary assumptions, to criminalize and marginalize informal settlements. This makes informal settlements subject to state power and interpretations (Durand- Lasserve, 2006; Yiftachel, 2009). For instance, many governments use the term illegal settlement with clear repressive connotations that enable and justify forced evictions, as in the case of Cambodia (see for example Royal Government of Cambodia, 2010).

In response to this problematic, the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing argues for understanding informal settlements as both rights violations and rights claims (United Nations, 2018). This means that on the one hand, informal settlements are systemic human rights violations such as a product of ineffective state actions and failed policies that deprive millions of their fundamental rights to housing. On the other hand, informal settlements constitute forms in which individuals, families and communities claim their rights to the city, including not only their right to secure land and housing but also their right to belong and be recognized (Rolnik, 2014). Here the proposition of Lombard (2015) to understand informal settlements as places is useful and is linked with the concepts on space and place I discussed in Chapter 2. This approach considers informal settlements as a social process allowing a view of the political, social and power dynamics that occur there, as well as the more static physical and legal aspects. This perspective also recognizes informal settlements as places of individual and collective experience where incremental building processes result in places that contain social meaning, identity, struggle and memory (Lombard, 2015). The conceptualization of informal settlements as places helps in moving forward binary conceptualizations of these places, and is useful in understanding the deep meaning involved in the upgrading of informal settlements, as explained in the following section.

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3.3 Upgrading as social and spatial transformation The discussion on the definition of informal settlements presented in Section 3.2 makes it clear that there is a structural power imbalance that makes these settlements vulnerable to various degrees of exploitation by the state and planning systems (Yiftachel, 2009). This demonstrates the structural nature of informality discussed in Chapter 2. Thus, for upgrading interventions to be able to contribute with social and spatial justice in cities, these need to be able to transform the structural power relationships that undermine the ‘informal’. This transformation demands a significant shift of power relationships between governments and their powerful allies in cities, and people living in informal settlements (Fiori, Riley & Ramirez, 2001; Abbot, 2002; Boonyabancha, 2009). Moving forward from formal and informal divisions in informal settlement upgrading can aid governments to stop criminalizing, penalizing and marginalizing informal settlements and the practices of their residents. Governments have the opportunity to shift from controlling the processes of upgrading and looking to formalization (as in the formalization of land into individual property) as the dominant model for upgrading, to one in which this process is community-led and enabled through new approaches to ownership, tenure, inclusive planning, innovative legislative and program initiatives, and rights-based participation and accountability (United Nations, 2018).

Thus, upgrading interventions not only relate to physical aspects of land, housing and basic services as previously thought in conventional site-and-services programs (Abbot, 2002). These interventions need to engage with the multiple dimensions of poverty by finding solutions to land and housing, but also having access to appropriate finance, infrastructure and services, livelihood and community development opportunities, and adequate institutional and governance arrangements that appropriately support upgrading processes (see for example Minnery, et.al, 2013). Importantly, these interventions contribute to a process of redistribution of power, resources and means of access to the benefits of city life by applying appropriate spatial, political and social strategies, which can enhance connectivity across diverse urban conditions while contributing to redesigning urban institutions and regulations to take diversity into account (Fiori & Brandão, 2010). In this sense, upgrading interventions are, by definition, about transforming the nature of the city itself rather

41 than just requalifying a part of it (Fiori, Riley & Ramirez, 2001; Boonyabancha, 2009; Fiori & Brandão, 2010).

Here, the conceptualization of informal settlements as places is useful to see processes of upgrading as processes of place-making. Lombard (2015) suggests that as an analytical lens, place-making offers a cross-cutting perspective on practices and activities that are categorized as either formal and/or informal. This explains that upgrading can be a top-down and/or a bottom-up process. Thus, place-making offers a wide view of the practices involved in the spatial and social construction of place, without resulting in standard binary divisions. Place-making offers the possibility to see all types of activities, such as the practices of people living in informal settlements and the state, as equally valid objects of study and analysis involved in the spatial and social construction of these settlements. Also, place-making allows a view of the dynamic tensions and power relationships that constitute the construction of these settlements. In this way, place-making can provide a way to recognize and value the productive capacity, practices and effort of people living in informal settlements to construct a place to live in the city, which continue to be devalued by planning and the formal system in general. Also, place-making offers an opportunity to understand how residents of informal settlements manage to build power internally and expand this power to influence and transform the structures that create social and spatial injustice in cities (Boonyabancha, 2001; Beard, 2003; 2012; Mitlin, 2008; Levy, 2015; Roitman, 2019).

This argument evidences how the ‘negotiability of value’ discussed in Chapter 2 can be manifested within informal settlement upgrading. Thus, for upgrading processes to truly respond to social and spatial injustices in cities, these need to be able to transform the vulnerable and marginal position of residents of informal settlements. This entails informal settlers being politically recognized as equal citizens, but at the same time challenging the spatial logics imposed by neoliberalism that create injustice and dispossession (Porter, 2011; Rolnik, 2015). The next sections identify and discuss key debates associated with upgrading practices of informal settlements in the global south.

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3.4 Debates on land formalization One of the key issues involved in the upgrading of informal settlements is the complex question of security of tenure. This question has generated, and continues to generate, important debates in the academic literature and policy discussions. The global policy shift toward land tenure interventions occurred in the mid-1990s as a result of theoretical propositions put forward by influential development economists and international financial institutions arguing for a more interventionist approach which supports the state’s responsibility to regulate land markets (de Soto, 2000; Deininger, 2003). In this regard, land titling has become the dominant policy prescription, entailing the replacement of local informal tenure systems with global-standard formal models based on western notions of individual property and property registration. This policy prescription demonstrates how the formal/informal divide is operationalized within policies for upgrading informal settlements; in this case they show an eagerness to formalize the informal. This approach became highly accepted and supported by development agencies and governments around the world after the publication of The Mystery of Capital in 2000 (de Soto, 2000). De Soto claims that land titles and land formalization are the answer to ending poverty by unlocking the capital generating potential of informal land and property, a term known as ‘dead capital’ (de Soto, 2000). De Soto’s evidence fit well into the neoliberal concepts of market-oriented urban development policies being developed by agencies like the World Bank.

One of the key rationales for replacing informal tenure with formal titles is that informal systems inhibit the efficient functioning of land markets. De Soto (2000) claims that informal tenure creates uncertainty as it is not recognized by the state and formal financial institutions. Thus, there are high transaction costs in informal markets as assets are priced to reflect the high risk associated with informal transactions. In this sense it is argued that land titling programs, as a market-oriented intervention, can fix land markets. Land tilting provides the foundation for increased land market transactions by formalizing ownership rights and creating property information systems such as a cadastre and land registry, to secure tenure and record land transactions. Thus, the perceived risks associated with informal ownership are removed, providing confidence in the market to buy and sell land without fear that assets will be appropriated. The widespread provision of formal, statutory, titles would release potential local investment for house improvements, which would then raise

43 property values and in turn increase municipal revenues through higher property taxes (de Soto, 2000). Rolnik (2015) explains that, in this way, titling speaks the globalized language of financial markets. Thus, on the one hand, titles seek to improve tenure security for residents of informal settlements, but at the same time, titles seek to increase security for domestic and international investors and promote economic development. This represents a complex and dangerous contradiction (Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013). This contradiction is particularly concerning in the speculative environment that characterizes land markets in cities where individual owners constantly compete for location with multinational corporations and foreign investors (Rolnik, 2013a).

The dominant form of tenure proposed in titling programs, as a long-term objective, is individual freehold titles or private ownership. This happens despite the diversity of concepts, categories, and practices regarding land tenure, and as a result of the tendency of financial and international development institutions to reinforce statutory tenure systems based on western preoccupations with the rights of the individual (Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013). Brandão and Feder (1996) claim that secure individual property rights are critical in establishing a structure of economic incentives for investment in land-based activities. The authors argue that the more freehold rights are restricted, the weaker the investment incentives will be and the lower the productivity of land. They argue that the role of governments in land markets is then to remove regulatory constraints to the free operation of land markets. Also, individual property rights and titles can help reduce poverty by allowing poor individuals and families to access credit from formal state and financial institutions (de Soto, 2000). These arguments, like neoliberalism, are powerful and have been successful in determining individual and freehold title as the dominant form of tenure in the global south for land regularization programs. This happens even when it is now commonly accepted that there is a continuum of land tenure forms, and different social relationships and processes attached to land and property (Payne, 2001; Mathivet, 2014).

Thus, title and the reproduction of individual property rights as a single and universal policy option have been considered dangerous as these obscure the complexity embedded in local contexts and the contributions of locally evolved property

44 institutions, as well as discriminating against other forms of tenure which might be more appropriate for large sections of the population (Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013). For example, Payne & Durand-Lasserve (2013) explain that it is common for low-income households to prefer the social cohesion which customary/informal systems offer, or the mobility offered by rental tenure systems, providing they enjoy adequate security and legal protection. Apsan Frediani (2009) argues that instead of accepting the existing collective arrangements of informal settlements, titling implies the integration and/or transformation of collective values into individual values through the imposition of private property rights, with important implications as further discussed below. Similarly, Porter (2011) argues that land formalization policies are based on a liberal-economic model of property that ignores the use rights of people living in informal settlements. Porter (2011) claims that use rights are more significant rights than private exchange rights, and thus formalization can be analytically closer to a form of enclosure and dispossession because it ignores the real property use rights exercised by people living in conditions of informality. This argument makes formalization not a liberal attempt to address questions of urban justice, but an action to seek control and power. Thus, formalization is really about restructuring property relations for accumulation and control (Porter, 2011). These critics draw on post/decolonial arguments and view titling as a form of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004) as explained in Chapter 2.

Different authors argue for the need to recognize property beyond individual property rights (Blomley, 2004; Marx, 2011; Porter, 2011; Rolnik, 2015). These arguments support the view that land is a product of social relationships and not a product of the market (Rolnik, 2014). This resembles the arguments of Lefebvre (1976) who theorized space based on its user value rather than exchange value. Payne’s (2001) definition of land tenure as ‘a set of relationships among people concerning land’ (Payne, 2001, p. 416) expresses this point of view. This view is also evident in literature promoting the social function of property and rights-based approaches to land and housing (see for example Sugranyes & Mathivet, 2011; Ortiz Flores, 2012; Gonzáles, 2014). Thus, these critics argue that the incorporation of informal property into the formal market enables the conversion of land and houses into commercial assets and acts as a powerful mechanism to eliminate social relationships with land and housing (Rolnik, 2015). This makes tenure security for the urban poor vulnerable

45 to market forces. For instance, Payne & Durand-Lasserve (2013) argue that current dynamics of land liberalization in developing countries and systematic land title programs are increasing the pressure of the market on urban low-income settlements. This situation has severe impacts on security of tenure and has resulted in market- based eviction. Market-based evictions are not recorded as such, either because they do not require the use of force, or because some form of compensation is paid, regardless of how fair and equitable this compensation might be. Payne & Durand- Lasserve (2013) assume that the scale of market-driven displacement worldwide is tending to override that of forced evictions. Furthermore, the costs of a formalized property can increase financial pressure on poor households through the payment of taxes and urban services. Renters, in particular, are most affected by formalization, as rents tend to increase because of these processes (Durand-Lasserve & Selod, 2009).

Despite the clear advantages of securing property rights for the urban poor supported by the state, there is evidence to demonstrate that initiatives to formalize property rights through title have failed in their own terms in more cases than they have succeeded (Hutchison, 2008; Deininger & Feder, 2009; Marx, 2009; Rolnik, 2015). For example, despite the popularity of title, evidence suggests that the settings where land titling programs have been most successful have been dependent on a favourable governance environment, the effectiveness of the state apparatus, and the distribution of socio-economic power (Deininger & Feder, 2009). This is particularly important within the speculative environment defined by movements of financial capital, leading municipal governments to engage in interspatial competition and developing instruments for unlocking land values and attracting investment (Rolnik, 2013a). Thus, formalization should not be considered as a panacea and/or the only answer to secure land rights for the urban poor; instead, interventions in cities of the global south need to engage with the complexity of governance arrangements, the economic interests driving urban development, power inequalities, social and cultural dimensions, and the specific needs of individuals and communities (Payne, 2001; Durand-Lasserve, 2006; Deininger & Feder, 2009).

Also, Field & Torero (2006) find from their research on a land titling program in Peru that having land title does not enable access to credit by the urban poor from private commercial institutions as expected. Unstable income and liquidity for deposits

46 continue to be barriers for the urban poor to access credit. Financial practices by the urban poor do not necessarily relate to assumptions associated with whether they live formally or informally, but are dependent on a case-by-case basis and context-specific circumstances that often blur formal and informal relationships in unpredictable ways. This situation is explained by the fact that the concept of security of tenure often refers to a perception of tenure status in a given time and place by people concerned, and policy makers (Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013). For the urban poor, social networks and recognition by their neighbours are often considered more important for ensuring secure tenure than recognition through title, as well as factors such as street addressing, access to water, support from local politicians and infrastructure, networks with NGOs and knowledge of legal instruments (Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013). Thus, even living without land tenure security allows investments in housing and infrastructure, despite these being considered a risk due to the lack of tenure security. Furthermore, Rolnik (2015) evidences that having title and being able to borrow money from financial institutions has led to dangerous borrowing practices that can ultimately compromise security of tenure. Payne, Durand-Lasserve & Rakodi (2009) find from their research in Senegal that tenure formalization and access to land title can induce processes of gentrification and displacement, especially in settlements located near city centres or other high value locations. Thus, the authors find that title does not provide tenure security to residents that are directly exposed to threats of eviction where land can be earmarked for development by the state or private investors, but mostly to residents living in areas where land has lower values and less interest.

The questions and criticisms regarding title have resulted in the manifestation of alternatives to regularization and the organization of property for informal settlements. Payne & Durand-Lasserve (2013), for example, argue for incremental approaches to regularization to avoid drastic increments in prices and reduce risks of market-based displacement and dispossession. Collective tenure arrangements in which ownership, rental or use rights over land and housing are shared under joint governance structures such as collective title have also been supported to prioritize collective over individual values and, in this way, control land transfers and discourage speculation (see for example Mathivet, 2014). Boonyabancha (2009) sees collective title and other arrangements as not only necessary to control and protect the urban poor from losing their land because of market forces, but also to maintain power and collective action

47 within informal settlements, and support city-wide networks of the urban poor capable of negotiating and resisting exclusion and dispossession. Collective arrangements have also been recognized for reducing upgrading costs by leveraging group resources (ACHR, 2014a). Other alternatives such as housing cooperatives, community land trusts and hybrid tenure models (e.g. a mix of cooperatives, community land trusts, rentals, etc.) have been supported to move forward from the liberal model of individual private ownership and achieve tenure security for people living in informal settlements (United Nations, 2013).

The importance of recognizing ‘the commons’ and collective ways to relate to land and housing comes into light in the literature. This recognition is problematic as collective and/or commons property are not really considered as property by the dominant economic model because there is neither a unitary nor stable set of exchange rights (Blomley, 2004). Thus, ‘the collective’ is not supported by mainstream upgrading programs. Individual titling has been criticized for strengthening the tendency to oppose collective values to the individualism of private property, and dislocating people of informal settlements from their collective past (Varley, 2017). This has implications for social movements and resistance against urban injustices such as exclusion and dispossession. For instance, Apsan Frediani (2009) argues that formalization encourages fragmentation of spaces while diminishing the collective initiatives and processes of people living informal settlements. This can lead to a breakdown in social fabric and capital (conditions that can lead to empowerment and resistance) by imposing individualism. These arguments make sense for Payne (2001), who points out the necessity of recognizing that although land tenure raises important technical and procedural questions, it is ultimately a political issue. Thus, supporting collective values, and ways to relate to land and housing, is important because the means of addressing poverty, vulnerability, dispossession and exclusion are not logically structured through technical means of legalization, but instead are political struggles for the recognition of rights in need of collective power (Boonyabancha, 2009; Rolnik, 2015; Beard, 2018). The next section builds on these arguments through the lens of accessing finance for upgrading.

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3.5 Debates on access to finance for informal settlements upgrading Access to finance is a key condition for informal settlement upgrading as it is necessary for securing land, housing, infrastructure, labour, access to services, as well as livelihood and community development opportunities (Sheuya, 2007). Housing finance has direct links with processes of accumulation by dispossession, as explained in Chapter 2. This is particularly the case for the urban poor, as their lack of stable income and job opportunities makes them more vulnerable to debt, exploitation from informal lenders and manipulation from the state, and thus expropriation from their land. However, Rolnik (2015) evidences how the financialization of land and housing makes urban dwellers globally vulnerable to losing land and housing due to processes of accumulation dispossession, evidently seen in the 2008 global financial crisis. Thus, the key debate in the literature concerning access to finance discusses which models of finance are more appropriate for the upgrading of informal settlements, but at the same time guarantee the right to the city and the access to secure land and housing for all (Mitlin, 2011; Rolnik, 2013a; 2015). Because of the broad nature and scale of the need for finance in the upgrading of informal settlements, financial interventions have been in the hands of international, public, private and grassroots actors whose approaches respond to different interests, ideologies, practices and objectives (see Datta & Jones, 1999; Mitlin, 2011; Freire, 2013).

Conventionally, the types of finance involved in the upgrading of informal settlements have been divided between formal and informal sources. Formal sources of finance include private banks, governments, and international donors that since the 1980s (following the period of globalization and structural adjustment in the global south) have supported the market-enabling strategy for addressing shelter and upgrading related needs (The World Bank, 1993). This strategy aims to provide access to housing by expanding financial markets, increasing competition and eliminating compulsory government barriers, assuming that efficient housing markets will lead to countries’ economic prosperity and facilitate housing for low-income and urban poor populations (Pugh, 1994). Furthermore, the strategy supports the privatization of services such as water and infrastructure with the aim to de-regulate and facilitate the market to provide these services to the overall population. Despite this, it is widely acknowledged in the literature that housing markets do not reach low-income and

49 urban poor populations and thus these people have been excluded from accessing formal housing (Stein & Vance, 2008; Solo, 2008; Mitlin, 2011).

The formal financial system excludes the urban poor and large segments of low- income populations. This happens because housing finance provided by private financial institutions is not affordable for these populations, as evidenced in the gap that exists between payment-to-income ratios versus conventional mortgage finance institutions, as well as the increase in prices for basic services due to privatization (Mitlin, 2011). Also, formal loans demand inflexible conditions for access such as stable incomes, the need for a secure guarantee, and/or land security, which most of these groups lack (Sheuya, 2007; Solo, 2008). Moreover, financial institutions have little incentive to lend finance to poor and low-income groups. Disincentives include high transaction costs, small returns and extra work in verifying creditworthiness. There are also perceived risks associated with the capacity of the poor to repay loans, and security of compliance with planning development standards and regulations, even when these directly impact on housing affordability (McLeod, 2001; 2006). Some social-corporate responsibility instruments such as social investment funds (see UN- HABITAT, 2009) have been developed, showing that the interface between private banks and informal financial systems has not yet operated to its full potential. One interesting case has been documented in Nepal where community-driven cooperatives have started to leverage finance from private banks to invest in low- income housing (see Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2018).

In addition to this, government-led interventions for dealing with informal settlements (e.g. development of public housing estates, sites and services, relocations, in situ upgrading) have been characterized by a highly centralized, hierarchical structure in which the state leaves little room for the inclusion of beneficiaries in decision-making (Archer, 2010). This has diminished the chances for government-led investments to be responsive to the needs of the occupants and meet individual and collective aspirations of low-income and poor communities (Lemanski, 2008; Gilbert, 2014). Instead, most public housing in the global south is on the peripheries of cities where land prices are lower, characterized by lack of adequate infrastructure and services, lack of access to job opportunities, and the opportunity to adapt housing to the changing needs of families (Buckley, Kallergis, & Wainer, 2016). Also, in many cases

50 government subsidies have been unable to reach those in need of financial support due to stringent rules needed for their access (Sheuya, 2007; Stein & Vance, 2008; Solo, 2008; Mitlin, 2011). In addition, many governments of cities of the global south lack the financial resources and governance capacity to make adequate investments in housing and infrastructure for urban poor populations (Buckley, Kallergis, & Wainer, 2016).

The various government-funded interventions for dealing with informal settlements have been supported by international development organizations such as the World Bank and Cities Alliance. Thus, funds provided by international donors rarely reach the beneficiaries directly as funding is allocated to government institutions for specific reforms and/or programs that are thought to result in housing provision and settlement upgrading (Mitlin & Satterthwaite, 2007). This affects the inclusion of low-income and urban poor families and/or opportunities to catalyze local social development through housing development. Due to the rollback of governments as a result of the market- enabling strategy, as well as in many cases the presence of weak government institutions and lack of funds, the private sector (e.g. private developers) has taken a lead role in informal settlement upgrading interventions, in particular housing development (see Buckley, Kallergis & Wainer, 2016).

Despite the unquestionable importance of formal finance in the upgrading of informal settlements, informal sources also play a key role; however, their role has not received necessary attention (Datta & Jones, 1999; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2018). Informal sources of finance include individual and/or collective practices used by low-income and urban poor individuals, families, and/or communities to finance housing, infrastructure and livelihood needs. Individual practices can include family savings, finance from different sources of income, remittances and inheritances, and loans from friends and families (see Gough, 1999; Gordon, 1999). Also, loans are accessed from informal money lenders (see Baken & Smets, 1999). Collective practices can include saving groups, rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), and cooperatives such as credit cooperative societies (SACCOs) developed by groups of individuals and families by pooling collective savings (see for example Gordon, 1999; Smets, 2000; Boonyabancha, 2001; Sheuya, 2007).

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Informal finance is used by low-income and poor families to incrementally invest in housing and infrastructure upgrading following the characteristics of self-help housing processes (Boonyabancha, 2001). This means that informal finance is used according to the livelihood opportunities, capacities and needs within a particular place and time of these individuals and families (Gough, 1999; Sheuya, 2007). This resembles the idea of conceptualizing upgrading as an incremental process of place-making as explained in Section 3.3. Informal finance also allows recipients to deal with fluctuating and often low incomes, and prioritize and make choices about investments based on these fluctuations (Baken & Smets, 1999). This happens thanks to the flexible and accessible nature of informal finance and its reliance on social relationships rather than on legal contracts, as characterizing the formal system (Datta & Jones, 1999). However, not all informal sources allow this, as for example informal money lenders are characterized by having an exploitative nature and charging high interest that poor families cannot easily repay (Baken & Smets, 1999).

The role of savings, both individual and collective, has been identified in the literature as an important source of finance for housing, livelihood, and infrastructure investments for the poor (Mitlin, 2011). On the one hand individual savings help the urban poor to manage risks associated with low, irregular and uncertain incomes, and can also serve in avoiding debt and associated costs (Mitlin, 2011). On the other hand, collective savings are recognized as building an internal resource base within poor communities and providing the possibility of access to easy finance such as loans for diverse needs with flexible conditions for access and repayment (Boonyabancha, 2001). Furthermore, collective savings are recognized as generating social capital, empowerment and self-development of urban poor communities (Mitlin, 2008b; Archer, 2012). Saving groups bring people together on a regular basis and promote a learning process in which people acquire the capacity to visualize, prioritize and make collective decisions about the issues to be tackled in their communities (Boonyabancha, 2001; Mitlin, 2008b; D’Cruz, McGranahan & Sumithre, 2009; Archer, 2012). Thus, saving groups catalyze the capacity of urban poor communities to become a key player in upgrading processes through the contribution of financial resources, detailed information on the composition of informal settlements, and increasing capabilities for collective decision-making and action (Shand & Colenbrander, 2018).

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Collective savings are a worldwide phenomenon known under different names such as tandas (Mexico), susu (Ghana), cadenas de ahorro (Colombia), and chits (India) (Smets, 2000). These consist of collective financial accumulations accrued by a defined (but often not formalized) group of people. In most cases these groups are residentially based (i.e. spatially defined) but they can also be associated by trade/occupation (Mitlin, 2011). Members of the group are primarily women but can also include men, and even children, who deposit a daily, weekly or monthly contribution in a common revolving fund and support access to small loans for diverse needs to their members (Smets, 2000). Although savings are individual, with each person recording and ‘owning’ their own savings, there is a collective accumulation and management of the money (Boonyabancha, 2001). The evolution, characteristics, rules and conditions of these systems are diverse, as well as the use of funds, commonly starting with small loans for emergencies and welfare related needs, and gradually increasing their use to housing and infrastructure (D’Cruz, McGranahan & Sumithre, 2009; Archer, 2012). Collective savings also experience vulnerabilities, such as the control and mismanagement of funds from community leaders and other powerful actors in the settlements, the lack of consistency of members due to high rates of internal migration and mobility of the population, and insufficient money to scale up investments (Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2018).

Financial mechanisms have been developed in recent decades with the aim of bridging both informal and formal systems together, and providing informal settlement upgrading solutions for low-income and urban poor populations. These mechanisms can be hybrid in their characteristics (mixing formal and informal financial practices) and/or semi-formal sources aiming at adapting the formal system to the characteristics of the informal system (see for example Matin, Hulme, & Rutherford, 2002). These conceptualizations move forward the dichotomy between formal and informal financial systems and highlight instead the need to consider financial sources as a continuum with various informal/formal interfaces.

One of these mechanisms is micro-finance institutions (MFIs), which emerged in the early 1990s with the aim of extending financial services to those excluded from the private financial sector. The most popular model followed by MFIs is that of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (a model extended to the whole world), which offers

53 access to lump sums of money through loans to individuals (usually women) for enterprise development, and more recently for housing improvements, as well as offering opportunities to make savings deposits (Matin, Hume and Rutherford, 2002) . The reason why MFIs can be considered as semi-formal sources of finance is because they aim to synchronize financial products with the way poor individuals and households make a living, and the characteristics of their daily lives, such as experiencing fluctuating incomes. To do this, MFIs employ more diversified and flexible requirements for accessing loans and making loan repayments. However, with the introduction of commercial banks into MFIs and the expansion of their links with the global financial markets, many of these institutions have become increasingly commercialized (Rolnik, 2015). Thus, MFIs have been transformed in another neoliberal attempt to profit from the poor supporting a ‘one-size fits all’ model that lacks the degree of flexibility to really synchronize and accommodate the diverse needs of the clients as promised by the model (Rolnik, 2015). MFIs have experienced immense growth in recent years, scaling up their operations by seeking funding not only from international aid, but also from private sources (see The World Bank, 2017). Thus, MFIs vary between functioning as an NGO or a bank, resulting in a continuum ranging from semi-formal to formal sources of finance.

Research into MFIs shows that this approach supports poverty reduction through enterprise development and increasing household incomes (Karlan & Valdivia, 2011). However, MFIs have been criticized for failing to reach far down the poverty spectrum and excluding ‘very poor’ groups, as well as re-enforcing gender inequalities by posing the financial burden on women when resources are used by men (Kabeer, 2005). Furthermore, MFIs have created a debt burden for poor individuals and families, and been accused of coercively enforcing debt repayments (Liv, 2013). Thus even when MFIs play an important role in giving access to finance for low-income and poor people, their approach and intentions follow a market-driven logic and need to be questioned in the light of the real benefits for the urban poor, and their capacity to reproduce structures that create spatial and social injustices in cities.

Housing financial programs and approaches supported by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have also been considered semi-formal sources of finance. NGOs’ interventions vary, some supporting community savings mobilization, others

54 operating in a more institution-beneficiary relationship and others acting as intermediate institutions between communities and governments (Jones & Mitlin, 1999; Hasan, 2008). Overall, most NGO-driven housing financial programs support micro-credit and loan finance within a more comprehensive approach than MFIs, involving the provision of technical support, financial literacy and community development training, community exchanges, grants for improving infrastructure and services, housing materials production and support in negotiations with local authorities (Kyessi, Reed & Furaha, 2010). The major debate around NGO-supported housing finance projects involves their project focus and the inability to scale up these initiatives to address the housing demand and need experienced by the urban poor in growing cities of the south (Jones & Mitlin, 1999; Llanto, 2007; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2018).

Hybrid sources of finance used in the upgrading of informal settlements have been generated to scale up the collective savings of the urban poor, and link these with government, international and private financial institutions. Examples include government programs such as the Community Mortgage Programme in the Philippines (see Llanto, 2007), the Baan Mankong Programme under the Community Organisation Development Institute (CODI) in Thailand (see Boonyabancha, 2009), donor-supported financial mechanisms including the Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility (CLIFF) (see McLeod & Mullard, 2006; Levy, 2015), the Asian Coalition for Community Action Program (ACCA) (see Boonyabancha & Mitlin, 2012) and multi-stakeholder collaborative funds known as community development funds (CDFs), and urban poor funds (UPF) managed by grassroots organizations proliferating in different cities of Asia, Latin America and Africa (see Archer, 2012; Schermbrucker, Patel & Keijzer, 2015; Sripanich, Nitivattananon & Perera, 2015). These mechanisms are broadly referred to in the literature as community-driven or community-led finance.

Community-driven finance is recognized as an approach to finance housing for low- income and urban poor groups that can help enforce the citizenship rights, sense of belonging and political recognition of the urban poor, as later explained in Section 3.6. Financially speaking, Boonyabancha & Kerr (2015) explain that collective finance reduces the vulnerabilities experienced by poor individuals when accessing finance,

55 as when a community organization is strong, group support can reduce risks of debt and loan defaults. Despite this, there is a need for more systematic research into the impact of the housing programs resulting from community-driven finance approaches (Rolnik, 2015). Recent studies suggest the need to consider the financial sustainability of collective funds, the power imbalances that can occur within communities in the management of the funds, and the conditions that lead to success in community organization and collective action for the effective management of the funds and delivery of housing programs (Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2018). These approaches can result in promising outcomes to finance housing and upgrading for the poor in the light of social and spatial just values. The links of finance with citizenship, belonging and recognition of the urban poor are discussed in the next section.

3.6 Debates on citizenship, belonging and recognition in upgrading The discussion of upgrading informal settlements needs to be linked with discussions on citizenship, belonging and recognition. This is because, as explained in Section 3.2, the dichotomies reproduced by planning systems and the use of the formal/informal divide categorizes informal settlements and the practices of their residents as illegal or illegitimate. This challenges the citizenship status of people living in these settlements, as well as their rights to belong to a place in the city and be politically recognized. This argument makes it clear that using binaries as the dominant way to understand the city (e.g. formal/informal, private/public, individual/collective) is inappropriate to the reality of difference in cities of today (Marx & Kelling, 2018). If these binaries continue to be perpetuated and supported, then market capitalism and the inequalities and injustices that this system generates will continue to be the only imaginable possibility and model for the city (Blomley, 2004).

Conceptually, citizenship questions who is included and excluded from rights, entitlements and protections as urban citizens (Hammet, 2017). Conventional ideas explain urban citizenship as a place or territorially rooted identity embedded in, and through, a set of known rights and obligations to both residents and the governing authority (Hammet, 2017). These rights and obligations are usually prescribed under national laws and defended under constitutions and other legal instruments. Despite their importance to guaranteeing rights, these instruments need to be critically looked at, to understand their assumptions and ability to truly secure rights outside liberal

56 models. This is particularly important for securing land and housing rights. In this sense, it is useful to conceptualize urban citizenship as a practice rather than something that is given and/or prescribed in national or city laws. Citizenship is practised by citizens themselves as well as the state, and in the global south typically negotiates exclusion and marginalization in contexts of colonial legacy and inequality (Lemanski, 2017). This negotiation can happen between exclusionary practices of citizenship by the state that ignore their obligations and seek to marginalize vulnerable groups, and the agency of these individuals and groups to deploy resistance. Thus, in the context of planning and informality, the negotiation of rights and citizenship is linked to the argument of informality being characterized by a negotiability of value (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012) as explained in Chapter 2.

Citizenship is recognized in the literature as a plural concept, enabling a repertoire of practices ranging from routinely ordinary (Staeheli, Ehrkamp, Leitner, & Nagel, 2012) to insurgent (Holston, 2009). Ordinary citizenship recognizes that the quotidian and everyday play a powerful role in the way citizenship is structured, practised and enacted. This conceptualization entwines legal status, norms and systems of rule with the everyday. Also, the concept directs attention to the ways in which citizenship struggles (from individual to collective action) draw on a range of resources and claims beyond the law (Staeheli et al., 2012). The concept of insurgent citizenship (Holston, 2009) also draws on the ordinary with particular emphasis on the urban poor living in the peripheries of cities. Holston (2009) argues that it is in the realm of the everyday and domestic life where an insurgence can begin with the struggle for the right to have a good quality of life in the city. This involves a process of building and defending residential spaces not only to construct a new city, but also to propose a new city with an order of citizenship different from what is prescribed in the law. As a plural concept, there are many different types of insurgent citizenship, and in fact not all align with values of social and spatial justice. What is common, though, is that insurgent citizenship is practised outside of formal systems and laws. Sandercock (1998b) argues that insurgent citizenship is made of a ‘thousand tiny empowerments’ and that insurgency does not necessarily begin with grand, overt acts but instead with smaller actions that can lead to transformations of structural conditions of power and inequality. The practices of insurgent citizenship evidence that there are actors operating outside the formal planning systems that make important contributions to

57 how cities are imagined, lived, and transformed, and highlight the need for the planning profession to recognize and engage with these actors and practices (Simone & Pieterse, 2017). This discussion also applies to forms of community-led approaches including co-production and covert planning that express citizenship but do not necessarily use insurgency to seek recognition and negotiate value in cities, as discussed in Chapter 2. Conceptualizing citizenship as a practice is useful in recognizing the practices of residents of informal settlements in upgrading processes. The concept of ordinary citizenship is useful in recognizing the individual and collective everyday and ordinary practices of people living in informal settlements, incrementally constructing the places where they live as a process of place-making (Lombard, 2015).

An important dimension of the concept of citizenship is to recognize the importance of belonging. Belonging is also a plural concept that can be conceptualized at different scales. The concept entails an emotional connotation associated with feeling at home in a place, or a feeling of rootedness associated with feelings of sense of place, place attachment and place identity. Antonsich (2010) identifies five factors which contribute to the generation of the feeling of belonging: auto-biographical (i.e. history, personal experiences, relations and memories that attach a person to a particular place), relational factors (i.e. personal and social ties such as gender that enrich the life of an individual in a given place), cultural factors (i.e. language, race), economic factors (i.e. profession), and legal factors (i.e. residency permits). Thus, belonging implies a recognition of identity, arising from citizens’ race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnic distinctions, and their relationships with class (Bauder, 2016). Also, Antonsich (2010) explains that belonging is not just an individual but also a collective feeling, as belonging to a place can imply belonging to a group of people, thus belonging becomes synonymous with identity, both social and individual. Membership in a group and ownership of a place are key factors in what is known as the politics of belonging, which derives from the collective sense of belonging such as that experienced by Indigenous societies and racialized urban spaces (Antonsich, 2010).

The discussion on belonging leads to the concept of recognition. Balaton-Chrimes (2017) explains that recognition in the context of development is related to claims based on identity, whether ethnic, racial, cultural, sexual or gendered, that can be tangled with specific aspirations on the spatial re-configuration of space. Those

58 aspirations can be understood as individual and collective expressions of the self. Thus, recognition claims go beyond redistribution and include political recognition of difference in the ways cities and places are shaped, freedom, self-determination, and self-realization (Balaton-Chrimes and Stead, 2017). Recognition is related to the concepts of belonging and citizenship in that rights and obligations should not be only recognized as prescribed under national laws. There is a need for recognition and inclusion of other ways of life, relationships with the land and the city, and cultural identities than demand other models for the city, different from those perpetuated by neoliberal values and market-oriented policies.

Recognition differs from participation and collaboration, key concepts within the planning literature (Healey, 1997), advocating for the inclusion of all stakeholders in planning processes (Innes, Connick & Booher, 2007). Collaboration and participation have been criticized mainly because of their disassociation from the power and systemic realities that characterize urban development (Yiftachel & Huxley, 2000). Furthermore, critics have claimed a focus on decision-making rather than on the actual spatial or physical outcomes derived from these processes (McGuirk, 2001). Similarly, development and planning theorists have claimed that collaborative and participatory planning exercises have become a vehicle of de-politicization of development and manipulation of disadvantaged groups by the powerful, rather than an avenue for social and political transformation (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Mansuri & Rao, 2004). Collaboration and consensus are also seen as an avenue to move forward the neoliberal agenda through discourse on ‘good governance’ and participation (Miraftab, 2009). Following these shortcomings, Brownill & Parker (2010) suggest that planning debates on urban governance and participation are now in a post-collaborative phase. Recognition is then a useful concept that engages with the complexity of power relationships that are at play in urban governance.

Porter (2014) argues that mechanisms and processes for recognition in planning that in the context of upgrading include land title, compensation, and participation in upgrading processes, are embedded with neoliberal logics and assumptions that are masked under the promises of ‘rights’. Ultimately, these mechanisms benefit those in power, reproduce inequalities and can potentially lead to dispossession rather than truly secure social and spatial justice. These arguments pose great challenges for

59 planning and associated upgrading processes, and highlight the need to seek alternatives for recognition able to truly respect the citizenship rights and belonging to place of vulnerable groups in cities. Furthermore, these arguments emphasize the need to understand how vulnerable groups such as the urban poor build power and their capacity to influence and transform the structures that create social and spatial injustice in cities (Levy, 2015; Beard, 2018; Roitman, 2019).

A key condition for successful upgrading efforts of informal settlements in the global south has been the recognition of informal practices as legitimate, and enabling formal-informal relationships through governance and spatial arrangements (Altrock, 2012). The Baan Mankong program in Thailand is perhaps one of the most recognized examples in the literature where formal (in this case a national fund from the Ministry of Social Development) and informal financial mechanisms (community savings groups) form hybrid formal-informal arrangements for the upgrading of informal settlements driven by community networks of the urban poor (Boonyabancha, 2009). Another example includes the process of social urbanism in Medellin, Colombia. Here the ‘informal’ practices of residents of informal settlements are enhanced through municipality-driven spatial interventions including transport, public and open spaces, and small-scale infrastructure upgrading, and used to improve quality of life and connections with other parts of the city (see Sotomayor, 2016). Also, the 2001 City Statute in Brazil recognized the social function of land and housing and enabled the implementation of planning instruments such as the AEIS-2 (Special Areas of Social Interest) in municipal areas, which relaxed land use standards and occupation norms to facilitate the in situ upgrading of favelas, ensuring that people living in these areas could maintain their existing livelihoods, assets and social networks while infrastructure upgrading (such as for roads, drainage, lighting and open space) improved their existing way of life (see Reali & Alli, 2010). Further to this there are cases where residents of informal settlements have used upgrading to enter the political realm, claim their rights to the city and move forward the discursive formal/informal divisions that exclude and marginalizes them (Roitman, 2019). One example of these practices is the Asian Coalition Community Action Program (ACCA) of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) that gave small funds to organized communities for small infrastructure upgrading to give visibility to urban poor

60 communities and support them to build relationships with key government officials and gain recognition (Boonyabancha, Carcellar, & Kerr, 2012).

The importance of collective action for recognition in upgrading is evidenced in the literature. As previously explained in Chapter 2, collective action is a mechanism to build power within vulnerable groups. Residents of informal settlements organize and use collective action to develop activities to increase visibility and advocate and negotiate access to secure land, housing, infrastructure, livelihood opportunities and political participation. Enumerations are one important strategy that the urban poor use for these purposes. Enumerations are processes where residents of informal settlements survey and map the settlement. Through the information and the collective process they experience, residents build the skills and knowledge to represent themselves, their settlements and their needs to government (Patel, Baptist & D’Cruz, 2012). Further to enumerations, saving groups are another strategy that residents of informal settlements use to practice citizenship. Saving groups are used to build a financial resource base within poor and low-income communities that, if working properly, provide opportunities for financial independence to address their needs, but at the same time leverage political recognition in upgrading processes (Mitlin, 2008b). In some cases, saving groups are used to initiate linkages with formal financial sources and scale up the development of housing and infrastructure for low-income and urban poor families at the city level (Leonhardt, 2012; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2018). Both enumerations and saving groups are practices of citizenship that have resulted in the empowerment of urban poor communities and a change in the donor-beneficiary relationship that characterizes most approaches used in informal settlement upgrading. The political support gained through these processes is stronger when linkages are expanded through networks of urban poor communities operating at the neighbourhood, city, national and international scales (Herrle, Ley & Fokdal, 2015). By being financially organized, communities have power to negotiate and persuade government authorities to be recognized, as well as leverage additional financial resources for upgrading. In this regard, finance is used as a political strategy to obtain recognition of the urban poor as citizens in contexts of weak institutional support (see for example Boonyabancha, Carcellar & Kerr, 2012).

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Through these processes, residents develop collective identity to the place they live and a sense of belonging to this place. This not only helps form the political basis for their engagement with government, but can also be used to generate collective and other living arrangements in the city outside the neoliberal model (Patel, Baptist & D’Cruz, 2012). These alternative living arrangements are summarized by Cabannes (2013), who provides an overview of non-individual forms of land tenure, housing and more generally the city, which are key to the social function of space. These models include cooperative regimes, mutual aid cooperatives, community land trusts, and communal tenure and customary rights. Collective forms of land tenure and organization not only provide an opportunity to express the collective identity that some residents of informal settlements have, but can also be strategies to limit speculation in the market and protect low-income families from market-based dispossession (Ganapati, 2014). Also, collective forms of tenure and finance help build and maintain community networks, which they are if strong help to resist threats and evictions from the state (see Cabannes, Yafai & Johnson, 2010). Thus, collective action is a key condition to legitimize and enforce the citizenship rights of people living in informal settlements, and an avenue to enhance their sense of belonging and recognition in the city (Rolnik, 2014).

3.7 Conceptual Framework Based on the literature review presented in Chapters 2 and 3, I discuss here the key concepts informing the conceptual framework of the thesis and my research questions. The research enquiry of this thesis departs from the problem of binary thinking in planning. As explained, binaries are a characteristic of western thought and capitalism, ingrained in systems of planning since colonial times, that reproduce unequal power relationships in cities. In the context of urban informality, the formal/informal dichotomy perpetuates a hierarchical way of thinking that excludes and marginalizes what is seen as informal or not compliant with formal planning systems. Within the informal/formal dichotomy there is also an individual/collective dichotomy that favours individual values in the organization of land and property over collective relationships to place and collective living arrangements, that for vulnerable groups are essential in maintaining collective action and power to resist processes of accumulation by dispossession. This happens as the normative approaches to formalization imply conversion toward individual systems of property rights. Thus, binary thinking

62 obscures the reality of difference in cities, a key condition proposed by Young (1990) for progressing social and spatial justice.

In order to transcend binaries in urban informality, there is an increasing need to produce evidence and document formal and informal relationships in cities of the global south. As explained in this chapter in the context of informal settlements upgrading this enquiry is necessarily linked to an analysis on power relationships between actors, practices and mechanisms in the struggle for land access, finance for housing, infrastructure, and livelihoods, citizenship and political recognition. Here, understanding the role of collective action within formal and informal relationships is essential as most responses to urban informality are driven by market values that perpetuate individualism, such as individual property rights. Thus market-based solutions to urban informality obscure the collective forms, support networks and sources of power that vulnerable groups use to negotiate value in the city and resist state and market-based dispossession in neoliberal cities. Thus, producing evidence of formal and informal relationships, and the limitations of the individual/collective dichotomy in urban informality is essential to inform planning knowledge for social and spatial justice in the global south. These theoretical discussions and research gaps inform the research questions of my study presented in Chapter 4 contextualized in the case of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Spatial and social justice is understood in my research as a plural concept, not only encompassing a distributional and institutional dimension (Harvey, 2003; Young, 1990), but also, the capacity within development practices and institutions to recognize social and spatial diversity beyond the neoliberal model. Here, neoliberalism is understood as a socio-economic development process favouring open, competitive and unregulated markets (Peck, Theodore & Brenner, 2009). Neoliberalism perpetuates a series of logics including hierarchies, market discipline, privatization, commodification of space, financialization, competition, and individualism. These logics enable market-oriented policies, and have deep antipathy to forms of social and institutional solidarity (Peck, Theodore & Brenner, 2009). Neoliberalism is driven by the state and powerful actors in cities and imposed over the city through social and spatial systems including land formalization policies.

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In my research, urban informality is understood as a structural phenomenon that is the expression of the uneven nature of capitalist development (Rakowski, 1994). This recognizes that power inequalities produce informality, and that these are shaped by historical, political and socio-economic structures. Based on this my research uses two key concepts to illustrate how power relationships operate within formal and informal relationships in the context of informal settlements upgrading in Phnom Penh. The first concept is the use of the formal/informal dichotomy as a ‘governmental tool’ (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012) by the state and powerful actors in cities. This helps me to evidence how the state is involved in the production and reproduction of informality, and the resulting social and spatial injustices that the use of this dichotomy generates. Further to this, I use the concept of ‘negotiability of value’ (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004) to evidence how formal and informal relationships involve vulnerable groups’ struggle for recognition of their citizenship rights, and legitimate place in the city.

Power is understood in this thesis based on Foucault’s conceptualization explaining power not as a fixed force centralized in a particular source (e.g. the state) but as fluid circulating among all individuals (or groups). This means that when power is exercised it is done over subjects with agency given a field of possibilities to transform this power through behaviour, mode of reaction, strategies and tactics (De Certau, 1984). This conceptualization presents power not only as a negative force capable of generating repression, coercion and domination (Lukes, 2005), but also as a productive, transformative and positive force (Foucault 1976a; 1976b; 1982). Thus, as explained in Chapter 2, for social and spatial justice to occur agents need to build the capacity to exert ‘power with’ (Ife, 2016) and expand this power to transform the spatial, political, economic and social structures that are in place (Castells, 1983).

In this light collective action is defined in this study as ‘a broad range of social phenomena in which social actors engage in common activities for demanding and/or providing collective goods’ (Beard, 2018, p. 3) and the available mechanism that ordinary citizens can use to transform spatial, political, economic and social structures (Castells, 1983). This definition is related to the concept of ‘power with’ (Ife, 2016) which emphasizes the principle that we do not act alone but together in solidarity and opens up the possibility of collective rather than individual power. This notion is

64 different from the idea of ‘power over’ which suggests individual forms of domination and hierarchy and power over other people or groups (Ife, 2016).

In this study, I analyze formal informal relationships in the context of informal settlements upgrading. Upgrading is conceptualized as a process of place-making (Lombard, 2015) that opens up possibilities for social and spatial transformation by contributing to redistribution of power, resources and means of access to the benefits of city life (Fiori & Brandão, 2010). I focus then on analyzing upgrading practices of different actors taking into account land, finance for housing, infrastructure and livelihoods, citizenship and political recognition. Citizenship in this research is understood as being ordinary (Staeheli et al., 2012) and insurgent (Holston, 2009) and practised outside formal systems and laws. Belonging is understood as an emotional connotation associated with feeling at home in a place, or a feeling of rootedness associated with place identity. Thus, belonging implies a recognition of individual and/or collective identity, arising from citizens’ race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnic distinctions, and their relationships with class (Bauder, 2016). Within this analysis my research questions the possibilities for recognition and the achievement of social and spatial justice through upgrading practices. Recognition is understood as claims based on identity, either class, ethnic, racial, cultural, sexual or gendered, that can be tangled with the spatial re-configuration of space. Recognition can be individual and collective, and enables redistribution of resources, and political recognition of difference and alternative models in the way cities and places are shaped and developed (Balaton-Chrimes and Stead, 2017). This understanding of recognition fits well within the structural understanding of urban informality demanding to move forward binary thinking in cities and the capacity to recognize social and spatial diversity in upgrading beyond the neoliberal model in order to achieve social and spatial justice.

3.8 Conclusion In this chapter, I have discussed how formal and informal relationships manifest in the context of informal settlements, and practices for their upgrading. As happens with other forms of informality, the formal/informal divide has been used to exclude and marginalize informal settlements and the practices, aspirations and needs of the people living in these settlements. This has generated a range of injustices in cities

65 that violate the rights to the city of people living in these settlements. The formal/informal dichotomy has led to the idea that formalization is the only and most appropriate solution for informal settlements, in particular in the context of land. This happens even when formalization is recognized as being a governmental tool to control, and an attempt to reproduce the logics of neoliberalism, such as market efficiency which ultimately benefits only a few.

Thus, I support the arguments that see formalization as obscuring diversity and difference in cities, which respond to the sense of belonging and identity of diverse groups and their claims for social and spatial justice. Further to this, I explained the different forms of collective action and planning that vulnerable groups use in the context of upgrading to seek visibility and recognition, evidencing how formal and informal relationships are characterized by negotiability of value in this particular context. These collective forms of planning have been key in the struggle for the recognition of social and spatial upgrading strategies that enable and recognize formal and informal relationships.

In this chapter I also presented the conceptual framework of the study, which sums up the key concepts and ideas informing my research questions based on the literature review. These questions are presented and explained in the next chapter along with the methodology used in this study.

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Chapter 4 Research methodology

4.1 Introduction The literature review presented in Chapters 2 and 3 has pointed to the importance of transcending binaries in urban informality, and an increasing need for research to produce evidence and document formal and informal relationships in cities of the global south. Research into formal and informal relationships in this context needs to account for the structural nature of urban informality (Rakowski, 1994), the power inequalities between actors in cities, and the implications of the state and planning in producing and reproducing urban informality (Roy, 2005, 2009; McFarlane, 2012). In the context of informal settlements upgrading this enquiry is necessarily linked to an analysis on power relationships between actors, practices and mechanisms in the struggle for land access, finance for housing, infrastructure, and livelihoods, citizenship and political recognition. Here, understanding the role of collective action within formal and informal relationships is essential as most responses to urban informality are driven by market values that perpetuate individualism. Thus market- based solutions to urban informality obscure the collective forms, support networks and sources of power that vulnerable groups use to negotiate value in the city and resist state and market-based dispossession. Thus, producing evidence of formal and informal relationships, and the limitations of the individual/collective dichotomy in urban informality is essential to inform planning knowledge for social and spatial justice in the global south. These theoretical discussions and research gaps inform the proposed research questions and methodological approach presented in this chapter.

4.2 Research Questions

4.2.1 Principal Research Question How can the understanding of formal and informal relationships in settlement upgrading in Phnom Penh inform planning knowledge for the development of just cities in the global south?

Based on the theoretical discussion presented in chapters two and three, this overarching question aims to understand the formal and informal relationships in the

67 context of practices for informal settlements upgrading; and analyze how these relationships contribute knowledge into planning systems and assumptions to develop just cities in the urban global south. This question departs from the concern and debates in the literature associated with binary thinking and current planning practices and approaches, and their inability to respond well to the challenges associated with the rapid urban growth and informality characterizing most cities of the global south. The question places the formal/informal interface and its relationship with justice as the central theoretical debates to which the question aims to contribute. The following sub-questions are proposed to help answer the principal research question.

4.2.2 Secondary question 1 How do historical, political and socio-economic structures shape understanding and practices toward urban informality in Phnom Penh?

In this question I use theoretical discussions presented in chapters two and three sustaining the understanding of informality as structural (Rakowski, 1994). This understanding highlights the importance of recognizing power relationships as the root cause of informality as well as the implications of social and political dynamics in its unfolding (Roy, 2005; 2009). Hence, I identify and discuss how historical, political and socio-economic forces shape the understanding and practices of urban informality, specifically informal settlements, in Phnom Penh. This question helps to identify key actors and their practices involved in upgrading informal settlements in Phnom Penh, the assumptions behind these practices, and the historical, political and socio- economic factors that have shaped them. I focus on analyzing actors, practices and structural conditions at the city scale providing the context for the case study. The responses to this question are analyzed with the lens of social and spatial justice and contribute to answering the principal research question of the study.

4.2.3 Secondary question 2 How are formal and informal relationships manifested in land use practices in informal settlements, and what are the implications of these relationships in the production and reproduction of social and spatial injustices in Phnom Penh?

In this question, I focus on analyzing the issue of land to understand formal and informal relationships in the context of informal settlements. I use the case study to

68 identify and discuss the origins of the condition of urban informality associated with the case study site and its relationship with land legislation, planning frameworks and the state. I focus on understanding how informality is produced and reproduced by formal systems (Roy, 2009) and the social and spatial injustices that these relationships generate for informal settlements. Overall, the question contributes to answering the principal research question of this thesis by explaining how formal and informal relationships are manifested in the context of land use and planning in Phnom Penh, and the implications of these relationships for social and spatial justice.

4.2.4 Secondary question 3 How are collective practices of urban poor communities used to legitimize their claims to land and citizenship in Phnom Penh?

In this question I analyze the capacity and opportunities that collective action present for urban poor communities in Phnom Penh to build power with (Ife, 2016; Roitman, 2019). Also, I focus on understanding how urban poor communities use collective action to expand this power to move forward the formal/informal divide within planning and governance systems classifying their practices as ‘informal’ and/or ‘illegitimate’. This question helps in analyzing formal and informal relationships in governance and planning systems, giving visibility to different forms of planning and actors that collectively organize themselves in face of exclusion and marginalization. The implications of these relationships are discussed within their meaning and contribution to planning knowledge for social and spatial justice.

4.2.5 Secondary question 4 How do market-led solutions to informality threaten the tenure security and recognition of the claims to justice of the urban poor in Phnom Penh?

In this question I analyze the causes of market-based displacement experienced by residents of Phka based on their individual financial practices and a process of gentrification experienced in the settlement. I also explain how SLR intensified market-based dispossession, already experienced under conditions of informality, because of the financialization of land and housing and the lack of support toward maintaining residents’ collective support systems. Furthermore, I explain that even though SLR and obtaining land title was important for residents of Phka, their claims

69 for recognition and social and spatial justice went well beyond receiving title. The research question questions the effectiveness of land formalization programs ingrained with formal/informal and individual/collective dichotomies in benefiting the urban poor and contributing to social and spatial justice in Phnom Penh.

4.3 Justification for the use of qualitative research enquiry and case study method The research questions in this thesis required me to examine power relationships between actors in cities, including perceptions, attitudes, experiences and opinions of people in Phnom Penh. Thus, the use of qualitative research methods is most appropriate as it helps to understand the experiences of research participants in their own terms. Creswell (1998) defines qualitative research as ‘an enquiry process of understanding based on distinct methodological traditions of inquiry that explore a social or human problem. The researcher builds a complex, holistic picture, analyses words, reports, detailed views of informants and conducts the study in a natural setting’ (Creswell, 1998, p. 15). This highlights how qualitative enquiry allows research to engage with complexity and to understand a phenomenon from a specific natural setting and the respondents’ perspective (not just the researcher’s perspective). I use constructivism as the epistemological paradigm informing the study, assuming that knowledge is constructed together by the researcher and participants in the research using qualitative methods that facilitate their interaction (Guba & Lincon, 1994). I use qualitative research, specifically case study research, as an explanatory research strategy (as opposed to exploratory or descriptive) to answer the how and why, of my research questions (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Yin, 2009).

A single case study research method of one informal settlement in Phnom Penh is recognized as highly appropriate for understanding complex social phenomena such as formal/informal relationships in informal settlement upgrading as proposed in this research (Watson, 2002; Flyvbjerg, 2006; Yin, 2009; Duminy, Odendaal & Watson, 2014). Case studies are contextually grounded, comprehensive and empirically detailed, and their strength lie at their capacity of providing opportunities for intensive analysis to understanding complexity and producing detailed knowledge (Yin, 2009). What is distinctive about the case study method is the process of drawing conceptual, spatial and temporal boundaries around a case unit and granting special attention to

70 what occurs within these boundaries (Duminy, Odendaal & Watson, 2014). Case studies are therefore studies of something in particular and their essential task is to understand the uniqueness and complexity of a single case (Watson, 2002; Duminy, Odendaal & Watson, 2014). However, case studies always involve investigating events or actions in their real-life contexts, thus they focus on actors as well as structures with the intention of explaining the case in relation to its real-life context (Duminy, Odendaal & Watson, 2014).

Contrary to conventional understandings, case studies can be used to generalize the particular knowledge acquired from the case. Single-case studies are typically seen as generalizable only in their capacity, through their depth of detail to evoke an empathetic or comparative response from the reader’s own experience, this is known as ‘naturalistic generalization’ (Stake, 1978). Here, the case study’s association with detail and experience offers the basis for learning than do abstract rules or theories (Watson, 2002). Thus, making a case study generalizable is about ensuring that it is ‘relatable’ and ‘transferable’ to enable a process of experience-based learning (Duminy, Odendaal & Watson, 2014). To do this the reader needs to have understanding of the details and context of the case study and how this context differs from others that may be more familiar. This type of generalisation differs from ‘analytical generalisation’ in which theory is used as a template to compare the empirical results of the case study with other similar cases, and in this way contribute to knowledge (Flyvbjerg, 2006). In this research I use the specific case study and the social, political and economic context of the city to provide explanations of how formal and informal relationships unfold in one particular city of the global south. By producing specific and detailed knowledge about the case and the specific context where it unfolds, I aim to contribute knowledge to the wider global south by making the research findings available to be used and compared with wider scholarly work arising from the cities of the global south that produces knowledge embedded within the specificities of this context. In the discussion of my research findings I use other studies in cities of the global south to highlight the similarities with other Southern contexts and inform wider planning knowledge. These considerations fit within wider debates concerning the development of a view ‘from the South’ within general bodies of urban knowledge and theory (Watson, 2009b).

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4.4 Case Study Design There is no universal principle for the selection of a good case study, as there are a variety of issues that can impact case study design and selection such as having access to research locations and data (Duminy, Odendaal & Watson, 2014). I chose Phnom Penh as the city to conduct the research because I had previous experience living in the city and working in the particular topic of research. I had access to networks with civil society organisations and representatives of urban poor communities that facilitated my access to the case study. Also, Phnom Penh has one of the fastest rates of urbanization in South East Asia. This makes it a city in transition, contested by various development interests and a presence of a dynamic informal sector that plays an important role in the development of the country, as reflected in the growth of informal settlements as well as the informal economy in the capital. This makes Phnom Penh an appropriate and interesting city to conduct studies on urban informality. Furthermore, as explained in Chapter 5, Phnom Penh has a long and difficult history associated with the treatment of informal settlements and upgrading interventions involving a range of different actors and practices. This makes Phnom Penh an appropriate and interesting context to study formal and informal relationships in the context of informal settlements upgrading. The aim of applying a case study methodology for this research was to generate knowledge from people including perceptions, experiences and opinions about the relationships between formal and informal systems experienced in this particular city. The case study is also contextualized within the historical, political, social, and economic characteristics driving urban development in Phnom Penh.

The research focuses on one informal settlement in Phnom Penh, for which details are provided in Chapter 6. I used three criteria based on the literature review and the proposition of research questions and conceptual framework presented in Chapter 3 to select the case: insecurity of tenure, financial investments already in place, and the existence of collective action. Based on these criteria I consulted with different organizations (in particular non-government organizations) working with informal settlements in Phnom Penh to identify the settlement. These criteria ensured that the characteristics of the informal settlement were appropriate to study formal and informal relationships to inform the research questions. Also, these criteria defined the units of analysis for the case, making it an embedded case were subunits of analysis are

72 identified to allow in-depth research into specific events and actions (Yin,2009). The definition of manageable subunits of analysis allows the identification of ‘boundaries’ to designate the case study and its sources of data. Without these boundaries the researcher faces the risk of studying a ‘case of everything’ without a clear empirical focus. Also, the definition of analytical subunits is useful to determine how the case study can relate to a broader body of knowledge by using similar studies focused on the topics of these subunits (Duminy, Odendaal & Watson, 2014). The three criteria are explained below:

 Settlement with no tenure security: The lack of tenure security is the key characteristic of informal settlements (Durand-Lasserve, 2006). In the study this criterion was necessary and instrumental to understand formal and informal relationships and the implications these have for social and spatial justice. This criterion facilitated the analysis on how planning and land laws shaped the idea of informality in this particular settlement, the formal and informal land use practices and their relationships in questions of land security and citizenship, and the relationships between financial practices of residents and formal and informal systems of finance.

 Settlement where financial investments (housing, infrastructure, and livelihood) had been undertaken: It was important that the settlement to be studied had investments by its residents in housing, infrastructure, and livelihood activities. This was relevant because of the significant relationship between finance and security of tenure, justifying the relevance of understanding relationships between the informal financial practices of residents with formal and informal systems of finance, and the implications these had for their ‘informality’ and security of tenure.

 Settlement with collective action: The potential of collective action in being a source of power and contributing toward improving the lives of people living in informal settlements and social and spatial justice is widely recognized in the literature (Mitlin, 2008a; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2015; Levy, 2015; Beard, 2018; Roitman, 2019). It was important to select a settlement where collective action was present within residents in order to understand how power relationships unfolded between the community and other actors in Phnom Penh, and how

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the formal/informal and individual/collective divide was manifested in this particular case. This was particularly important as not many people living in informal settlements in Phnom Penh are successful in building and enduring in collective action as explained in Chapters 6 and 8.

I consider this case to be a deviant case, understood as an unusual case in the sense that it is especially good compared to other informal settlements in Phnom Penh (Flyvbjerg, 2006). This is particularly because of the presence of financial investments in housing, infrastructure and livelihood, as well as collective action within residents. Thus, the case was selected on the basis of expectations about its information and content and expected to reveal much information than typical or average cases by activating more actors and mechanisms involved in the study of formal and informal relationships. To ensure that the case study was complemented with knowledge on the social, political and economic context of the city, the research was informed by the experiences of community leaders of three other informal settlements presenting different characteristics to the one studied, as well as the experiences of civil society organizations, and government and private institutions involved in urban planning, housing finance and informal settlements upgrading in Phnom Penh. The specificities of the historical, political, social and economic context of Phnom Penh also help me sustain the consideration of this case as a deviant case compared to other cities of the global south.

4.5 Field trips and site visits I made two field trips to Phnom Penh to re-connect and establish new networks, gain access to the case study and collect data to inform the research.

The first field trip was in March 2015 for 30 days. During this field trip I conducted initial consultations with non-government organizations and community leaders and visits to informal settlements in Phnom Penh. I also created and re-established networks with academics, international organizations, and government officials, as well as collecting documents such as government policies, research studies and reports to inform the research. During this field trip, I identified a research assistant to help me as an interpreter during more extensive periods of research. This field trip was significant in establishing support networks, providing an introduction and broader perspective to the situation of informal settlements in Phnom Penh, and visiting different informal

74 settlements in the city to start the selection of the case study. This was facilitated by previous networks that I had in Phnom Penh as I had lived and worked in this city in the past. The field trip was also valuable for experiencing the opportunities and challenges of conducting in-depth case study research on this topic in this city and country. Overall, the field trip was essential for making an initial scope of the case study and it helped me to refine research questions, re-establish research networks and create new ones.

The second field trip to Phnom Penh lasted three months (August to October 2015). With the research questions refined as well as the established support networks, I identified the settlement to be used as the case study. An initial meeting was conducted with community leaders in the settlement to explain the purpose and objectives of the research. Contextual information about the settlement and support for future site visits was obtained in this meeting. After this, I conducted regular site visits with the interpreter to the settlement to collect data. Site visits were conducted three days per week (for about 4–6 hours per day) for eight weeks. During this field trip, I also set up appointments with and collected data from community leaders from other informal settlements, government, non-government, international, and private institutions involved in the upgrading of informal settlements in Phnom Penh.

4.6 Data collection methods The strength of case studies, in comparison to other research methods, is their ability to deal with a full variety of evidence (Yin, 2009). The case study in this research was informed by collecting qualitative data using multiple social research methods, informed by the research questions. Some quantitative data was also collected to inform the situation of informal settlements in Phnom Penh.The following presents the four methods used and describes how these were used in the research.

4.6.1 Document Reviews Quantitative and qualitative information was collected from academic studies, research studies and reports conducted by non-government, private and government organizations, as well as government policies, and government statistics. This information was also collected from informal settlement profiles and surveys made by community-based organizations and non-governmental organizations, real estate

75 market analysis, and media articles from two local English-speaking Cambodian newspapers the Phnom Penh Post and the Cambodian Daily.

An initial document review using academic articles, government policies and documents, and other research reports was conducted to understand the trajectory and context of informal settlements in Phnom Penh, and the different policies and approaches that have been applied to manage informal settlements in the city. In particular, the review focused on identifying the actors, policies and financial approaches used for the upgrading of these settlements in Phnom Penh. This review also helped in identifying research that had already been conducted on informal settlements in Phnom Penh. The document review was complemented with interviews of government, community, private and non-government actors, conducted during the field trips.

In addition, supplementary documents such as government statistics, community profiles and surveys, and real estate analysis were used as quantitative baseline information to inform and contextualize the case study. This information was also complemented with qualitative data collected from methods such as interviews and focus group discussions.

4.6.2 Semi-structured face-to-face interviews I conducted 50 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with residents from the informal settlement chosen for the case study, community leaders of informal settlements, government officials, private banks, micro-finance institutions, NGO staff, international development agencies and academics, all of whom could provide different perspectives on the circumstances affecting the case study site. This range of actors was important to gain a full range of perspectives on urban informality and planning in Phnom Penh, as well as understanding power relationships and dynamics in the city. The use of semi-structured interviews meant that while engaged in the conversation, I used semi-structured questions to gently nudge responses toward topics that were more relevant to the research but maintained flexibility by allowing the participant to guide the conversation.

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4.6.2.1 Sampling Purposive and snowballing sampling techniques were used to select interviewees. Purposive sampling involves the researcher actively selecting informants based on their knowledge and expertise about who can best inform the aims of the study (Marshall, 1996). I started the research contacting relevant organizations working closely with urban poor communities, and with their support and advice identified the settlement to be studied in accordance with the criteria explained in Section 4.4. Stewart-Withers, Banks, McGregor and Meo-Sewabu (2014) explain that the sample size in qualitative studies becomes more obvious as the study progresses as new categories, themes or explanations stop emerging from the data, a process known as data saturation. Based on this, thirty interviews with households and twenty interviews with government, non-government and private sector stakeholders were considered sufficient for informing the research. Interviews and regular conversations with key informants were essential in complementing and clarifying information and played an important role in helping me to construct knowledge regarding the case study.

4.6.2.2 Interviews with residents of informal settlements Within the settlement I contacted community leaders through previously established networks at non-governmental organizations to collect essential and contextual information about the settlement and gain support for conducting the research. After this step, a mix of snowballing and purposive sampling was conducted with the support of the community leaders putting me in contact with residents in the settlement, and then residents themselves contacting me with referrals to other residents for interview. Initially the interviews were conducted with a group of residents that had been living in the settlement for a long time and had good knowledge to inform the research, and after this, using snowballing sampling, other groups of residents such as wealthier households and people renting rooms were included in the research.

Thanks to the purposive and snowballing sampling techniques, the sample for the study within the informal settlement was diverse. I was able to include a representative sample composed of wealthier and low-income households, men and women, and young and old. This ensured the responses included different opinions and experiences from residents. In some cases, households preferred not to participate in the research and others were hard to find as they were busy working or away in the

77 provinces. The interviews with residents were conducted in Khmer with translation to English by a Khmer interpreter and research assistant. The role of the interpreter was key in facilitating the interviews with residents and collection of information. The research assistant that supported me was a local professional and educated woman with very good understanding of the topic I was researching. She had also worked in the settlement that I studied and had good relationships with community leaders and key people in the community.

The interviews with residents lasted between 1 and 1.5 hours and were sometimes longer depending on the respondent. Notes on the interview and participant responses were taken by the interpreter and me. After each interview these notes were shared, clarified and complemented by me and the interpreter. The notes were then typed into the computer every day in a private space after conducting each interview. I decided not to digitally record the audio of the interviews following advice from local researchers as well as community leaders. Not recording the interviews allowed participants to feel more comfortable to share information with a foreign researcher. This was particularly relevant as some topics discussed during the interviews were sensitive, relating to urban land and political interests, and given the sensitivity of these issues in the context of Phnom Penh, it was more appropriate not to record the interviews. Not being able to record interviews while doing research in development contexts is acknowledged in the literature as an issue that many researchers experience (Stewart-Withers et al., 2014). In these cases, taking notes and transcribing these is seen as an appropriate response.

During the interviews I motivated the residents to tell me the story of their lives in the settlement and in the city, and the changes they had experienced over time as a result of various investments in their houses, livelihoods, and community. As seen in Chapters 7, 8 and 9 I used some of these stories to communicate my research findings. I found stories to be highly appropriate for interacting with participants from a different background than mine, as well as an effective way of communicating complex information. I also encouraged participants to express their motivations, feelings and expectations about their lives, as well as the nature of their relationships with neighbours, government and non-government organizations. To encourage these responses, I allowed residents to freely talk about what was important for them but at

78 the same time nudged the direction of the conversation toward topics that were more relevant to the research. Some quotes from these responses were recorded in notes and used to present the research findings in Chapters 7, 8 and 9.

Apart from these interviews, I regularly paid visits and had conversations (including two formal interviews) with two community leaders who acted as key informants and gatekeepers in the research. These key informants were instrumental in the research as they had a broad and comprehensive understanding of the history and current situation of their settlement, as well as issues related to informal settlements in Phnom Penh. They helped me not only to get access to people in their community to interview, but also to clarify information, access documents pertaining to issues of land security and other relevant policies/issues affecting their settlement, as well as giving a broader perspective of the current situation of informal settlements and urban poor people in Phnom Penh. This happened because the community leaders played an active role in working with networks of poor communities in Phnom Penh on issues regarding land and housing rights supported by NGOs and donors.

Community leaders from three different informal settlements were contacted through previously established networks in non-governmental organizations and visits were made to their settlements to conduct interviews with support from the local interpreter. In some cases, other people informally joined the conversation and thus the interviews sometimes resulted in focus group discussions, even when these were not intended. During my visits to other informal settlements I constrained the information collected to make sure I could compare it with the information collected from the principal case. In this way, collecting information from different informal settlements helps in obtaining what Yin (2009) calls rival explanations for the case study and places the particular experiences and characteristics of the informal settlement studied in the perspective of other experiences of informal settlements in Phnom Penh.

4.6.2.3 Interviews with participants from civil society, government, private sector and international development organizations Twenty interviews were conducted with participants from civil society, government, private sector and international development organizations. From these, there were three interviews with government officials including one official from the national

79 general department of housing, one official working at the planning office of the Phnom Penh Municipality, and a commune councillor. Two interviews were with representatives from private banks, three interviews were with representatives from micro-finance institutions, five interviews were with representatives from non- governmental organizations, two interviews were with representatives from international organizations, and two interviews were with academics. I used purposive and snowballing sampling to identify interview participants from these institutions. Initially, through a document review, I identified the relevant institutions playing a role in upgrading informal settlements and identified those institutions that were important to inform the research. Letters and emails were sent to private institutions to introduce the research and set up appointments for the interviews. Government officials, academics, non-government and international organizations were contacted through previously established networks using the snowballing technique. Representatives from international organizations and government officials were hard to reach and grant interviews for the research. However, the sample from this aspect of the research was diverse and able to provide a broad perspective on the topic of research in the context of Phnom Penh.

Interviews with government officials and private institutions used more structured questions to guide the responses toward specific topics of the research, as people did not have time to engage in long conversations. Interviews with non-government and international organizations were more flexible and I used a semi-structured guide of questions to facilitate the discussion. Only the interviews conducted with academics, non-governmental and international organizations were digitally recorded. The other interviews were not recorded as government officials and staff from private institutions were quite suspicious of the information collected by a foreign researcher on urban issues in Phnom Penh. It was more appropriate to take notes for the participant to feel more comfortable and willing to share information. Most of these interviews were conducted in English, apart from those conducted with one government official, and one staff member from a micro-finance institution. In general, the interviews lasted for about one hour. Notes and digital recordings were transcribed into the computer every day after each interview.

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4.6.2.4 Direct observation and photographs I used direct observation and photographs to collect information about the urban development context and dynamics in Phnom Penh, as well as the situation of the informal settlement studied. In the city I conducted field trips and collected photographs and notes from various sites while observing the characteristics of urban development in the city. These sites included satellite cities at the outskirts of Phnom Penh, previous lakes that are now filled in to make room for development, previous sites occupied by informal settlements that have suffered evictions and relocations, relocation sites, informal settlements, and private and public housing developments in the city. Furthermore, observations and photographs were taken during site visits to the informal settlement that was studied in order to gather information and evidence about daily life in the area, the various housing and infrastructure improvements, as well as the characteristics of each household that participated in the research. Photographs and observations have been used to illustrate my analysis in Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8.

4.6.2.5 Forums and Workshops During field work in Cambodia, I attended forums and workshops relevant to the topic of the research as follows:

 First public housing forum in Phnom Penh organized by the General Department of Housing under the Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction

 Two workshops organized by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights to disseminate their research on community finance in five countries in Asia: Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Philippines and Thailand

 One workshop organized by the Community Development Foundation (CDF) (previously Urban Poor Development Fund under Phnom Penh Municipality) to disseminate their research findings on community finance in Cambodia.

Observations, notes, recordings, photographs and documents were collected from these forums and workshops. Attending and participating in the workshops was

81 important to inform the research as it provided a broader perspective on the topic, including understanding of the actors involved and their different perspectives in relation to the financing of upgrading initiatives of informal settlements, not just from Cambodia, but also from different countries in Asia. The attendance at these forums and workshops also expanded my social and research networks and directed me to the right people to interview for the purposes of my research.

4.7 Ethics Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences (formerly the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management) of The University of Queensland. During data collection I behaved ethically toward participants by being aware and respectful of the contextual, cultural and gender differences between me and the participants, as well as the potential power imbalances that can arise by being a foreign researcher conducting research in poor communities. I was aware of my position as a young, female, relatively affluent and highly educated researcher in my interactions with participants as well as my limitation of not speaking the Khmer language. Apart from obtaining informed consent from participants, I ensured that participants were comfortable in sharing information. I didn’t give any gifts to participants but instead focused on building a relationship with them and genuinely paying attention to their stories and points of view. Also, I was flexible while conducting interviews so that participants were able to have ownership and control over the interview, as my role was more that of a guide. Not recording the interviews was also an important decision made to ensure participants felt more comfortable with the information shared. In addition to this, I ensured confidentiality of all responses, as well as providing open information about the research and the purpose of collecting information and giving my contact details to all participants in case of concerns and/or future questions. For this I developed consent and information forms which were translated into Khmer. However, in most cases, rather than asking participants to sign the form I read or explained it to them. This happened as most people felt uncomfortable signing the form. Also, I found that asking people to sign a paper at the first encounter damaged opportunities to build trust. Furthermore, I coded the data collected from the interviews so that no identification of the respondents can be made and stored this in a safe place that only I have access to.

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4.8 Data analysis Once the information was collected, the results were organized in a database outlining the information collected from each research method: interviews, document reviews, photos, notes from observations, and notes and documents collected from participating in forums and workshops. This database ensures that the information can be accessed easily for analysis. The database also ensures that the results and evidence of the research are not limited to a case study report (Yin, 2009).

Further to this I analyzed the data by reading and reviewing documents, notes and each interview conducted, and traced a ‘story’ (Yin, 2009) of the case study in light of the data collected. These ideas were recorded as notes in a notebook. Also, I used NVivo to code the interviews and identify key themes for the analysis of results. These themes ended up being a combination both of themes in accordance with the questions I asked the participants, and unexpected themes that emerged during my interview transcripts. The identification of key themes was useful in making sure that each theme was included in the discussion of results and made part of the analysis of the research findings presented in Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. Also the key themes identified were used to select stories presented in the findings chapter. My analysis also helped me in re-framing the research questions based on key information the data was showing.

4.9 Research limitations The research study encountered one main limitation, as explained below:

Cultural context: The study was conducted in a different culture and language affecting the researcher’s communication capacity with informants and understanding of social and contextual dynamics. This limitation was partly addressed by hiring a local research assistant during the data collection period to translate and assist with the findings. As I explained, the research assistant that I hired was a professional, educated woman with good understanding of the topic I was researching and had good relationships with community leaders in the settlement I studied. These characteristics facilitated addressing the limitations associated with the different cultural context as the interpreter not only translated for me but was able to contextualize the information collected

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within the broader research topics. Also, as a researcher I was aware of how my age, gender and background could affect the relationship and interactions with different actors and understanding of the findings. Continuous awareness and reflection on these limitations were important to avoid personal bias that could potentially intervene in the analysis of the findings.

4.10 Conclusion In this research I used qualitative research, specifically case study research, as an explanatory research strategy. I found that a single case study method was appropriate to produce in-depth knowledge of the informal settlement I studied and the context where it unfolds. I found a strength in the case study method by allowing me to draw conceptual, spatial and temporal boundaries around a case unit and granting special attention to what occurs within these boundaries. This sustains the argument that case studies are studies of something in particular and their essential task is to understand the uniqueness and complexity of a single case as well as its real-life context (Watson, 2002; Duminy, Odendaal & Watson, 2014). In this light, I consider the single-case study I used as generalizable only in its own capacity. This is known as ‘naturalistic generalization’ (Stake, 1978). Here, the case study’s association with detail offers the basis for learning instead of using abstract rules or theories (Watson, 2002). Despite this, I use other relevant studies in the global south to express relationships and applicability of my findings to other cities of the global south and inform planning knowledge, including theory and practice (Watson, 2002; Duminy, Odendaal & Watson, 2014). I use the specific case study and the social, political and economic context of the city to provide explanations of how formal and informal relationships unfold in Phnom Penh. By producing specific and detailed knowledge about the case and the specific context where it unfolds, I also contribute knowledge to the wider global south by making the research findings available to be used and compared with wider scholarly work arising within the specificities of this context. These considerations support wider debates concerning the development of a view ‘from the South’ within general bodies of urban knowledge and theory (Watson, 2009).

I found that the use of multiple data collection methods was useful and necessary as a foreign researcher working within a context of cultural and language difference. However, most important was having the ability to create networks and relationships

84 with key people to appropriately and respectfully gain access to the information needed to answer the research questions. This implied making compromises such as not recording all the interviews with participants, and adapting to people’s time and way of life, as well as respecting in some cases their unwillingness to share information. I also found it important to give participants clear and open information about the research, and before collecting data to make sure that parties’ expectations were clear. This was also important to manage power relationships between participants and myself as a researcher. I found that most people in Phnom Penh were happy to share their life story with me without expecting more than a genuine interest in their lives. Furthermore, choosing a good research assistant and interpreter can facilitate the research immensely. It is not enough that the person speaks English or any other foreign language well, but also that they have good understanding of the research topic and good social skills to help build relationships with participants. The next chapters present the findings of the research in the light of the research questions and methodology explained in this chapter.

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Chapter 5 The understanding and policy responses to urban informality in Phnom Penh

5.1 Introduction As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, urban informality is an expression of the uneven nature of capitalist development, and a result of broader power and capitalist structures, systems and forces (Rakowski, 1994). The aim of this chapter is to explain the structural nature of urban informality in Phnom Penh and evidence how power relationships are manifested in the understanding and responses to urban informality, in particular informal settlements. In this chapter I answer secondary research question number 1: How do historical, political and socio-economic structures shape the understanding and practices toward urban informality in Phnom Penh? To answer this question, I unpack key historical, political, social and economic factors that have influenced the understanding of urban informality in Phnom Penh, and explain how a discursive formal/informal dichotomy has been used by powerful actors to pursue a particular model of urban development, to satisfy their interests at the expense of vulnerable groups. Furthermore, I explain practices from civil society in Phnom Penh to legitimize the ‘informal’ and the tensions that exist within formal and informal relationships. In Section 5.2 I analyse key historical, political, economic and social structures shaping urban development of Phnom Penh, and urban informality in the context of land and housing. In Section 5.3, I explain the practices of the various actors involved in the upgrading of informal settlements. The chapter ends with a conclusion in Section 5.4 which provides a final overview of the context in which the case study used in this thesis unfolds, giving a broader understanding of the urban development dynamics of Phnom Penh and the tensions that exist in the negotiation of urban space and efforts to generate social and spatial justice in this particular city.

5.2 Key historical, political, and socio-economic structures influencing the understanding and responses to urban informality in Phnom Penh As in many other cities of the global south, Phnom Penh was subject to colonization and the imposition of a western development model that consolidated a hierarchy

86 between formal and informal systems, and undermined traditional systems of organization (Robinson, 2005). The French, under their colonial rule, negatively defined Phnom Penh’s traditional development practices in the light of absences and deficiencies and put forward major transformations in its urban form and governance systems through a form of rational planning. During this time, a western property rights system favouring private ownership was first introduced, diminishing Khmer traditional forms of land use and organization. French colonial buildings and streets replaced a city of thatch bamboo in response to modernist development leanings. French administrators introduced master planning to legislate new patterns of organization across space in response to what they perceived to be disorder of the capital and its social structure. However, these planning mechanisms were introduced to centralize control over space and the Khmer population and progress a particular form of urban development to favour of the colonizers and their economic and political interests over the Khmer territory (Nam, 2011).

It was at this point in history that a discursive divide between formal and informal sectors emerged in Phnom Penh as a governmental tool (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012) used to impose modernist ideals over the urban space through planning. This discourse favoured ‘formal’ development practices over those considered ‘informal’ and private individual ownership as the principal model of land ownership, obscuring the traditional Khmer ‘by the plough’ system. In this traditional system, all land belonged to the King but people were able to freely till their land and cultivate as much as they liked. With a small population and an absence of land market, the cultivating proprietor could move from one area to another on an ‘informal’ basis and without the need for formal documentation on the land (Boreak, 2000). After colonizing Cambodia in 1863, the French introduced the first Land Act in the country which allowed the registration of plots as private property. By the 1930s most of the land was divided into plots of less than five hectares and large plantations were established (Boreak, 2000).

The discursive formal/informal divide inherited from colonial times was perpetuated over time in Phnom Penh, by land laws, modernist development models and planning policies. For instance, following the end of French colonial rule in 1953 Phnom Penh entered a ‘golden age’ of post-independence urbanism; in the 1960s the city was named the prettiest capital in South East Asia (Nam, 2011). Under King Norodom

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Sihanouk (1941–2012) nation-building was directly associated with city building, and efforts to modernize the capital through ‘modern Khmer architecture’ were led by famous architect Vann Molyvann (Ross & Collins, 2006). Despite the importance of this period to Khmer identity, these development practices sustained a binary mentality perpetuating an eagerness to modernize what was seen as traditional and under- developed. The city continued to grow and with this growth the colonial order imposed by the French was expanded as seen in Figure 5.1. The golden period was as fragile as its political landscape, and from the 1970s it deteriorated with the overthrow of Sihanouk by the Lon Nol government and the influx of refugees as a result of the massive United States cross-border bombing campaign, and culminating in 1975 with the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime (Springer, 2010).

Figure 5.1 Phnom Penh’s urban expansion from 1958 (left) to 1968 (right) (Nam, 2011, p. 57)

Between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge proclaimed Cambodia as a worker-peasant revolutionary state. The Communist leader Pol Pot imposed economic isolation involving abolishing money, rejecting foreign capital, killing educated people and artists, and sending children, women and men to work in collective camps (Kiernan, 2008). During this period collective behaviour was imposed, private property was

88 abolished, and all land records were destroyed. These events had enormous implications in Khmer society such as a destruction of trust and solidarity, and the negotiation for land access and resources. The evacuation of all cities and towns was ordered, leaving Phnom Penh abandoned for the next five years. Many of Phnom Penh’s residents died during the evacuation period, as did many as a consequence of hunger and illness in rural camps, and until 1978 the only inhabitants of Phnom Penh were Khmer Rouge soldiers. For some scholars, the evacuation of Phnom Penh constituted ‘urbicide’, entailing the deliberate destruction of the built environment and social fabric of the city (Tyner, Henkin, Sirik, & Kimsroy, 2014).

Since the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and because of the destruction of land records by this brutal regime, the divide between formal and informal sectors in the context of land and property in Cambodia was non-existent, and continues to be hard to distinguish in Phnom Penh (Khemro & Payne, 2004; Lindstrom, 2013). During this time, the city experienced the return of thousands of its citizens from rural areas and refugee camps, searching to rebuild their lives after years of war and suffering. In the absence of land records, legal claims to immovable property were declared invalid by the then government and all land and houses became property of the state (Khemro & Payne, 2004). However, most property owners in Phnom Penh were killed or died between 1975 and 1979, leaving land and buildings vacant in the city. People returning to Phnom Penh occupied land and empty buildings on a ‘first come first served’ basis. Until 1989, the government allowed people the right to occupy property and to sell and buy this on the emerging de-facto land and housing market. As a result, arrangements for ownership emerged mainly through informal means for buying and selling plots and houses (Khemro & Payne, 2004). This type of informal arrangements is widely common in cities of the global south, showing that informal access to land and housing is, in many cases, the norm rather than the exception (Marx, 2009).

With the return of refugees and people living on rural camps, various living arrangements expanded rapidly in the city. These were characterized by an active informal market, with rapid turnover and occupation, and the development of diverse housing options including: housing on rental land, housing on owner-occupied land, shared low-income housing in shop houses, apartments or other single-family houses, subdivisions inside multi-storey buildings in the city, occupation of old flats and

89 apartments, rooftop settlements, settlements on the rural fringe of the city, and rental rooms (Boonyabancha, 2000; Fallavier, 2003). These informal systems show the diversity that can exist within living arrangements in cities different from the ownership model, in this case thought to have helped Cambodia’s urban poor survive more than any government or foreign aid intervention (Boonyabancha, 2000). An example of one of these living arrangements is seen in Figure 5.2, showing the development of different family rooms within one unoccupied building in Phnom Penh.

Figure 5.2 Example of one alternative housing arrangement developed by the urban poor in Phnom Penh1

During the time of the Vietnamese-supported government, collective land ownership was introduced in the People’s Republic of Cambodia (1979–1989) where different types of ‘collectives’ were formed to encourage support between the population in rebuilding the social, political and economic fabric of the country (Sekiguchi & Hatsukano, 2013). However, during the 1990s powerful actors, including the young now prime minister Hun Sen2, led the country toward a ‘triple transition’, encompassing a transition from authoritarianism to democracy, command economy to free market and war to peace which abolished any type of collective arrangement and governance

1 All photos in this thesis are attributed to Johanna Brugman unless otherwise stated. 2 Hun Sen is the current Prime Minister of Cambodia, President of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). He has served as Prime Minister since 1985 making him one of the longest serving leaders of the world. 90 system (Springer, 2010). The transition to neoliberalism involved an aggressive urban development dynamic in the city. Here the formal/informal dichotomy was conveniently used by powerful actors to progress a model of development favouring the logics of neoliberalism, as explained in the following section. Thus, as is characteristic of binary thinking, the merely different became an absolute other (Young, 1990) and the diversity of living arrangements created by people to survive after the civil war was considered illegal, with significant consequences for powerless groups in the city such as the urban poor as explained in Section 5.3. The next section explains these dynamics.

5.2.1 The introduction of neoliberalism in Phnom Penh and its impact on urban development dynamics The triple transition in 1991, supervised by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), opened the country to global neoliberal socio-economic reforms, which directly shaped the urban dynamics and development model of Phnom Penh. The reforms were based on neoliberal ideology, as explained in Chapter 2, supporting the belief that open, competitive and unregulated markets represented the optimal mechanism for socio-economic development (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2009). With neoliberalism a series of ‘logics’ were introduced including individualism, market discipline, competition, and financialization of land and housing. Specific reforms during this time in Cambodia included the introduction of tax and marketing policies, the introduction of a new investment law designed to attract foreign capital, as well as a separation of the state from production through the reduction of subsidies and privatization of state-owned businesses (Springer, 2010). Land in particular was a dimension through which neoliberal ideology was imposed. This occurred through the introduction of new land laws favouring private ownership and a multi-donor funded land titling system as explained later in Section 5.3.2 (Bugalski & Pred, 2010; Flower, 2018).

At the time of this research in 2016, Phnom Penh was filled with the noise and liveliness of building and growth. Phnom Penh’s economy has developed due to the garment, tourism and booming real estate sectors (see for example Knight Frank, 2016). Real estate was driven by national and foreign private investment and resulted in the speculation and commodification of land, with land prices growing exponentially

91 over the years across the city. Thus, the value associated with land was merely an exchange value (Lefebvre, 1974) which considered land as a product of the market detached from social relationships and use value. The demand for land in central locations was driven by commerce, foreign corporations, tourism and middle- and upper-class residential development. Land was mainly purchased by the private sector and developed or kept for the profits of rising land prices. An example of land commodification in Phnom Penh is seen in Figure 5.3 where a land plot is earmarked to be developed by a foreign investor.

Figure 5.3 Example of land commodification in Phnom Penh

Following neoliberal logics, what had become a familiar pattern across South East Asia had started to manifest in the urban form of Phnom Penh. This included the development of skyscrapers, large infrastructure projects, satellite cities and gated communities such as Camko City, Diamond Island, and Gran Phnom Penh International as seen in Figure 5.4. These projects were promoted as ‘world class’ urban spaces seen to contribute to the city’s international significance and competitive advantage (Percival & Waley, 2012). Most of these ambitious development projects were financed by intra-Asian private foreign investors from China, Korea and Malaysia, who appropriated Phnom Penh’s urban space to satisfy their economic interests. For example, the little open space in the city available to its citizens had started to be

92 compromised by the development of residential and commercial spaces for the rich, such as the Olympic stadium as seen in Figure 5.5.

The current development model of Phnom Penh clearly reflected the financialization and commodification of the urban space, a trend happening in many other cities of the world developing under neoliberalism (Rolnik, 2015). As explained in Chapter 2, the financialization and commodification of the urban space sees basic needs such as land and housing being transformed into a commodity and financial gain, the redesignation of citizens as consumers and players in the market, and the loss and control of public spaces. All these factors compromised the right to the city for the urban poor and other inhabitants of the city, with negative consequences for social and spatial justice (Rolnik, 2013a). Lower-income and urban poor families, in particular, had very few possibilities to find land and stay secure in central locations, and experienced constant threats of eviction from a powerful nexus of politicians, bureaucrats and local and international developers with interests in the land (ACHR, 2005). This shows how, even when neoliberalism claims to be free of state interference, it is the state in compliance with the private sector that enables and manipulates this system to pursue their economic interests (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2009). In Phnom Penh, neoliberalism was reproduced by a nexus of powerful state and private sector actors that manipulated planning systems and used the formal/informal dichotomy to acquire land for development at the expense of the urban poor as explained in the following section.

5.2.2 Urban planning and governance in Phnom Penh Because Phnom Penh’s urbanization was responding to the flows of foreign capital, government decision-making was influenced by the availability of funding from foreign investors and international development agencies. Thus, a large part of decision- making over the city’s development involved a complex range of intertwined relationships between state actors, the military, and the private sector. Development decision-making was primarily influenced by informal partnerships and relationships between the government, private companies and the business elite, generating what Paling (2012) calls ‘disjointed governance’ in which state-private informal alliances and relationships bypassed any form of urban legislation.

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Figure 5.4 Entrance to Phnom Penh International, a gated community in Phnom Penh

Figure 5.5 Commercial and residential development affecting the Olympic stadium in central Phnom Penh

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Most decision-making took place behind closed doors and away from public scrutiny (Goad, 2012) and was characterized by a general opacity, making it difficult to establish a thorough understanding of the dynamics of urban governance and policy- making in Phnom Penh. Un and So (2011) describe the informal behaviour of powerful actors in Phnom Penh as a form of neopatrimonialism featuring a combination of modern bureaucracy and traditional patrimonial systems, with no clear differentiation between the public and private realms. Thus, personal relationships pervade the formal bureaucratic structure in such a way that the Prime Minister himself has direct influence over development projects in the city, even before these are formally approved by the Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction (MLMUPC) and/or the Municipality of Phnom Penh (Paling, 2012). This reflects the hierarchical characteristic of Khmer society which follows a tradition of the pursuit of networks of support and protection, which operate through patron-client or kin relationships that combine pyramidal hierarchies of power and respect with personal dyads of favour and reciprocity (Hughes, 2006). Within these pyramidal hierarchies of power there is an innate and unassailable spiritual power clinging particularly to Prime Minister Hun Sen, as a means of elevating the political party to the status of natural powerholder and the guardian of the national good. As Hughes (2006) explains, these pyramids of power and patron-client relationships influence the structure of the overall population.

Because of this, there were no formal mechanisms of public participation in decision- making for civil society and the urban poor to have a voice in the development of the city, thus most of the population ‘invented’ spaces of participation (Miraftab, 2009) to make their voices heard. These ‘invented’ spaces included organized public protests and marches around Phnom Penh to advocate for particular and collective issues, the occupation of public spaces such as Freedom Park in the centre of the city, and the use of social media. This generated what Springer (2013) called a disquieting nexus between violence and democracy characterized by domination, coercion, and intimidation exerted by the state.

Central to the rule of the CPP was its ability to maintain a patronage network and a monopoly over national and local governments. This was characterized by patronage- based loyalty through the allocation of resources, government positions and business

95 licences to key segments of the political, military and business elite (Un & So, 2011). This dynamic was permeated by corruption and clientelism (Hughes, 2006) and generated violent processes of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2004) producing social and political alienation, as well as increased inequalities of wealth and power within Cambodian society (Springer, 2013).

The disjointed governance arrangements experienced in Phnom Penh facilitated the spread of the neoliberal project across the city, due to the close nexus between politicians and private and foreign investors. This created a clear power imbalance between the state, the private sector, and civil society and community organizations with clear negative implications for social and spatial justice. The urban poor, in particular, experienced criminalization, marginalization, exclusion, violence and constant insecurity. This happened even when ‘informality from above’ (Roy, 2009) occurred at the same time and in the same space as those ‘informal’ development practices of the urban poor whose only avenue to survive in cities was to access resources through ‘informal’ means. Despite this, as further explained in Section 5.3, the urban poor also used their collective agency to build power and negotiate their exclusion by accessing land, housing and infrastructure.

Urban informality of various forms was perpetuated by the lack of enforcement of urban planning and policy frameworks. The institutional planning framework and capacity of government departments (at national and local levels) in urban planning and management were limited (Kammeier & Makathy, 2014). The development of a master plan for the city had not been effective; Phnom Penh’s master plan as seen in Figure 5.6 was only approved in 2015 after eight years in the making. The master plan aimed to direct the growth of Phnom Penh city and focused on infrastructure and physical needs such as transport and drainage, with little accountability for social and environmental aspects and the need for land and housing security for the urban poor. Many questions had been raised in relation to the master plan’s use, purpose and implementation (Halim, 2016). One academic interviewee said:

When you read the master plan of Phnom Penh, they just want to grow the city, not include the urban poor, the people mind-set, they just want to grow for business, they target the business and not the social or environment. For instance, no commune has land use plans, so how can they develop a master

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plan? It is not from the ground because then it should be developed in the commune. So, there is no open space, anything; it is a top-down approach based on the consultation with the business people.

The lack of enforcement of planning regulations, such as the master plan, characterized the development of Phnom Penh with a serious degree of ambiguity. Ambiguity was used by government authorities to their advantage and implicated planning in the production and reproduction of informality (Roy, 2009; Herlambang, Leitner, Tjung, Sheppard, & Anguelov, 2019). Rolnik (2015) explains that ambiguity is a characteristic behaviour of many governments in the global south. Here undetermined development zones are used purposely to create a reservoir of land that can be released and developed at its most appropriate time, for example, when the highest bidder for the land is identified. In the meantime, those living on the land are forced to live in ‘gray spaces’ subject to permanent temporariness (Yiftachel, 2009) and control of the state as explain in Section 5.3.

Figure 5.6 Municipality of Phnom Penh’s master plan and vision for the city

These arguments not only evidence the inability of planning to respond to the complexities presented by urban informality in Phnom Penh, but also the use of the formal/informal dichotomy to perpetuate a particular model of development that

97 benefited those in power at the expense of vulnerable groups. The next section discusses how this is manifested in the context of informal settlements in Phnom Penh.

5.3 Practices of informal settlement upgrading in Phnom Penh 5.3.1 Characteristics of informal settlements The definition of informal settlements in the context of Phnom Penh reflects the historical complexities left by the legacy of the civil war and destruction of land records. As explained in Section 5.2 after the Pol Pot regime in early 1979 all legal claims to immovable property before 1979 were declared void by the then government and all land and houses became the property of the state. Most property owners had been killed or died leaving most land and buildings vacant. In the years that followed, people came and occupied vacant buildings and dwellings in Phnom Penh on a ‘first come first served’ basis (Khemro & Payne, 2004). Until 1989, the government allowed people the right to occupy the properties where they were staying and also to have the right to sell and buy them on the emerging de facto land and housing market. Since that time as the city’s population grew fast and it became hard to find vacant land or houses. Khemro & Payne (2004) explain that most suitable land, buildings and houses were occupied by government officials and people with support and networks. Poor people who came to Phnom Penh later were not able to find any vacant or free land and could not afford to buy houses. Therefore, they had to find land and somewhere to stay at very low prices such as wetlands, along pagodas and railways. These resulting settlements are now considered informal settlements because they occupy ‘others’ land, specifically state3 and/or privately-owned land (Royal Government of Cambodia, 2010).

At the time of research, the term ‘informal settlement’ was not used under Cambodian planning terminology; instead government authorities refer to these settlements as ‘temporary settlements’ defined under Circular 03: Resolution on temporary settlements on land which has been illegally occupied in the capital, municipal and

3 Land owned by the state in Cambodia is classified as state public land and state private land. State public land is land with a public value. This type of land includes natural areas (e.g. mountains, rivers and lakes), property to be developed for special public use (e.g. airports and railways), property to be developed for general public use (e.g. roads and public spaces), property allocated to a public use (e.g. schools) and properties with historical and cultural values. State private land is land that belongs to the state but does not have a public value and thus can be sold and transferred for private development (Open Development Cambodia, 2015). 98 urban areas (referred to in this thesis as Circular 03) as ‘a settlement built on land which does not belong to the settlements builder’ (Royal Government of Cambodia, 2010, p. 1). Circular 03 explains that previously to the term ‘temporary settlement’ government authorities referred to the term ‘squatter settlement’ which in Khmer equalled to the term ‘anarchic settlement’; however, this term was considered a downgrade to the settlers and in 2003 the Prime Minister requested that the name ‘anarchic’ be changed to ‘temporary’. Despite the different terminologies the key point of these definitions is to stress that an informal settlement in the context of Phnom Penh refers to a settlement occupying ‘others’ land such as state and/or privately- owned land. Thus, the key issue defining the informality of a settlement in Phnom Penh is the informality of occupation and non-compliance with land use reserved for present or future public and/or private use. This specific characteristic of informal settlements is acknowledged in other definitions of informal settlements in the global south (see UN-Habitat 2003; 2015); however, the definition of informal settlements as ‘temporary’ reflects the stage in which Phnom Penh finds itself in history in a process of re-building and registering land records, including definition and registration of state land through systematic land registration (SLR) as well as the planning framework for the city.

The ‘temporary’ term presents complexities in defining what is legal or illegal or what complies with formal planning legislation in Phnom Penh. This happens also because the ‘formalization’ of most of the city is in process. Because of these ambiguities, research studies in Phnom Penh conducted by civil society organizations, international donors and the Municipality of Phnom Penh have used the term ‘urban poor settlements’ (see Fukuzawa, 2014; PIN, 2014) and/or ‘urban poor communities’ (see Municipality of Phnom Penh, 2012) to refer to informal settlements. However, my revision of these studies indicate that their main objectives have been to understand the poverty dimensions and deprivations experienced by people living in these settlements using socio-economic indicators guided by different sources including UN- Habitat’s definitions of slums (see Fukuzawa, 2014) rather than to discuss or enquiry about the condition of informality in Phnom Penh. Based on this these studies do not reflect the statutory definitions of informal settlements used in Phnom Penh explained above.

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Theoretically, the term ‘temporary settlement’ reflects the concept of ‘gray space’ (Yiftachel, 2009), recognized in the literature as a systemic dimension to the concept of urban informality (Yiftachel, 2015). This temporary dimension is not acknowledged in many definitions of informal settlements provided by international organizations; however, in planning theory gray spaces are directly related to the spatiality and politics of urban citizenship and the pervasive existence of informality in contemporary cities (Yiftachel, 2015). The temporary dimension of informal settlements in Phnom Penh explains how many residents of cities live in conditions that are neither formal nor informal but in gray spaces between the whiteness of legality/approval/safety and the blackness of eviction/destruction/death, acknowledging how informality is many times characterized by a state of ‘permanent temporariness’ (Yiftachel, 2009). This temporary state makes these settlements vulnerable when planning and spatial regimes, ingrained with binary understandings of informality, are used as a governmental tool to advance the interests of powerful actors in cities as explained in Chapter 7. Thus, gray spaces evidence the structural processes that sees many or the majority of residents of contemporary cities confined to inferior citizenship status due to their economic or identity regimes, and because of living in unrecognized, illegal, temporary, or severely marginalized conditions (Yiftachel, 2015).

Various surveys have identified the characteristics of informal settlements in Phnom Penh over time. ‘The state of poor settlements in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’ survey conducted by the Squatter and Urban Poor Federation (SUPF) in 1997 identified 379 settlements with approximately 180,000 people settled between 1979 and 1988 (SUPF, 1997). In 2009 the local NGO Sahmakum Teang Tnaut (STT) undertook the ‘8 Khan Survey’ which identified 410 settlements with 40,548 families and reported a major shift of these settlements from the inner to outer communes of Phnom Penh (STT, 2009). The survey found that in 1997 almost half of urban poor settlements were found in the inner communes but the number had dropped to close to a quarter in 2009. Informal settlements in the outer communes were identified as resettlement sites. More recent surveys included the ‘Phnom Penh Urban Poor Assessment’ conducted by the Urban Poor Office of the Municipality of Phnom Penh with support from UNICEF in 2012 (Municipality of Phnom Penh, 2012). The survey indicated that 516 urban poor communities lived in Phnom Penh from 1980 to 2011. Of these, 342 were recognized and organized communities (e.g. with a recognized leader and saving

100 group) and the remaining 174 were yet to be organized. The survey estimated that urban poor communities in Phnom Penh accounted for one quarter of the capital's residents.

The most recent survey of informal settlements in Phnom Penh identified a decreasing trend in informal settlements (STT, 2018). In 2013, 340 informal settlements were surveyed in Phnom Penh and in 2017 this number decreased to 277 (STT, 2018). This showed that the overall number of urban poor settlements in central districts of Phnom Penh had decreased since 2009 from 410 to 277 (STT, 2018). This occurred because settlements that were surveyed before had later disappeared, because either the land had been developed or was vacant due to displacement and/or evictions (Lindstrom, 2013; STT, 2018). This trend meant that people living in informal settlements in the central districts had to move elsewhere. Figure 5.7 shows that only a few informal settlements remain in the most central districts of the city. However, informal settlements are spread out and are not necessarily located on the city’s periphery. The survey explains that the number of informal settlements and people living in these settlements in Phnom Penh has continued to grow, and that these settlements continued to be exposed to eviction threats due to insecurity of tenure (see STT, 2018).

Urban poverty was present in most informal settlements in Phnom Penh. For example the Municipality of Phnom Penh estimated in 2012 that about sixty per cent of the households interviewed in their study earned less than USD $75 per month and thus lived below the poverty line (at that time the poverty line was based on the MDGs Cambodian report, stated at 2,470 riel per day per capita, or about USD $0.60). This figure is likely to increase now as the official poverty line for Phnom Penh was modified by the Planning Department in 2013 to 6,347 riel per day per capita (or USD $1.53) (this poverty line is higher than in rural areas as well as secondary cities) (ADB, 2014). Despite this, there was diversity in the income groups of people that occupy informal settlements and wealthier residents make up part of these settlements (PIN, 2012).

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Figure 5.7 Map showing the number of informal settlements in Phnom Penh by district in 2017 (STT, 2018, p. 27)

Studies using multi-dimensional indicators of poverty have distinguished four groups of people experiencing different kinds of urban poverties and vulnerabilities in urban Cambodia. These ranged from homeless people without any roof under which to sleep, and very few job opportunities, such as waste-pickers to people living in more established informal settlements with more job opportunities (usually in the informal sector) and therefore the ability to invest in their houses (even without land tenure

102 security) and the education of their children. All of these groups experienced vulnerabilities in terms of insecurity of tenure and risk of eviction, but some of them were more organized and had documentation in place such as ID cards which helped them to be recognized by government authorities and enabled compensation in case of resettlement/eviction (ACHR, 2014b). These studies show how urban poverty continues to be a central concern within informal settlements, and the need to consider this dimension as fundamental for upgrading programs. Two examples of informal settlements are presented Figures 5.8 and 5.9.

Despite the differences between informal settlements and the ambiguities characterizing their definition, for the state informal settlements were considered ‘illegal’ because they occupied state or privately owned land (see footnote number 3 for a clarification of this land classification). The definitions and assumptions associated with the ‘illegality’ of informal settlements reflect how the formal/informal dichotomy had been used by state authorities, in particular Phnom Penh Municipality, as grounds for large-scale forced evictions and human rights violations. These happened even when legal/illegal divisions did not apply in the context of Phnom Penh, as historically and as a response to the chaos created by the civil war, the state had allowed the production and reproduction of different ‘informal’ systems associated with land and housing as explained in Section 5.2.

The former Special Rapporteur on adequate housing conducted a mission to Cambodia in 2005 and documented that tens of thousands of poor people had been forcibly evicted and displaced in Phnom Penh, constituting a grave breach of human rights (Rolnik, 2008). Furthermore, a consistent pattern of violation of rights had been observed in connection with forced evictions: systematic lack of due process and procedural protections, inadequate compensation, lack of effective remedies for communities facing eviction, and excessive use of force, harassment, intimidation and criminalization (Rolnik, 2008). More recent estimates by Sahmakum Teang Tnaut (STT) indicated that 29,358 families (146,790 persons) were evicted in Phnom Penh between 1990 and 2011, over 12,000 families were under threat of eviction in 2014, and 77 eviction sites were identified in 2016 (STT, 2014; 2016). Studies into the impacts of displacement in urban poor communities (see for example Fallavier, 2003) highlight the negative effects that these processes have on people’s livelihoods,

103 including the inability to access jobs and services, the disruption of social networks, the impact on women-headed households, and in some cases the resulting increase in debt and economic marginalization. The most well-known forced eviction in Phnom Penh is the case of Boung Kak Lake, which resulted in the World Bank withdrawing its lending operations in Cambodia for about five years from 2012 to 2016 (Bugalski & Pred, 2010).

The large-scale and long trajectory of forced evictions in Phnom Penh reflects how state practices used the formal/informal divide as a governmental tool (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012) to marginalize and criminalize informal settlements and justify evictions. This process is not unique to the case of Phnom Penh, as the literature recognizes that in many cities of the global south evictions of informal settlements have responded to the development interests of elites and foreign investors to create global cities, as explained in Section 5.2 (see Watson, 2009a for an example in South Africa and Hasan, 2011 for an example in Pakistan). Furthermore, the large-scale evictions in Phnom Penh reflected the capacity of the state to use its power to purposely create a legal environment of ambiguity and uncertainty with a lack of clear and available information on the classification of state land, and a lack of enforcement and implementation of planning frameworks (Bugalski & Pred, 2010). Thus, in the past and at the time of this research, Phnom Penh was a city where state and market-driven dispossession of the urban poor was common due to land grabbing and the financialization of land and housing (Grimsditch & Henderson, 2009). Because of the alarming rates of dispossession and evictions in Phnom Penh, land security had been the main focus of international interventions, as well as the main concern of urban poor communities, NGOs and civil society organizations regarding the upgrading of informal settlements in Phnom Penh as explained in the following section.

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Figure 5.8 Example of an informal settlement in Phnom Penh where people occupied a graveyard in a central district of Phnom Penh

Figure 5.9 Example of an informal settlement on the outskirts of Phnom Penh

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5.3.2 Upgrading interventions led by governments, private sector and international donors The government institutions that had responsibility for informal settlements in Phnom Penh included the Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction (MLMUPC), the Municipality of Phnom Penh (MPP), and district (sangkat), commune (khan), and village (phum) authorities. The specific interventions of government actors have been influenced by international organizations such as the World Bank (WB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), UN-Habitat, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the Australian Development Agency (formerly AusAID), and the United States Development Agency (US Aid). Because of the legacy of the civil war, the main efforts of governments and donors to find solutions for informal settlements had been the introduction of land legislation and registration programs including the Land Law 2001, the Land Allocation for Social and Economic Development (LASED) (formerly known as the Land Management and Administration Programme (LMAP) and Land Administration Sub Sector Programme (LASSP)), and Circular 03: Resolution on temporary settlements on land which has been illegally occupied in the capital, municipal and urban areas.

These legal instruments followed the worldwide pattern of formalizing land through the large-scale issuance of land titles. This was done through Systematic Land Registration (SLR), a land registration program aiming to register all land parcels in the country and secure land rights for vulnerable groups (see Dwyer, 2015). The primary donors contributing to this formalization program were the World Bank (pledging USD $28.83 Million), GTZ (contributing USD $3.5 Million in technical assistance) and the Government of Finland (contributing USD $3.5 Million in technical assistance) (Bugalski & Pred, 2010). Over time other donors such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) contributed to the registration program under LMAP and LASSP, however at the time of this research most donors had withdrawn their support because of deficiencies with its implementation as further explained in Chapter 6.

By 2013 SLR had registered more than 2.2 million land parcels in the country (mainly in rural areas), benefiting over two million citizens and solving 11,000 land disputes

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(GIZ, 2016). The program also strengthened mechanisms for dispute resolution and increased technical and institutional capacity for the Royal Government of Cambodia (GIZ, 2016). Despite the results, the program defined the problems of informality as a legal problem rather than recognizing its structural dimensions, and thus failed to tackle fundamental inequities in the control and management of land and improve tenure security for vulnerable populations. Bugalski and Pred (2010) identified two main factors in the design and implementation of SLR which impaired its capacity to improving tenure security: the exclusion of difficult areas with competing land claims from obtaining registration, and the lack of transparency of the government in the classification of state land. These factors, which are discussed in Chapter 6, allowed the program to be manipulated by the state at the expense of vulnerable households. Overall many argue that land reforms and frameworks introduced by foreign donors in Cambodia had not achieved tenure security for vulnerable groups, and in fact had been designed to purposely exclude residents living in informal settlements from securing land rights (Grimsditch & Henderson, 2009; Bugalski & Pred 2010; Dwyer, 2015; Flower, 2018). These claims point to the importance of considering the political dimensions of insecurity if tenure security for the urban poor is to be achieved in Phnom Penh (Flower, 2018).

Further to this, SLR perpetuated the formal/informal dichotomy by putting forward formalization and private ownership as the only avenue for the solution of informal settlements. As acknowledged in the literature and further explained in Chapter 9, individual property title made urban poor residents vulnerable to dispossession as it is conveniently shaped to enable land markets, easy land transactions and commodified land as a product of the market as explained in Chapter 3 (Payne, 2001; Porter, 2011). The commodification of land obscured the relationships that existed between people living in informal settlements and the place they lived, including any collective identity that residents of these settlements had managed to build over time, and was important in their struggle to secure an adequate and secure place to live as discussed in Chapter 8.

Two other dimensions linked with upgrading informal settlements in Phnom Penh were appropriate access to finance and housing for the urban poor. During Phnom Penh’s golden age, the first public housing projects were developed in the city, funded by the

107 government and mainly directed toward housing government officials (Nam, 2011). During the 1990s the Phnom Penh Municipality’s main approach to dealing with informal settlements was the relocation of the settlements from the centre to the outskirts of the city. At the time of this research, a new General Department of Housing (GDH) was formed under the MUPLMC and the first National Housing Policy was approved in 2014 after years in the making. The policy focused on developing housing strategies for all Cambodian citizens, not just the urban poor. From interviews conducted with representatives of the GDH, the policy was still under development. The GDH was focusing on expanding collaborations with various stakeholders including private developers and the governments of Japan, Korea, and Thailand to obtain financial and technical support for the implementation of the housing policy. Overall, at the time of the research, the implementation of the housing policy was at its very initial stages and no impacts from this policy were tangible in Phnom Penh.

What was clear, and not surprising considering the neoliberal environment in Phnom Penh, as in other cities of the global south, was the reproduction of the idea of the private sector as the answer to the affordable housing shortage in the city (see Ferguson, Smets and Mason, 2014 for examples the enabling housing markets paradigm in cities of the global south). Private developers were enabled by the state to take a leading role in this matter. At the time of this research, collaborations had started between the MUPLMC, banks and private developers to advance an ‘affordable housing project’ in Phnom Penh. The general idea was that the government would provide land and trunk infrastructure, private developers would develop the houses (with incentives in the form of tax reductions from the government), and banks would provide low-interest loans to the recipients of the houses who ultimately paid for the houses. Interviews with international agencies and non-government organizations explained the limitations of such approach. For instance, there was not a clear definition of low-income and urban poor groups to identify the beneficiaries of the houses. Also, the cost of the houses started at USD $20,000 and they were therefore unaffordable for the urban poor. There were also questions about the willingness of the government to provide land in an adequate location, as well as the quality and design of the houses. Consequently, most of the non-government and international agencies representatives I interviewed said that little benefit would result from this pilot private-public partnership project for low-income and urban poor families. These

108 findings resemble other studies on housing projects in Phnom Penh (see Talocci & Boano, 2017), and other cities of the global south, which argue for the need to acknowledge the political nature of housing rather than consider this as solely a financial and administrative issue (Rolnik, 2015).

Apart from this pilot project, representatives of the GDH explained that Circular 03 was the principal policy instrument to be used to resolve the situation of ‘illegal’ settlements occupying state land. This policy provided a guideline for collecting data through community-led enumerations and mapping of informal settlements (Royal Government of Cambodia, 2010). The information was then used for finding planning solutions such as relocation and/or on-site upgrading for each settlement depending on the type of land they occupied. Circular 03 was a progressive policy but lacked political will to be implemented. For instance, between 2011 and 2015 only one solution for one informal settlement under Circular 03 came close to materializing after strategic negotiations among GIZ, NGOs and the municipality. During my field work I attended the first housing forum in Phnom Penh organized by the GDH. In this forum, the director of the GDH described the role and activities of the new Department and explained the purposes and main directions of the Housing Policy and Circular 03. This forum was the first of its first kind in Cambodia, however, it was consultative in nature with very little involvement from civil society and/or poor communities in decision-making, demonstrating the top-down nature of upgrading processes in Phnom Penh.

Commercial banks were also important actors in the provision of finance for housing; however, despite the existence of 31 fully licensed commercial banks at the time of the research, my findings show that not many of the financial products offered targeted low-income and/or urban poor groups. Interviews with bank representatives revealed that interest rates for housing loans offered by banks in Cambodia ranged from 9 to 18 per cent per annum depending on the client’s profile, such as capacity to demonstrate a stable income and collateral including land title and/or saving deposits. Some banks became more flexible with land title requirements due to the complexities of land registration in the country. Also, some banks valued the ‘profitable’ market created for low-income groups and in some cases provided more flexible conditions such as flexible repayment schedules. However, stringent criteria to access loans and

109 high interest rates made the characteristics of the financial products unfit to truly reach and benefit the urban poor, and threatened their security of tenure if ever achieved.

Because of this, micro-finance institutions (MFIs) were a key actor in the provision of finance for housing to urban poor populations in Phnom Penh. In 2018 a total of 61 MFIs were registered under the Cambodian Micro-Finance Association (CMA) (CMA, 2018). The enabling environment for micro-finance had seen NGOs providing micro- credit services converted into private micro-finance institutions (such as Amret and AMK), and some private micro-finance institutions converted into private banks (such as ACLEDA’s bank). However, only one MFI, First Finance, specialized in providing financial products for developing and purchasing new housing. Most MFIs provided individual loans for business development; yet, interviewees explained that people used these types of loans to invest in home-based businesses and/or housing improvements. Despite MFIs filling a gap in providing finance for low-income and urban poor populations this was not always beneficial for the urban poor as interest rates for loans could reach up to 24 per cent per annum, and there had been cases where people had fallen into bad debt and lost their land used as collateral (as further developed in Chapter 7). Thus, even when MFIs and banks were important players for the provision of finance for housing in Phnom Penh, these institutions could also dispossess the urban poor from their land (see for instance STT, 2012; Liv, 2013). This same process is recognized as a trend in many cities of the global south as a result of the integration of MFIs with broader housing markets (Rolnik, 2015).

The responses analyzed in this section positioned the state and the private sector as legitimate actors to intervene in the upgrading of informal settlements and perpetuated the formal/informal divide that marginalized other actors and practices. This happened even when limitations had been recognized from ‘formal’ approaches, and even when important results giving the urban poor access to land, housing and infrastructure had been achieved in the past by community-driven upgrading practices as explained below. Despite this, and as explained in the following section, different upgrading practices lead by urban poor communities and international and civil society organizations existed in Phnom Penh, providing understanding of formal and informal relationships in this particular context.

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5.3.3 Upgrading interventions led by civil society In response to the long history of injustice and dispossession, there was a variety of practices from civil society also supported by international donors in Phnom Penh. The practices of these actors varied in the understanding of urban informality, ideology, and strategies and did not necessarily resemble each other. In fact, I found an atmosphere of mistrust between urban poor communities, NGOs and other civil society organizations in Phnom Penh. This mistrust resulted in a lack of communication, collaboration and coordination of the efforts of civil society to engage in collective action and progress a just model for the upgrading of informal settlements. Collective action and solidarity were impacted not only by Cambodian culture characterized by hierarchy, patronage and acceptance of the social order (Hughes, 2006); but also by the history of conflict and civil war of the country, having a great impact in the trust of families and communities, and the imposition of collective behaviour among citizens (Zucker, 2011). Also, the history of violent forced evictions had impacted on the internal trust within communities and their leaders who many times were closely associated with the government (Springer, 2013; Beard, 2018). Finally, Cambodia’s transition to a market economy had transformed traditional patterns of exchange and reciprocity leading to greater individualism (Ledgerwood, 2002). Despite these structural factors affecting collective behaviour among Cambodians, collective action continued to be one of the principal mechanisms supported by urban poor communities and civil society organizations in upgrading processes.

Community-led upgrading practices had been developing in Phnom Penh since the 1980s, forming part of a global movement wanting to support the urban poor to be at the front of their own development in land, housing and infrastructure (see Boonyabancha, 2000; Kerr & Phonpakdee, 2008). These practices were first driven by local activists and students of the Urban Resource Centre (URC), which at the time of this research evolved into the Community Development Foundation (CDFound) and the Community Saving Network of Cambodia (CSNC), all operating under the umbrella of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) and Slum Dwellers International (SDI).

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The principal characteristic of community-led upgrading practices in Phnom Penh and other cities in Asia was the acknowledgement of the structural nature of informality and poverty, recognizing that these conditions were a result of power inequalities in society (see ACHR, 2014b). Based on this understanding, their focus was on mobilizing the agency of the urban poor, including their capacity to learn, organize, and play a principal role in making decisions about their lives and development priorities (see Boonyabancha & Mitlin, 2012). Thus, the practices of this coalition of actors encouraged a collective mobilization process of urban poor communities across the country using saving groups, enumerations, and upgrading as strategies for collective mobilization (Boonyabancha, 2000; Kerr & Phonpakdee, 2008).

As explained in Chapter 3, saving groups are recognized in the literature as important mechanisms used for the community-based upgrading of informal settlements (Archer, 2012). When these informal systems function well, they are able to link with formal sources of finance and scale up to city, national, and international funds to broaden their impact. These mechanisms are an example of hybrid systems that link together formal and informal financial mechanisms to upgrade informal settlements, and thus an example on how binaries are transcended in upgrading interventions. In 1998 the community-led mobilization process in Phnom Penh led to the development of the Urban Poor Development Fund (UPDF), a hybrid fund composed of a multi- stakeholder decision-making committee between the Municipality of Phnom Penh, the ACHR and a urban poor community savings network known initially as the Squatter and Urban Poor Federation (SUPF) (Phonphakdee, Sok & Sauter, 2009). The UPDF provided collective loans to organized urban poor communities with established saving groups for housing, infrastructure and income generation activities in relocation sites. In these processes the government provided free land for the relocated communities. This fund was a strategic intervention led by ACHR aiming to influence the political power structures of the city. As such, ACHR counted with the political support of one key politician (former vice governor of Phnom Penh who at the time of research was a member of the Cambodian Senate) to establish and oversee the activities of the fund and negotiate with other key politicians. For instance, leveraging free land and political will of government authorities for upgrading informal settlements was a complex process, mainly achieved through informal relationships and discussions rather than the implementation of formal legal frameworks. This also meant that the UPDF was

112 highly politicised, many times requiring compromises from communities, activists and ACHR, and was vulnerable to ‘elite capture’ (Dasgupta & Beard, 2007) from local politicians and community leaders. However, strategic changes to re-define and mobilize leadership and ensure community control over the CDF were always present.

Initially, the UPDF supported the relocations of informal settlements to the outskirts of the city such as the Aphiwat Meanchey relocation project which gave 129 families living along the roadside in Toul Svay Prey District free land to relocate to within five kilometres from the city, as well as to the Toul Sambo relocation project site 25 kilometres outside of the city (Boonyabancha, 2000; Goad, 2012). Also, the ‘city’ of Andoung, one of the largest relocation sites in Phnom Penh which still continues to grow informally, was developed. As a result of several years of the work and mobilization by this coalition of actors, the Municipality considered on-site upgrading of informal settlements rather than relocations. In 2003 the Prime Minister announced the government’s support for a program to upgrade 100 informal settlements per year in Phnom Penh for the coming five years (see Goad, 2012). Land sharing, allowing negotiated shared arrangements of land between private owners and the urban poor, was sought as the strategy to achieve this purpose in three trial locations: Borei Keila (‘Sports Complex’), Dey Krahom (‘Red Earth’) and two settlements along the railway line. Despite these efforts, the land sharing projects were not met, and all projects failed in their objectives of providing a sustainable housing solution for the urban poor. Only Borei Keila came close to materializing, however the project was compromised by a lack of transparency from commercial developers, local authorities, and community leaders as well as failure to genuinely involve local residents in decision- making (Goad, 2012; Talocci & Boano, 2017).

Despite the precedents achieved by the UPDF such as efforts to develop comprehensive and inclusive relocations projects and policies (Goad, 2012), Phnom Penh’s increased development opportunities and urban economic growth continued, leading to forced relocations and evictions of informal settlements driven by the Municipality. Because of this, activists and communities expanded the community-led model to other parts of Cambodia and in 2013 the UPDF transitioned into the Community Development Fund (CDF), led by the Community Development Foundation (CDFound) and the community saving network of Cambodia (CSNC),

113 registered at the time of the research as an NGO independently from government. In 2017 the community-led mobilization processes had achieved the development of 40 city development funds in 32 provinces and cities of Cambodia with a total of USD $2.83 million in lending capital, and about 453 community saving groups across the country with USD $621,395 in total savings (ACHR, 2017). The UPDF/CDF had given collective loans to organized poor communities across the country to invest in housing (USD $1.8 million benefiting 4,783 households), livelihoods (USD $589,613 benefiting 4,482 households), emergencies (USD $2,517 benefiting 211 households), environmental improvements (USD $11,975 benefiting 1,560 households) and infrastructure (USD $477,318 benefiting 11,591 households) (ACHR, 2017).

At the time of the research, the community-driven approach in Phnom Penh was mainly successful in Russeikeo District where there was a district-wide community development fund that consistently use collective loans to support livelihood activities of poor Muslim communities living on the banks of the Tonle Sap river (ACHR, 2014a). Also, ACHR, the CDFound and the CSNC had signed a memorandum of understanding with the MUPLMC and built strategic relationships with local government authorities across the country to continue to support community-led upgrading. Furthermore, the role of community saving groups and networks was recognized in the National Housing Policy (Royal Government of Cambodia, 2014). The experience of the UPDF/CDF shows that collective action in upgrading process in Phnom Penh is complex and not always successful, as it is influenced by the political and organizational environment (Beard, 2018).

The long history of community mobilization in Phnom Penh resulted in collective saving groups growing as an important financial resource for urban poor communities in the city. Based on the survey on informal settlements conducted by STT in 2014, 43 settlements or 12 per cent of the settlements surveyed had a functional saving group in Phnom Penh (Fukuzawa, 2014). These self-help mechanisms appeared in the form of small-scale revolving funds giving easy access to finance to members for urgent needs including health emergencies and funerals, as well as finance to invest in livelihood options and undertake housing repairs or improvements. These mechanisms were also important for developing social and political capital within urban poor communities, being recognized by local government authorities and

114 receiving support from civil society organizations. Despite the importance of self-help saving groups, this type of collective organization was vulnerable, and in some cases it had been affected by power relationships between members, high rates of mobility within urban poor communities, lack of trust between residents, and lack of leadership in the administration of the funds (Ward & Mouyly, 2013).

Also, not all informal systems were beneficial for the urban poor. Informal private lenders, unlicensed micro-finance institutions and informal developers had an exploitative nature, making profit out of poor individuals and families by offering high interest loans, and risky financial packages to finance new housing. These financial products created debt and a cycle of poverty within poor individuals and families (see for example STT, 2012). Despite this, informal sources appeared in some cases as the only available option for the poor to access finance in times of need. Furthermore, interviews with private financial institutions highlighted that informal financial sources such as those provided by unlicensed MFIs were becoming competition for formal institutions as these were reaching an important sector of the population that could not access formal finance.

A different alliance of NGOs was present in the city, mobilizing with urban poor communities facing evictions, against these human rights violations caused by government and the private elite. The creation of the Housing Rights Task Force (HRTF) in 2005 reflected the strong advocacy role among these NGOs which perceived land and housing as a contested human right violated by the state. NGOs making part of this coalition included Sahmakum Teang Tnaut (STT), Equitable Cambodia (EC), and the Cambodian League for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights (LICADHO). The advocacy activities of these organizations included organizing forums and demonstrations, filing court cases, using international covenants to spotlight housing rights violations, lobbying the multi-lateral funding projects causing evictions, monitoring development projects and their impacts on the urban poor, and actively sharing this information with domestic and international media. Organized communities that faced evictions provided leadership on advocacy and demonstrations against the government and international agencies. These activities ended in confrontation with the local police and at the time of the interviews, community activists had been sent to jail by local authorities. Thus, even when human

115 rights were important to be defended with a strong voice, the chances of this approach achieving change and/or respect for human rights within Cambodia’s authoritarian regime seemed complex.

Most other NGOs present in Phnom Penh were funded by international donors such as GIZ, and operated independent but in collaboration with government. These included the Community Managed Development Partners (CMDP), Community Volunteers for Society (CVS), Community Empowerment and Development Team (CEDT), World Vision (WVC), and Urban Poor Development Women (UPDW), and the NGO forum of Cambodia. Influenced by western donors, these NGOs had the view that solutions to informality would come from the successful enforcement of the law and focused on advocacy for these purposes. Many of these NGOs advocated for accountability in land registration, and the implementation of Circular 03 by conducting participatory mapping and enumeration of informal settlements, and provided technical assistance and financial support to urban poor communities to develop upgrading plans. These practices had an important value for urban poor communities as explained in Chapter 8, however they operated within the status quo without critically understanding the ideologies supported by land and planning frameworks. Also, interviews with NGO representatives and urban poor community leaders explained that implementation of land legal frameworks was a complex political process, and very little had been achieved to secure land rights for the urban poor. At the time of the research most of these NGOs had lost funding due to donors removing their support from land programs in Cambodia due to the lack of accountability and transparency in their implementation.

All actors and practices I describe above helped organize community networks of urban poor communities around Phnom Penh. The activities, strategies and ideologies of these networks were associated with the international and national organizations they worked with and received support from. Thus, their practices and associations differed from one another even when their aims were similar. These facts created a highly fragmented environment in the city and a lack of coordination which, in the end, resulted in diminished opportunities for the urban poor to legitimize their role in the city and secure land and housing rights. Despite this, it is clear from all the different practices analyzed in this section that collective action was the key mechanism used

116 by urban poor communities and civil society organizations to build power and make themselves visible to negotiate their value and citizenship rights to the state (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004). This points out to the importance of understanding the conditions that can lead to collective upgrading processes to be successful in this particular context and learning about the capacity of collective action to challenge the broader structures that create informality and poverty (Beard, 2018). I discuss these points in the light of my case study in Chapters 8 and 9.

5.4 Conclusion In this chapter I have explained key historical, political and socials, and economic structures influencing the understanding and responses toward urban informality, specifically informal settlements in Phnom Penh. Through this analysis, I evidenced the structuralist nature of informality (Rakowski, 1994), and how power relationships are key in understanding and analyzing formal and informal relationships. I explained how a history of civil war and conflict, the political and economic system, the way planning is understood and enforced, and the social structure of Khmer society influence the understanding and responses towards poor and vulnerable groups living under conditions of informality, as well as the practices that emerge from these vulnerable groups and civil society organizations to overcome exclusion, marginalization and dispossession.

As explain in this chapter, Phnom Penh presents a highly complex historical, social, economic and political environment which has violently exclude and marginalized people living in informal settlements throughout the development of the city. This is a legacy inherited from colonial times when a discursive formal/informal dichotomy emerged in systems of planning and was used by powerful actors as a governmental tool (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012) to undermine traditional Khmer development practices and forms of organization, and progress colonial and modernist urban development projects in favour of the elites. This process continues Today under neoliberalism, introduced in Cambodia in the 1990s during the UNTAC period. Here, the formal/informal divide has been used by the state as a governmental tool to criminalize and dispossess urban poor communities from their land, with the excuse that they are illegal. All this happens when the destruction of land records during the Pol Pot regime made formal and informal relationships even more evident in the city.

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Further to this, the formal/informal divide has been used to progress the idea that formalization is the only solution to informality, and has directed the efforts of governments, development agencies, and some NGOs in Cambodia to fund and implement land formalization programs through large-scale titling. This had led to a formalization fix (Dwyer, 2015) in Cambodia, sustaining the proposition that market- oriented land formalization programs and individual property rights constitute the answer and solution to land grabbing and dispossession, an assumption that I question in Chapters 7,8 and 9.

Further to this, I explained the complex political context characterizing urban governance in Phnom Penh. As Paling (2012) argues, Phnom Penh is characterized by a ‘disjointed governance’ in which development decision-making is primarily influenced by informal partnerships and relationships between the government, private companies and the business elite. Most decision-making in the city takes place behind closed doors and is characterized by informality and opacity. Un and So (2011) describe this behaviour as a form of neopatrimonialism with a combination of modern bureaucracy and traditional patrimonial systems. These governance characteristics mean that planning and the law are not enforced to purposely create a highly ambiguous environment were development decisions can be made at the right time to satisfy interests of powerful actors without much explanation. Information is rarely shared and made available to the public, giving power to the state and its allies to control the development of the city based on their interests and without interference from civil society or donor agencies. Thus, planning and legal frameworks have been instrumentalized to sustain the formal/informal divide to exclude people living in conditions of informality rather than used for redistribution of resources and inclusion of the diverse ideas of justice of its citizens. Planning is used to promote land and development speculation, excluding and marginalizing urban informality and any other living arrangement that does not comply with the neoliberal model or the interests of the state. Even when some studies point out the de-politicization of urban policies in Phnom Penh (Talocci & Boano, 2017), it is important to understand that this de- politicization is precisely a calculated political strategy of the government of Cambodia to pursue their development interests, usually at the expense of vulnerable groups. This situation is clearly not something that is happening in Phnom Penh alone; ambiguity as a political strategy of the state has been recognized in other studies (Roy,

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2009; Herlambang, Leitner, Tjung, Sheppard, & Anguelov, 2019), pointing to the inability of planning in the global south to respond well to urban informality and the crisis of urbanization in the light of social and spatial justice.

Further to this, I explained how various actors and practices have emerged to respond in various and different ways to the violent dispossession of informal settlements in the city and seek solutions for their upgrading. These practices demonstrate the various actors and forms of planning that exist outside the state, and the use of collective action as a key mechanism to negotiate rights to the city of vulnerable groups. Despite this, the relationships between these actors were characterized by mistrust, resulting in a lack of communication, collaboration and coordination of the efforts of civil society to engage in collective action. Thus, there were structural factors influencing collective behaviour and solidarity in Phnom Penh including Cambodian culture characterized by hierarchy, patronage and acceptance of the social order (Hughes, 2006); the history of conflict and civil war of the country and the imposition of collective behaviour among citizens (Zucker, 2011), the history of violent forced evictions impacting internal trust within communities and their leaders who many times were closely associated with the government (Springer, 2013; Beard, 2018) and Cambodia’s transition to a market economy transforming traditional patterns of exchange and reciprocity leading to greater individualism (Ledgerwood, 2002).

Despite these structural factors affecting collective behaviour and solidarity, collective action continued to be one of the principal mechanisms supported by urban poor communities and civil society organizations to negotiate value and claim rights to the city (ACHR, 2017). This points to the need for understanding the conditions that allow collective action within informal settlements to emerge, endure over time and evolve from everyday acts of citizenship (Staeheli et al., 2012) to insurgent acts (Holston, 2009) with clear political purpose. I used the case study to explain these conditions in Chapter 8. Despite the various practices that emerge from civil society and the results and precedents these had achieved in the upgrading of informal settlements, the state and the private sector continued to position themselves as the ‘legitimate’ actors leading the provision of housing and upgrading of informal settlements. This shows another level of complexity in the social structures of Cambodian society characterized by hierarchy, prestige and patronage, affecting the progression of social and spatial

119 justice through upgrading interventions further explained in Chapter 8. The next chapter introduces the case study of the research, leading to the analysis of the research findings in subsequent chapters in the light of the context of the city and key historical, political, and socio-economic structures explained in this chapter.

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Chapter 6 Case study overview

6.1 Introduction In this chapter I introduce the case study used in my field research. By doing this, I highlight the strengths in using a single case study methodology as a research strategy in cities of the global south, because of its capacity to produce detailed knowledge of the specificities and complexity of the single case as well as its structural context (Duminy, Odendaal & Watson, 2014). Using a case study of one informal settlement in Phnom Penh allowed me to understand in detail how formal and informal relationships in upgrading practices played out at the neighbourhood scale, and facilitated my analysis on how power relationships and other structural conditions of the city were manifested in upgrading processes experienced by people living in this settlement. In this chapter I explain in more detailed the three criteria I used to select the case explained in Chapter 4: land insecurity; presence of financial investments in housing, infrastructure and livelihoods; and presence of collective action. These criteria were useful in defining the units of analysis for the case and allowing in-depth understanding into these specific processes in the light of my research questions (Yin,2009). Also, using a case of one informal settlement and the development process that people experienced, allowed me to demarcate spatial and temporal ‘boundaries’ to focus my analysis.

By guiding the reader through a walk along the settlement, I introduce the specific characteristics of the site and the development process of its people. While doing this I explain some of the characteristics that make this case a deviant case (Flyvbjerg, 2006), which is especially good compared to other informal settlements in Phnom Penh; and thus its capacity to reveal more information than typical or average cases by activating more actors and mechanisms involved in the study of formal and informal relationships in upgrading practices. Overall, this chapter sets up the scene for answering the remaining research questions, in the light of the analysis and discussion of the city’s structural context presented in Chapter 5.

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6.2 Welcome to Phka The lotus flower, or Phka Chhouk in Khmer, plays an important role in the daily lives of the Cambodian people. As a Buddhist sacred flower, it is used in religious rituals and represents a symbol of every woman and man’s ability to grow, evolve and accomplish themselves, like the lotus flower growing tall until it floats above the muddy waters. I chose this name as a substitute for the original name of the case study site, not only to ensure confidentiality of the participants, but also because the name represents for me the strength and endurance of the people of this community in their struggle for recognition in Phnom Penh. Phka Chhouk is a long name, thus to facilitate the reference throughout the thesis the case study site is referred as Phka (flower).

Phka is located within ten kilometres north-west of Phnom Penh’s city centre as seen in Figure 6.14. The settlement is urban, located close to public and private services such as schools, health centres, markets and different types of businesses. This made the settlement an attractive place to live for poor, middle and high-income families as living there facilitated access to services and job opportunities.

Figure 6.1 Approximate location of Phka in Phnom Penh5

4 The exact location, including the name of the district and village, of the case study site is not disclosed to ensure confidentiality of the participants. 5 This map was made using Google Earth in January 2019. 122

6.3 Characteristics of residents of Phka In 2012, based on the statistics available on the settlement collected by community members and NGOs, Phka was home to about 48 households, approximately 253 people. The number of adults (above 18 years old) was 185 (94 men, 91 women) and there were 68 children under 18 years (32 boys and 36 girls). In Phka, 18 out of 59 families were from Phnom Penh and the rest came from other cities and provinces in Cambodia such as Prey Veng, Kandal, Kampong Thom, Battambang, Kampot, Kampong Spea, Pursat, Kratie, and Kampong Chhang. Most people were Buddhist however a small number of Christians and Muslims also lived in the settlement. At the time of the research, people who arrived during the 1980s mainly occupied Phka; however, because of its attractive location, offering access to services and jobs, newcomers had arrived in the settlement, such as people living in central Phnom Penh and a number of rural migrants. Thus, there were diverse socio-economic backgrounds within residents of Phka.

In 2010 residents of Phka, developed a community profile that classified themselves into three levels of poverty (with group 1 being the wealthiest residents) as explained below:

 Group 1: families with access to a house, small income, small number of family members living together (about four people), motorbike and TV

 Group 2: families with access to a house, no stable job, and a high number of family members living together (more than six people), TV and bicycle

 Group 3: renters, elderly people, and people with chronic disease.

My observations concluded that the community profile did not include wealthier residents, suggesting the information needed to be updated to reflect the current conditions of Phka at the time of the research. I found that the income of households varied according to occupation and number of family members living in the household. Most adults in Phka worked in the informal sector as moto-taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, or vegetable sellers in the market. Younger generations worked in formal low-paid jobs such as garment factories, building and construction, or as cooks and cleaners. Other wealthier members worked in low-skilled jobs in government, private companies, and

123 the military. Most children in Phka attended school and some families had been able to support their children at university, a major change in relation to their parents’ generation. My interviews with residents indicated that household incomes varied between USD $100 and $800 per month, showing that the families I interviewed were living well above the poverty line as explained in Chapter 4. However, it was clear that renters, elderly people, and people with diseases and disabilities continued to be within the poorest group of people living in Phka.

Statistics provided by the ID Poor Program of the Ministry of Planning indicated that the village and district where Phka was located6 were characterized by lower levels of poverty compared to other areas in the city. Despite this, the poverty that people experienced in Phka had changed over time as part of the collective social process experienced in the settlement and the benefits that some families had been able to gain from urban development.

6.4 Land tenure in Phka In the past, Phka was a wetland surrounding a lake as seen in Figure 6.2. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the Ministry of Defence settled former soldiers and their families in Phka. During the late 1980s the area experienced an influx of people returning from rural and refugee camps after the civil war. These people bought land informally from soldiers and their families who informally subdivided and sold land. At that time, people developed their own informal land records that were later recognized by the lower levels of government as explained in Chapter 7. People arrived in Phka to find a place to live; they harvested morning glory and used any available materials provided by the wetland to build their houses. For instance, Sreymoch, a woman who lived in Phka for over 30 years, proudly explained that she used her training as a construction worker to build a small shack when she first arrived in the area. Between laughs, she mimicked how she used a canoe to go around the wetland collecting palm leaves and other materials to build her walls and roof with support from one of her neighbours. During these early days, residents made small individual investments in housing and livelihood opportunities out of the meagre resources they could access, consolidating the settlement over time and incrementally.

6 The village and district are not disclosed due to confidentiality reasons. 124

Figure 6.2 Phka in the 1980s7

Phka is an informal settlement. People did not have formal land title but had possession rights over their land. Possession rights gave residents a higher level of tenure security and increased their chances for legal recognition compared to other informal settlements in Phnom Penh. However, as explained in Chapter 7, the settlement was designated as ‘temporary’ under the Land Law 2001, waiting for its legal status to be decided by government authorities under Systematic Land Registration (SLR). This made residents of Phka vulnerable to eviction. Access to legal title as a form of tenure security had been a struggle for residents of Phka since the settlement was excluded from SLR in 2007 as explained in Chapter 7.

6.5 A walk through Phka We will start our walk through the settlement entering through the main access road at the south east of Phka as seen in Figure 6.3. The boundaries of the settlement have been defined by community members and do not follow the village or district boundaries. The road you are walking on was constructed and upgraded over time by the residents of Phka. As explained in Chapter 7, this piece of infrastructure has been

7 Photo provided by the community leaders of Phka. 125 important in shaping social relationships and a sense of place in Phka, as it has provided public space for residents to use. Also, through the process of organization for the construction of the road trust and solidarity grew among residents.

Figure 6.3 Map of Phka based on the community understanding

One important aspect to notice is a plot of land in the centre of the settlement protected with barbed wire. The plot is empty and covered with vegetation, however if you look deeply you can see a couple of hammocks hanging from the trees and some women using them for resting and having chats in the afternoon. This land is owned by the state, however as explained in Chapter 7, the land has been sold to developers and there are rumours among community members that a condominium for upper-middle- class families will be developed. The lake that borders Phka in the north-west, as seen

126 in Figure 6.4 is facing a similar situation to the empty plot. Like many other lakes in Phnom Penh, it has been filled over time and community members explained that the land has been sold to a developer to construct a shopping mall. These development plans are further explained in Chapter 7.

Figure 6.4 Lake bordering Phka in the north-west

The settlement is clean, and most houses are connected to electricity and water as seen in Figure 6.5. As explained in Chapter 7, this was not always the case. Access to infrastructure and services required the collective organization and struggle of residents, and negotiation to access these services with powerful actors. We continue our walk along the west of the empty plot. Here we can see the ‘wealthy’ side of the settlement where some of the original residents sold their plots of land to newcomers, and others have become wealthier over time due to social connections and job opportunities. Most houses in this side are gated, wealthy and spacious as seen in Figure 6.6. However, there are pockets where we see one or two basic structures that people have built to live in or develop a business over rented land as seen in Figure 6.7.

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Figure 6.5 Phka in 2016

Figure 6.6 Gated houses in the wealthy side of Phka

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Figure 6.7 Example of a structure built on rented land in Phka

If we continue walking toward the north and north east of Phka, we start meeting the original residents of this settlement. Most of their houses consist of a basic wooden house lifted over a cement structure as seen in Figure 6.8. This has been done incrementally over time according to each family’s needs and resources. The houses were occupied by between one and five families living together. Most of the original residents do not have gates and use the access road as public space. We see that many houses have been used to open a home-based business. Women, particularly, opened grocery shops or sewing businesses and work from home alongside looking after children, as seen in Figure 6.9. There were also houses in poor conditions whose residents had not been able to upgrade, as seen in Figure 6.10. The variety of housing conditions indicated socio-economic inequalities between residents of Phka, the implications of which are discussed in Chapters 7,8,9.

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Figure 6.8 Example of a house developed incrementally in Phka

Figure 6.9 Examples of women’s home-based businesses in Phka

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Figure 6.10 Example of a house without upgrading in Phka

We also see that rental rooms have been developed by most households as a source of income. In Phka, there were a variety of options that accommodate a significant number of rural migrants as seen in Figure 6.11

Figure 6.11 Examples of rental spaces and families in Phka

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Most of the rental rooms are of good quality and people have few complaints about their renting situation, however, there are cases where rooms, especially those developed in wooden houses, are affected by mosquitoes and bad smells from garbage. The quality of rooms depended on the socio-economic characteristics of the household that developed the rooms. There were a variety of rental arrangements ranging from informal, to semi-formal and formal. Also, rooms were rented on a short- or long-term basis, depending on the needs and financial situation of the tenant.

6.6 Financial Investments of residents of Phka The images provided in the previous section evidence that despite not having land title, residents of Phka invested in housing, home-based businesses and infrastructure including connection to water, electricity and developing an access road. At the time of the research, Phka had been transformed significantly by the individual and collective financial practices of residents. The good physical condition of the settlement and its central location, close to business, education, and job opportunities, made this settlement attractive to a diverse group of families. As explained in Chapter 9, individual financial practices also made some residents of Phka vulnerable to market-based dispossession. Also, these investments led to processes of gentrification and people living in central Phnom Penh bought land and developed housing in this area.

My observations around the city indicated that the physical and living conditions of other settlements were of lower quality that in Phka. For example, housing consisted of wooden and plastic shacks, minimal investment in infrastructure and no access to basic services. This characteristic differentiated Phka from other informal settlements in Phnom Penh. As explained further in Chapters 8 and 9, the good physical condition of the settlement resulting from the financial investments of residents, is a particular characteristic of Phka. The sources of finance that residents used to buy land, develop/improve/repair their housing and invest in their businesses and livelihood included informal, semi-formal and formal sources as explained in Table 6.1.

Despite socio-economic differences between residents, there was not a clear relationship of one group using a particular source of finance, and most residents used a mixed of formal, semi-formal and informal sources for their investments. For example, some of the poorest residents such as renters were able to access loans

132 from banks for livelihood purposes due to special financial products offered to this type of clients, and some wealthy residents had accessed money from informal lenders at times of need because of having multiple debts. These findings point towards the importance of thinking beyond established assumptions regarding the investment practices of the residents of informal settlements as further evidenced in Chapter 9.

Table 6.1 Sources of finance used by residents of Phka (source: interviews with residents of Phka)

Informal Semi-formal Formal

 Family and  Micro-finance  Banks friends  Selling  Government

 Individual assets/valuables  United Nations

Financial sources savings  Community fund Transitional used by residents  Informal Authority of of Phka lenders Cambodia  Inheritance

The most common sources used by residents I interviewed were informal sources such as loans from family and friends, individual savings, and informal lenders. The community fund, composed of individual savings from households, is classified in this case as a semi-formal source because of its informal rules and administration system. This fund was a popular source of finance among residents, especially some of the poorest residents of the community such as elderly residents. However, most renters I interviewed did not participate or were not aware of the existence of the fund. Formal and semi-formal private sources such as micro-finance institutions (MFIs) and banks were a common source of finance in Phka. MFIs are considered semi-formal in this case due to their flexibility in criteria for accessing their products. Only a few of these private institutions offered financial products specifically for housing, as explained in Chapter 9. Thus, most families applied for general and/or livelihood loans, but used these funds to invest in housing. Also, only a very small number of families received support from government authorities. When this happened, it was in the form of some

133 type of compensation given for relocation in the past. In one case, a family received support from the United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia (UNTAC) after leaving a refugee camp in Thailand.

6.7 Collective action in Phka With support from various NGOs, residents of Phka experienced an important collective mobilization process that helped community members build social capital and overcome poverty over time, make physical improvements to the settlement, and gain recognition from the government over their land. Social capital in the form of trust, and mutual support was strong in Phka not only because of the relationships between neighbours forged as a result of working together to access infrastructure and services, but also because of the support between family members.

Phka had a community structure with elected community representatives from the community itself. This leadership model was characterized by supporting an informal network of representatives rather than one individual leader. At the time of the research, there were two representatives, a man and a woman, who were more active in community affairs. In addition, other three women informally supported community activities. In Phka, the community representatives were elected annually by residents. However, the committee had comprised the same people over several years because of the residents’ trust in them. As further explained in Chapter 8, this characteristic was of great importance in enabling collective action among residents. The community representatives had a good relationship with NGOs and lower levels of government (village and district). I found that representatives were associated with NGOs rather than government authorities. The two principal representatives volunteered and were hired by NGOs as ‘community trainers’ to support other people in informal settlements in Phnom Penh to be organized based on their skill and experience. As explained in Chapter 8, this successful leadership model was built over time as part of the collective and social learning process that residents of Phka experienced.

As part of the collective mobilization process residents of Phka had a community saving group, established in 1998. The saving group was divided into different sub- funds. These include savings from community members of approximately USD $4000, an interest fund gained from the savings of approximately USD $2000, a welfare fund which was set up thanks to a USD $700 grant from an NGO, and a funeral fund in

134 which members individually contributed about USD $1.50 per year. The fund was managed by one community leader, who kept savings records of all the members in a book, as well as by each member who kept their records in their own booklets. As explained in Chapter 7, the NGO played a key role in supporting the residents of Phka with setting up and managing the fund. At the time of the research, residents met once a month in the house of one wealthy community member. At these meetings representatives reported on the status of the saving group and relevant development projects, and supported residents to make plans based on their needs and interests.

The savings were deposited in two different accounts opened through a micro-finance institution. One account was used as a revolving fund that members used to access low-interest loans (USD $1.30 to 1.50 per month) for various individual needs such as housing extensions, business development, and health and emergencies. The second account was used to deposit the interest gained on the first account. The money earned in interest was used for three different purposes: 30 per cent of the interest was given back to members twice per year, 40 per cent was given to fund collective development projects including activities related to land tenure security, and 30 per cent was given to cover the expenses of managing the fund such as printing and transport. There was no requirement on how much money people needed to save, and members could withdraw their share and cease participation in the fund at any time. In the initial stages of the fund most households contributed with their savings every month, however as explained in Chapter 9, at the time of the research the membership had started to decrease with only 31 households actively participating. Renters did not participate in the saving group or community activities. This happened because many renters did not live permanently in the area. Renters were considered as a transient group and were not invited or considered part of the community by permanent residents.

The details of collective action and the conditions that enable this process in Phka are explained further in Chapters 7 ,8 and 9. However, it is important to point out that this characteristic is more the exception than the rule in the context of Phnom Penh, as not many urban poor communities are able to organize and endure in collective action. As explained in Chapter 8, the understanding of this situation cannot be detached from the history of conflict and the imposition of collective behaviour by the Khmer Rouge

135 regime (Beard, 2018). Despite this, there is evidence that urban poor communities do organize in Phnom Penh (ACHR, 2017); thus, understanding the conditions that lead to these processes to emerge and the results these can achieve in generating social and spatial justice is necessary and are explained in Chapter 8.

6.8 Conclusion This chapter has provided an overview of Phka, the case study site I used in my research based on the selection criteria explained in Chapter 4: insecurity of tenure; investments in housing, infrastructure and livelihoods; and the presence of collective action. I explain some of the characteristics that make this case a deviant case (Flyvbjerg, 2006), which means that is especially good to study formal and informal relationships compared to other informal settlements in Phnom Penh. These characteristics include having possession rights over the land, giving residents a higher level of tenure security than other informal settlements in the city. Being a settlement with lower levels of poverty, allowing people to make collective and individual investments in housing, infrastructure and livelihood. And particularly a settlement in which residents had organized and endure in collective action. As explained in the following chapters, these characteristics were able to reveal a wealth of information about actors and processes and facilitate the understanding on how formal and informal, and power relationships unfold in upgrading practices in the context of Phnom Penh. In the next chapters I also use other similar studies to analyse the applications of this particular case to other cities of the global south in the light of my research questions.

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Chapter 7 Formal and informal relationships in land use practices in Phnom Penh

7.1 Introduction As discussed in Chapter 2, a key point in research trying to understand formal and informal relationships has been to evidence the implications of the state in producing and reproducing informality (Roy, 2005; 2009; Yiftachel, 2009). This explains that urban informality is tangled with complex structural power relationships that define which urban development practices, models and citizens are legitimate and illegitimate in cities, and decide which of these models are valued, excluded or removed (McFarlane, 2012). In the context of informal settlements, these arguments point to the relevance of understanding how power relationships are manifested in land use practices and tenure security, justifying the use of these criteria to select Phka as my case study.

In this chapter I respond to research secondary question number 2: How are formal and informal relationships manifested in land use practices in informal settlements, and what are the implications of these relationships in the production and reproduction of social and spatial injustices in Phnom Penh? To answer this question, I explain the origins and meaning of urban informality associated with Phka, and the relationship of this condition to land legislation, planning frameworks, and the state. I discuss how definitions under land administration systems enhanced the vulnerabilities of residents of Phka, in terms of tenure security, by placing them in a ‘gray space’ between the whiteness of legality/approval/safety and the blackness of eviction/destruction/death (Yiftachel, 2009). I argue that the tendency of planning and land use frameworks to treat land as a product of the market detached from social relationships, marginalized the relationships and aspirations that the residents of Phka had to their land and place of residence, threatening their rights and belonging in the city (Rolnik, 2014). Importantly, by discussing urban informality under the epitomes of de-regulation and exclusion, I argue that a range of social and spatial inequalities were reproduced by planning instruments, governance structures and powerful actors in Phnom Penh (Roy, 2009). Overall, the chapter contributes to answering the principal research question of this thesis by explaining how formal and informal relationships are

137 manifested in the context of land use in informal settlements and planning in Phnom Penh, and the implications of these relationships for social and spatial justice.

The chapter is divided into five sections. Section 7.2 explains the origins and meaning of the category of urban informality in Phka. Following this, I explain in Section 7.3 the relationships of residents of Phka to their land and place of residence, putting in evidence how these are marginalized and disconnected from planning and land legal frameworks. In Section 7.4, I explain the exclusion of Phka from Systematic Land Registration (SLR), evidencing how the state is implicated in urban informality by manipulating legal frameworks to accumulate land for development at the expense of vulnerable groups. The chapter ends with a conclusion in Section 7.5 which discusses the findings of this chapter in the light of other studies in Phnom Penh and other cities of the global south.

7.2 The origins of urban informality in Phka As explained in Chapter 6, Phka was occupied by former soldiers and their families after the civil war in the late 1970s with the consent of the government at the time. This was an ad-hoc occupation as it happened in the whole of Phnom Penh under the de- facto property market that arose in the city in the absence of land records after these were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge (Khemro & Payne, 2004). People returning from rural and refugee camps bought land from the ‘original’ families who informally subdivided and sold land. At that time, residents recorded their land transactions informally, as a land sale or transfer written agreement, and lived securely in this area for many years with a certificate known as plong ton or soft title. However, as the country rebuilt its institutions and introduced planning and legal land frameworks, Phka was categorized as an ‘informal’ and/or ‘temporary’ settlement. This makes evident how planning frameworks are implicated in the production of urban informality (Roy, 2009; Altrock, 2012) and in this case threatened the tenure security that residents had manage to achieve over the years, as explained further in this section.

In Phka, soft titles stated information on the person/family occupying the land, and the location of the plot, including an indication of the land size and boundaries as seen in Figure 7.1. One section of the document stated that in the case of authorities claiming the land in the name of ‘public interest’, the resident would agree to give the land to the state without compensation. As explained in footnote 3 in Chapter 4, the public

138 interest related to land in the context of Cambodia includes land of natural origin (e.g. rivers, lakes and mountains), land that is specially developed for public use (e.g. ports, railways and airports), land that is made available for public use (e.g. roads, pathways and public parks), land allocated to provide a public service (e.g. schools, hospitals and administrative buildings), protected areas, archaeological and historical sites, and official properties of the Royal Family (Open Development Cambodia, 2015). This condition was signed by residents and local authorities, giving the state legal power of acquisition. Soft titles differed from hard titles issued under Systematic Land Registration (SLR). Hard titles were recognized by national authorities and recorded with GPS coordinates in the national cadastre, guaranteeing land ownership without contestation as seen in Figure 7.2. The state was also able to acquire land on the basis of ‘public interest’ from people having hard title but with the right to be compensated (Royal Government of Cambodia, 2001).

Figure 7.1 Example of Phka resident’s soft title

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Figure 7.2 Example of hard title issued by the Ministry of Urban Planning, Land Management and Construction

At the time of the research, soft titles served as evidence that residents of Phka or the people they had bought land from had lived in the settlement before 2001. This was significant under the Land Law 2001, which defined two different types of legal rights for the occupants of land in Cambodia. The most secure right was ‘ownership’ (kamaset), giving exclusive right to control, use and dispose of land and anything connected to that land. Under the Land Law 2001, ownership could be claimed by the state (as state public or state private land, as explained in Chapter 4), by private companies or individuals as private land, and/or indigenous communities and Buddhist monasteries as collective land (Royal Government of Cambodia, 2001). The second right was ‘legal possession’ (paukeas), recognizing any person who had been in possession of their land prior to the passing of the Law in August 2001. If someone commenced occupation of their land after August 2001 but could prove they purchased the land from the original legal possessor their claim was also legitimate; however, the law stated that no possession on state public or private land was legal no matter when it commenced. Under the Land Law 2001 people who did not have rights as owners or possessors and occupied state private and/or public land were

140 considered illegal and unable to claim land rights (Royal Government of Cambodia, 2001).

Based on the prescriptions of the Land Law 2001, residents of Phka were neither legal nor illegal, but able to claim land ownership because they lived there before 2001. Thus, the Land Law 2001 positioned Phka residents in a ‘gray space’ between the whiteness of legality/approval/safety and the blackness of eviction/destruction/death (Yiftachel, 2009). Having possession rights under the Land Law 2001 also positioned residents of Phka in a state of ‘permanent temporariness’ (Yiftachel, 2009), waiting for their legal status to be formalized by state authorities under the state’s Systematic Land Registration (SLR). As other studies have found (see Wigle, 2014; Keo, Bouhours & Bouhours 2015; Gilbert & De Jong, 2015; Rolnik 2015), this ‘graying of spaces’ and ambiguous classification of informal settlements by the state has become ‘the rule rather than exception’ in Phnom Penh and other cities of the global south forming a ‘new mode of urbanism’ (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004; Yiftachel, 2015). It is common that settlements like Phka are placed in a kind of planning limbo used deliberately by the state to manipulate the classification of urban informality to pursue the interests of private investors and accumulate land for development (Rolnik, 2015). In this way, gray spaces highlight the structural process that sees many residents of contemporary cities confined to an inferior citizenship status based on their class or cultural identity (Yiftachel, 2015).

In the context of Phnom Penh, this was made evident in the country’s planning regime granting residents of informal settlements possession rights over the land, and applying a planning terminology which defined ‘informal settlements’ as ‘temporary settlements’, implying the need for these settlements to wait for their legal status to be defined by the state as explained in Chapter 4. Flower (2018) explains that the division between ‘owners’ and ‘possessors’ in the Land Law 2001 arose from initial land reforms in 1989 and 1992, designed to purposely disadvantage residents of self-built settlements by creating a second-tier tenure category of ‘possessor’ which involved ambiguity and complexity in being recognized by the state as legitimate in claiming land ownership. Different studies in Phnom Penh (Grimsditch & Henderson, 2009; Un & So, 2011; Lindstrom, 2013; Keo, Bouhours & Bouhours, 2015) recognize these

141 ambiguities as threatening the tenure security of people living informally in Phnom Penh, as explained in Section 7.4.

Another important point was that despite the Land Law 2001 allowing some degree of diversity of rights and ownership categories by recognizing collective property to Indigenous peoples, land administration systems in Phnom Penh, as in many other cities of the global south, supported individual ownership as the preferred property right. As discussed in the literature review in Chapter 3, individual property rights were preferred to enable land markets, reproducing the commodification of land. This assumption reproduced the idea of ‘space’ as a neutral container or ‘blank canvas or platform to be smoothly acted upon’, separate from the ‘subjects who occupy and move through it, as well as specificities of social and political context’ (Keenan, 2014). These assumptions also reproduced legal orderings as binary, dividing categories as public/private, formal/informal, and legal/illegal (Blomley, 2004). As explained in Chapter 4, these legal orderings, introduced in Cambodia by western thinking under the French protectorate and international donors since the UNTAC period, were ingrained in capitalist thinking and obscured the existence of other types of relationships, sense of belonging and claims to land, including those that many urban poor communities such as residents of Phka had to their place of residence (Lombard, 2015). These assumptions reduced planning in Phnom Penh to an activity and/or instrument to regulate property rights based on the idea that land was a commodity and was thus subject to manipulation from powerful actors, as discussed in Section 7.4.

The above discussion explains how the notion of informality associated with the settlement of Phka was derived from planning and land legal frameworks when these were re-introduced in the country in the 1990s. Phka’s informality arose even when the occupation of the settlement was initially tolerated by the state as a response to the chaos left by the civil war, and even when people had lived securely in the settlement for many years. Phka’s ‘gray space’ and ‘permanent temporariness’ (Yiftachel, 2009) were products of legal definitions which differed from the residents’ subjective relationships with their place of residence. Thus, the condition of ‘informality’ in Phka, as in many other cities of the global south, was inherently subject to the state’s decision and conformance of the settlement with what was considered

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‘legal’ and/or ‘formal’ under planning and land administration systems (Roy, 2009; Altrock, 2012; Wigle, 2014). This case demonstrates how ‘informality’ is constituted by ‘formality’ in various ways, rather than these being external and independent categories (Roy, 2009; Kreibich, 2012). Despite this, planning and legal frameworks in Phnom Penh continued to divide the ‘formal’ from the ‘informal’ operating in disconnection with the everyday lives, aspirations and feelings of belonging of residents to their place of residence as explained in the following section.

7.3 Place and belonging in Phka The case of Phka is an example of how the individual and collective struggle experienced by residents of informal settlements transforms the meaning of informal settlements to ‘places’ where alternative relationships to land, housing and the city are constructed (Rolnik, 2014; Lombard, 2015). As explained in Chapter 2, place is a dynamic, heterogeneous process constructed in space by social relationships. Place leads to the consolidation of identities and sense of belonging of subjects in space (Cresswell, 2004). Thus, place creates diverse meanings of space transcending ‘exchange’ value, involving emotional attachments that people form with particular spaces, based on different uses, feelings, values and everyday experience (Lombard, 2015). The concept of ‘place’ moves forward from the assumption that ‘space’ is a neutral container, and instead highlights the social processes that occur in space consolidated by power relationships and social and political contexts (Massey, 1991; Keenan, 2014).

As explained in Chapter 2, the concept of ‘place’ is also useful to account for the possibility that the materiality or structures of places influence what people do in them, but at the same time places are influenced by people’s activities and agency (Lombard, 2015). These ideas position informal dwellers as agents, acting within the constraints of existing structures within informal settlements. This conceptualization of place accounts for Foucault’s (1976) understanding of power explained in Chapter 2, embodying the possibility of resistance and even the disruption of structures through incremental change (Gotham, 2003). Thus ‘place’ not only accounts for diverse ways to relate to land and property, but also for the multiple practices involved in the construction of places that go beyond institutional planning processes. As discussed in Chapter 3, this represents practices of informal settlement upgrading as place-

143 making, offering a cross-cutting perspective on activities which are often categorized as either formal or informal, moving forward standard binary divisions (Lombard, 2014).

7.3.1 Individual and collective struggle for place in Phka In Phka, ‘place’ was consolidated out of the struggle of many of its residents to rebuild their lives after the civil war and overcome poverty and precarious living conditions. Many of the stories I encountered expressed how residents found peace and security in Phka after the Pol Pot regime, and how they worked by themselves, with their families and neighbours, to rebuild their lives. Chynna8, a 55-year-old woman, said:

I lost my husband and two sons during the Pol Pot regime. Before the regime my family owned three houses in Phnom Penh, and we lost them all. During this time, I escaped to Malaysia with my mother by boat and lived there as a refugee. We then had to travel by land back to Cambodia. It was a long and difficult trip. I came to live in this area thanks to my brother who gave me a portion of the land he bought. Thanks to him I was able to rebuild my life again.

During the initial stages of consolidation of the neighbourhood the practices of residents accounted for Bayat’s (2000) ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’, referring to the silent, protracted but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the powerful in order to survive and improve their lives in cities. This involves quiet, atomized and prolonged mobilization with episodic collective action. Bayat’s (2000) encroachments are diverse, ranging from those undertaken by migrants, refugees and squatters; however, they are characterized by carrying out their activities not as a deliberative political act but by the force of necessity to survive and improve a dignified life. A key attribute of the quiet encroachment is that while advances are made quietly, individually and gradually, the defence of their gains is often collective and audible. This conceptualization points out the importance of both individual and collective practices of residents of informal settlements in upgrading and place-making.

In the case of Phka, most residents had invested most of their resources in buying land in the settlement. Most people I interviewed had individually gained access to

8 All the real names of the people interviewed have been changed to pseudonyms to protect their identities. 144 land through the informal market and built a small wooden house over water using materials offered by the wetland. Further to this, people individually accessed a livelihood activity to survive, mostly in the informal sector. Thus, individual practices were important in addressing residents’ basic needs. Further to this, residents of Phka engaged in collective action. The Urban Poor Women Development (UPWD), a Cambodian NGO working for the rights of urban poor women in Phnom Penh, played a key role in triggering collective action among residents in Phka in the initial stages. This process was far from easy, as one staff member from UPDW explained:

When we started working with them I thought they were not going to make it. It was very difficult. There was domestic violence, even a man hit [his] wife in front of everyone in a meeting. Women were weak and insecure. Also, people did not trust our NGO, so it was hard to help them to organize. But step by step people started to trust us more and communicate with each other.

With the initial support from UPDW, residents set up a saving group and a representative committee. As explained in Chapters 2 and 3, these practices, well documented in the literature about informal settlement organization, were important for residents learning benefits and systems of working collectively to address their urgent needs. They strengthened relationships between each other, and acknowledged the role that women had to play in the development of their community. Rachana, one resident, expressed:

The saving group is a means for generating solidarity between neighbours. I like to save because I can support other families in the community, earn interest from my share, but most important build solidarity between each other.

Thus, these practices created social capital between residents by nurturing the members’ trust, respect and support between each other. Darany, one of the community leaders, explained:

Without trust our system cannot work. Trust between community members and between members and the community committee is the principal and most important aspect for the saving group to work.

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One important characteristic of the fund was that it was designed to balance collective and individual interests of members. As explained in Chapter 6, savings were deposited in two different accounts opened through a micro-finance institution. One account was used as a revolving fund that members used to access low-interest loans (USD $1.30 to 1.50 per month) for various individual needs such as housing extensions, business development, and health and emergencies. The second account was used to deposit the interest gained on the first account. The money earned in interest was used for three different purposes: 30 per cent of interest was given back to the members twice per year, 40 per cent was given to fund collective development projects including activities related to land tenure security, and 30 per cent was given to cover the expenses of managing the fund.

The balance between individual and collective needs was essential for the successful operation of the fund in Phka. Studies on community funds in Asia have shown that there are cases where strict rules are set up by communities in managing the funds, leading to members’ dissatisfaction as no individual benefits are received (see for example ACHR, 2017). In this case the fund allowed people in Phka to save money and build good relationships with their neighbours, and at the same time have an individual financial incentive. These characteristics facilitated building trust between residents, as well as trust of residents in the collective system. The capacity of savings groups to generate trust, social capital and develop the collective agency of the urban poor has been documented widely in the literature (see Boonyabancha, 2001; Mitlin, 2008b; Archer, 2012; Shand & Colenbrander, 2018). These studies suggest that despite their apparent concentration on finance, saving groups develop capabilities for collective decision-making and action, and are used as a means for residents of informal settlements to learn to work collectively and trust each other, not as an end in itself. In the case of Phka the social capital and collective agency developed between residents were used to access basic services and in negotiating with internal and external actors in the settlement.

Dara, one of the community leaders, explained that only since 2003 had the connection to the public water supply been possible. Before this, the only water source available was from one household external to the community, located near the main road. Yara, a young mother who had lived in Phka all her life, remembered how hard

146 it was for her as a teenager to walk to this household to buy water and carry the full buckets back to her house. Later on, the household allowed families to make an illegal connection by paying USD $65 per connection plus additional monthly water fees. As other studies in the global south show, one of the causes of urban poverty is the fact that accessing services informally is more expensive than accessing these through the formal network (Satterthwaite & Mitlin, 2014). In the case of Phnom Penh, a cubic metre of water purchased privately was about five times more than if purchased from the public network (Fallavier, 2003). During this time only nine households in Phka could afford to pay for the connection, and the residents asked UPWD for financial support, which materialized, subsidizing 70 per cent of the connection cost to residents; support that was taken only by a few families as many residents did not trust the scheme. Connection to the public water supply happened after the Municipality expanded their water infrastructure closer to Phka, and the residents leveraged 40 per cent of the connection cost from UPWD, 20 per cent from the Municipality available as a subsidy, and 40 per cent collectively from each of the 29 households living in Phka at the time, to pay for the connection.

Similarly, residents organized to negotiate access to electricity. In the 1990s the only available source was a generator located on the empty plot, owned at that time by the Ministry of Defence. This institution offered one connection line at a cost of USD $2.5 per month which was only available at night. Later, an electricity source became available from a wealthier resident working for the former public institution Electricité de Cambodge (EDC). Because of personal connections, the household obtained connection to the power network of EDC and sold electricity to the other residents of Phka. At that time, this practice was common in Phnom Penh as the EDC developed a network of registered vendors who resold electricity to unregistered households for two or three times the rate of regular households (Fallavier, 2003). This scheme allowed the wealthy household to monopolize the electricity connection to make a profit, and residents were forced to pay high fees for electricity for many years until the community leader’s nephew, who started working at EDC, helped residents to connect directly to the electricity grid in 2007.

Interviews with residents revealed that access to water and electricity were key factors in improving the living conditions of people in Phka over time. This happened not only

147 because of improving health and living standards, but also by reducing the fees paid for these services, people were able to invest in other priorities such as housing and livelihoods, dimensions that are recognized in the literature as necessary for reducing urban poverty (ACHR, 2014b; Parnell, 2015). Darany explained:

The community is now connected to electricity and water, and thanks to these connections people pay fewer fees. Before the fees were about five times higher than what we pay today. So, people have changed their mind-set. Before people were lazy and did not want to self-develop and collaborate with their neighbours. But over the years people’s mind-set has changed and they have become active in development projects and community activities.

The social processes behind the saving group and access to electricity and water in Phka led to residents learning social and collective capital, building internal power, and achieving tangible results that improved their quality of life. Thus, these initial collective practices can be conceptualized as residents’ ordinary acts of citizenship (Staeheli et al., 2012) that were to build power from within (Roitman, 2019) and negotiate exclusion and marginalization, in this instance at the neighbourhood scale. Also, as explained in Chapter 2, these practices resemble the concept of ‘power with’ (Ife, 2016) emphasizing the principle that we do not act alone but together in solidarity, opening up the possibility of collective rather than individual power. As further discussed in Chapter 8, the collective citizenship developed by residents was used to negotiate exclusion and marginalization at the city scale in relation to land tenure security, to defend their belonging to place in Phnom Penh, as explained in the following section. This shows how ‘gray spacing’ is also re-shaping the nature of urban citizenship in the global south, forming new foundations and opening possibilities for shaping a new urban and political order (Yiftachel, 2015).

7.3.2 Belonging to place in Phka From the interviews with residents it was clear that through the individual and collective struggle many residents experienced in improving their living conditions, they developed a sense of belonging to place in Phka. As explained in Chapter 3, belonging is a plural concept entailing an emotional connotation associated with feeling at home in a place, or a feeling of rootedness associated with feelings of sense of place, place attachment and place identity (Antonsich, 2010). These feelings of belonging allowed

148 for the construction of plural meanings between people and the different elements constituting place in Phka, including land, housing and community. These meanings clearly transcended the temporary category associated with Phka and reproduced by planning and legal frameworks explained in Section 7.2, as well as the solely commercial value of land enabling processes of accumulation by dispossession explained in Chapter 2.

Most residents I interviewed perceived themselves as far from living in Phka temporarily, as perceived by land legal frameworks. Depika, a forty-year-old woman, said:

This is my land. I have lived here for the past 20 years. I have developed my home and my life in this community. My home is where life occurs, it makes me feel warm, without it I don’t have anything, and I will be lonely.

Also, residents who had lived in Phka since its consolidation expressed close relationships with their land and housing, reflecting how these have made part of their life. Most residents of Phka that I interviewed had a deep involvement in the consolidation of their place of residence. Sinith, a fifty-one-year-old man, said:

To improve oneself, one has to self-develop. That is what I have done over my lifetime and with my family. My house is very important for me. It has been part of me and my family life for a long time. I have self-developed with my house.

Younger residents valued their place because of the benefits that housing and land bring to stable lives and the opportunity to have close ties with their families. Khana, a twenty-six year old woman, said:

This house is very important for me, if I was to rent a place it will be very expensive for my family, even the utilities. It is important for me to live together with my parents and siblings and having a place to welcome other relatives and allowed them to stay when they visit from other places. I can also afford to stay home and take care of my son.

Furthermore, residents expressed a feeling of pride associated with efforts they had made in obtaining land and housing. Bopha, one forty-year-old woman, said:

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I am very proud of my house. Owing a house makes me happy. When I was young I lived with my cousin and I was not free. Having my own house makes me feel free and independent.

Also, Kosal, one of the poorest residents I interviewed, said:

My house makes me feel proud because I come from a very poor family in the province, and my house is the result of my and my husband’s work.

These quotes illustrate diverse personal meanings associated with places of residence from people in Phka, tangled with spiritual, social, cultural and economic meanings to land and housing. These plural meanings demonstrate social relationships and meanings toward space, that forge particular feelings and senses of belonging to place (Keenan, 2014). These plural meanings show that space is not a neutral container, but is constituted by a complex range of social relationships, which the law and planning frameworks fail to take into account (Blomley, 2004). Further to individual meanings toward place, residents of Phka had also constructed collective meanings around their places of residence, taking into account not only their relationships with family members but also their fellow neighbours. The story of Devi and Arun presented in Figure 7.3 evidenced these relationships.

The construction of the access road was another example of residents’ collective practices building a collective sense of belonging in Phka. Initially, a dirt road was built in 2002 with financial support from UPWD and the collective funds of the community. This dirt road was expanded in 2007 and upgraded in 2010 through a collaborative scheme where residents contributed their labour as seen in Figure 7.4. In this scheme, residents put forward an action plan to upgrade the road under the annual Commune Investment Plan (CIP). Community leaders explained that under the CIP the commune authorities would contribute part of the funds for the upgrading, but asked residents to contribute USD $3,000 in total from their side. The residents leveraged the USD $3,000 from NGOs and their community savings to improve the road. Instead of residents using all of the USD $3,000 to pay for the road, they decided to set up a system to ensure the money was maintained in the community for future use. For this they developed an internal scheme in which families had to pay back part of the funds based on the benefit they gained from the construction of the road.

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Figure 7.3 Life story of Devi and Arun, residents of Phka

Devi bought land with her husband and developed a house in Phka using their savings in 1991. The marriage split, and she had to raise four children on her own. These children grew up and started their families but continued to

live with Devi.

Over the years Devi borrowed money from the community saving group for various purposes including making small repairs in her house, as well as trying out some business such as selling shells in a food cart. Apart from her children, Devi shared her living space with her sister, Arun. After the Khmer Rouge Arun and her husband, a former soldier, were settled by the government in a school nearby Phka. After some years, they received compensation from the government and were forced to move away from this location. With this money the couple bought land along the railway line and built a house in which they lived for a number of years. In 2005 the couple was evicted for occupying public state land, losing their land, house and lifetime investments.

It was then that they came to live with Devi, who allowed them to move into the back of her house where they constructed a small shack with recycled materials. Thanks to this support, Arun was able to rebuild her life. She had also borrowed at various times from the community saving group. This helped her to protect her house from flooding, and allowed access to the medical doctor, something very important for her as she had suffered various falls due to poor vision. The two sisters have benefited from living in Phka and being part of the community. Their lives have not been easy, but they recognize their family and community support as essential in making it better. As Devi explained: ‘I used to be very poor. But my condition has changed. My children have helped me, and together with my neighbours we have been able to bring water and electricity connections to the community’.

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Figure 7.4 Collective upgrading of the access road in Phka in 2010

For example, residents who lived in front of the road paid more than those who lived at the back. In this scheme, residents paid the money back over time without being charged any interest. Once the money was paid, the funds were deposited in the savings group and used for individual loans. These practices show how the development of infrastructure is also a process that can develop collective citizenship and agency among people living in informal settlements, and the role that citizens themselves can have in planning and development processes (Beard, 2003; 2012). The development of small upgrades, in particular access roads, as a means to develop collective agency and increase visibility and positive perception of informal settlers, is used as an important strategy of umbrella organizations supporting social movements such as SDI and ACHR in the global south (see Boonyabancha, Carcellar & Kerr, 2012; Patel, Baptist & D’Cruz, 2012).

As the case of Phka shows, the development of an access road not only facilitated the connection of the settlement to the city, but importantly, provided common space where children played, residents gathered to chat in the afternoon, residents planted plants and decorated the neighbourhood, and occasional celebrations were organized such as a communal party for the 20th anniversary of Phka. Thus, more than a road,

152 this piece of infrastructure enhanced social ties between residents, nurturing a ‘sense of place’ in Phka as seen in Figure 7.5, Figure 7.6, and Figure 7.7.

Figure 7.5 A child with his grandfather and mother on the road at Phka

Figure 7.6 Children playing in the road in Phka

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Figure 7.7 Residents’ plants and decorations using the road in Phka

The road, as an example of public space in informal settlements, was then essential in enhancing the collective lived experience and social ties in Phka and creating and maintaining social and collective capital between residents. The links between public space and social cohesion have been discussed in other studies in the global south. For example, studies in informal settlements in Medellin, Colombia find that public spaces, in this case public libraries and parks, are essential in forging social ties and creating social capital in the comunas by generating community pride and reducing violence (Sotomayor, 2017). Also, in South East Asia, the Asian Coalition for Community Action Program (ACCA) led by the ACHR funded 126 roads and pathways as a means to provide links from informal settlements to the wider city, provide common space within settlements, and change internal and external negative perceptions of these settlements (Boonyabancha, Carcellar & Kerr, 2012).

Overall, from the discussion above, individual and collective practices born out of the struggle experienced by residents of Phka transformed this settlement into a place where a sense of belonging was constructed. This feeling of belonging, which is collective in nature, has been documented in different studies of informal settlements

154 in the global south (see for example Lombard, 2014) showing how, as residents of Phka did, people living in informal settlements construct an identity and relationship with the place and the people they share life with in the settlement, independently of any land title recognized by land and planning laws. In the literature, the feelings of collective belonging in settlements are mostly associated with race, ethnicity, and cultural backgrounds (Balaton-Chrimes, 2017), however feelings of belonging have also been associated with struggle experienced by people living in informal settlements and their involvement in building these places (Rolnik, 2015).

Both the collective practices and sense of belonging of residents in Phka highlight the collective aspect in urban development processes, a condition that is particularly important for urban poor communities to build internal power to secure their rights and belonging in cities. For instance, the negotiations for accessing water, electricity and the access road evidence that the consolidation of informal settlements as ‘places’ is not neutral but constituted by complex entanglements of power relationships (Lombard, 2014). Recognizing the role of the collective in urban development broadens the scope of conventional accounts that picture urban development models as solely reserved for the individual, such as the private property ownership model, obscuring intangible and collective ways that communities have to relate to their places of residence and the city and build power to negotiate marginalization and exclusion (Blomley, 2004; Cabannes, 2004; Boonyabancha 2009; Rolnik, 2014). Also, this sense of belonging transcended the ‘temporary’ category associated with Phka, and the individual and commercial value predominantly associated with land which characterizes most legal and planning frameworks in Phnom Penh. Acknowledging the collective nature of belonging challenges the dominant neoliberal model of urban development promoting individualism and competition (Pieterse, 2008). The following section evidences the importance of supporting ‘the collective’ in planning and urban development in the light of the vulnerabilities that current planning frameworks and development models pose for informal settlements living in ‘gray spaces’, and the capacity of the state to use informality from above to bypass planning legislation to pursue their interests in land (Roy, 2009; Yiftachel, 2015).

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7.4 Exclusion of Phka from systematic land registration (SLR) In 2006, the Ministry of Urban Planning, Land Management and Construction declared the village where Phka is located (referred here as ‘the village’) an adjudication area for systematic land registration (SLR) under the Land Administration and Sub Sector Programme (LASSP). Despite some land plots being registered, most of the village was excluded from this process, including all land parcels of the residents of Phka. The exclusion of Phka from SLR evidences the state’s implication of informality by promoting processes of spatial de-regulation and exclusion (Roy, 2009). Furthermore, this exclusion evidences how ‘gray spaces’ and ambiguity, as in many other cities of the global south (see Wigle, 2014; Gilbert & De Jong, 2015), are manipulated in urban planning processes in Phnom Penh to benefit the interests of powerful actors, threatening the citizenship rights, and individual and collective belonging of residents of Phka to their place of residence, community and city.

At the time of this research, the reasons for the exclusion of the village from SLR remained unclear; even a World Bank mission that visited the village in 2009 could not clarify the reasons for such exclusion. Research by the NGO Forum in Phnom Penh estimated that from the 861 plots in the village only 195 parcels were adjudicated and only 41 titles issued, which meant that at least 80 per cent of land plots were left unregistered (Grimsditch, Kol & Serchan, 2012, p. 3). What was clear was that the exclusion of Phka from SLR posed a threat to residents’ security and created fears about the possibility of eviction. These feelings appeared mainly as a result of the alarming dynamic of forced evictions of informal settlements that were happening in the city at that time (see Rolnik, 2008) as well as the realization of the residents of their ‘temporary’ status under the law, rather than from a direct eviction threat from local authorities.

Despite not being able to gather information from government authorities to clarify the reasons why Phka was excluded from SLR, I found that other cases of exclusion from SLR, specifically of urban poor communities, had been documented in Phnom Penh, suggesting a systemic problem in the governance structures of the city (see Keo, Bouhours & Bouhours, 2015). These exclusions occurred on land containing valuable real estate, earmarked for private development, as well as on land bordered or overlapped by state public or private land as the case of Phka. The exclusion and

156 subsequent eviction of the urban poor community of Boeng Kak was the most recognized case of exclusion from SLR in Phnom Penh, resulting in the in-filling of one of Phnom Penh’s principal lakes and the transformation of the area as the central business district of the city. Violent evictions occurred even when the residents of Boeung Kak had documents to claim possession rights under the Land Law 2001 as the residents of Phka had. This case resulted in the World Bank withdrawing its funding to the LASSP and freezing lending to the Cambodian government from 2011 to 2016 (Tran, 2011; Moek, 2016). This is a clear example of the ways informality can be used by the powerful to produce urban inequalities in cities by making the informal practices of the state ‘legitimate’ at the expense of vulnerable groups.

As explained in Chapter 6, Phka bordered two sites of state public land: a section of a lake in the north-west and an empty plot of land in the middle of the community. Community representatives explained that both the lake and the empty plot of land were classified as state public land; however, over the years, government authorities had re-classified these sites of state public land as state private land and sold them to private developers. The transfer of public state land to private land was made possible under the Land Law 2001 only when state public land had lost its public value (Royal Government of Cambodia, 2001). When permitted under the Law, this re-classification enabled land to be re-developed by the state or sold to private developers. Despite this, my research showed that the provisions of the Law had been used in opportunistic ways by powerful actors to profit from development as explained below. At the time of the research, no formal information or public notification about development plans for the lake or the empty plot had been given to residents of Phka. However, residents explained that inspectors visited Phka to survey the empty plot from time to time, and informal conversations with them as well as with commune authorities indicated future residential development plans for the area.

Also, in 2012 the Municipality of Phnom Penh granted permission to develop Pong Peay City, a mix of residential and commercial facilities including the second biggest mall in Phnom Penh. The project involved filling 9.6 hectares of the lake bordering Phka, including 2.6 hectares of the land directly surrounding Phka and occupied by about 20 families in the settlement (Grimsditch, Kol & Serchan, 2012). At the time of the research and as shown in Figure 7.8, 7.9 and 7.10 most of Pong Peay Lake had

157 been filled in and transformed, suggesting that development plans could affect Phka in the future.

Figure 7.8 Development trajectory of the lake near Phka from 2003 to 20179

Figure 7.9 Construction of mall over the Lake

9 The spatial imagery was obtained from Google Earth in 2017. 158

Figure 7.10 Condominiums constructed over the Lake

Based on this, Phka’s residents, as well as NGOs, believed that the exclusion happened because the government saw opportunities for the commercial development of the public sites and was not prepared to recognize the land rights of residents until development plans were defined. This conclusion reflects a serious degree of ambiguity characterizing the behaviour of the state in Phnom Penh, as discussed in Chapter 5. Here, as in other cities of the global south, undetermined development zones are used purposely to create a reservoir of land to be released and developed in the most appropriate time (Rolnik, 2015). These plans for development are kept within a small elite, and ambiguity, maintained with various strategies such as failing to register land, is used by government authorities to stop transparent and clear information being released to the public. As Roy (2009) shows from her case study and analysis of the legal expropriation of land by the state in the public interest in Calcutta, India, this evidences how the state uses ‘informality from above’ to their advantage, showing how informality is at the very heart of the state and an integral part of the territorial practices of state power (Roy, 2009). The case of Phka shows how the state, in its position of power, purposely used ambiguity in a process

159 of un-mapping and de-regulation with the intention of accumulating land for development.

For instance, Grimsditch, Kol & Serchan (2012) explain that the reason why land parcels were left unregistered from SLR in Phka was because of an ‘unclear status’. This term was not defined by law or any legal instrument in Cambodia. However, it appeared that most cases of ‘unclear status’ involved land claimed by the state, but that was not formally demarcated as such. Areas bordering state land were also recorded as having ‘unclear status’ if the state’s land boundary was not defined. In such cases, the land was not registered to anyone and was marked as ‘unclear’ on the cadastral index map. The ambiguity associated with the identification of public land and the exclusion of difficult areas with competing claims have been recognized as key deficiencies of the SLR process in Phnom Penh. Bugalski & Pred (2010) argue that these deficiencies have created systematic unequal treatment of citizens within Cambodia’s land rights protection regime, and a dual system of rights where formal titles are issued to the privileged, and those excluded must continue to rely on their ‘informal’ documentation as the basis for rights to land.

Furthermore, the exclusion of Phka from SLR reflects Roy’s (2009) arguments on the state being an informalized entity actively utilizing planning and its power to enable informality, and accumulate land and resources. This is particularly evident in the practices of lake in-filling. Here land use planning instruments are manipulated by the state to legitimize and advance their informal practices and development interests. Despite lakes being classified as state public land and having inherent public value, research suggests that almost 60 per cent of lake systems had been lost for development purposes in Phnom Penh (STT, 2015). To enable this, the state used sub-decrees to legitimize the re-classification of lakes (considered as public state land) to private land, and the subsequent leasing or selling to private developers (see Strangio & Channyda, 2008). This happened even when by law state public land cannot be sold or subject to long-term leases, and a lessee must not damage the property or effect change in its public function (Bugalski & Pred, 2010). This practice made evident the implications of the state in informality and the manipulation of planning and land administration systems to legitimize the practices of powerful actors (Roy, 2009). Also, these findings support Roy’s (2009) arguments on informality not

160 being a separate sector of unregulated work, enterprise and settlement, but intrinsic to the practices of the formal sector, in particular the state, planning, legal norms and forms of regulation. Furthermore, as explained in Chapter 5, these types of development deals occurred in highly informal ways, illuminating a complex range of intertwined relationships between state actors and the private sector where personal relationships pervaded the formal bureaucratic structure. One participant from an NGO explained this point well:

The law is the law, but the real situation is the real situation. The lakes belong to the On Nga, On Nga means tycoon. Tycoon A, tycoon B, tycoon C. Some lakes are still owned by the government but in general these belong to someone already. This is the real law. You cannot apply for land ownership of state public land even when you have been living there before 2001. But we feel this law is not real. The rich, the powerful, the high rank government official, and their relatives, they can apply for land ownership, even when it is state public land. You are not supposed to abuse the law but if you have money and you are a high-ranked official, yes you can, and you can order the official in the ministry of land management to please help you to issue land ownership to Mr. A, B, C…

Thus, the case of Phka illustrates Yiftachel’s (2009) gray spaces stretching over a spectrum of powerful and less-powerful actors in the city. The state used power to legitimize its informal practices through planning and legal instruments and ‘whitening’ the legality of its informality. At the same time, the state positioned Phka’s residents in a ‘gray space’ that could lead to the ‘blackening’ and criminalization of their claims as ‘illegitimate’, resulting in forced eviction. Thus, the exclusion from SLR and the use of ambiguity and ‘informality from above’ by the state represented threats to Phka residents’ citizenship rights and belonging in the city, as discussed in Section 7.3. This reflects the vulnerabilities that the urban poor can face when placed in ‘gray spaces’ in Phnom Penh and other cities of the global south, and highlights the need for these individuals to develop social and collective capital to build internal power and resources to defend their citizenship rights and belonging in the city (Yiftachel, 2015).

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7.5 Conclusion In this chapter I explained how formal and informal relationships are manifested in land use practices in Phka, and the implications of these relationships in the production and reproduction of social and spatial injustices in Phnom Penh. By de-constructing the condition of informality associated with Phka and analyzing the exclusion of Phka from Systematic Land Registration (SLR), I demonstrated how the state is implicated in the production and reproduction of urban informality in Phnom Penh. I evidenced that informality is not something that takes place outside of the state and formal planning systems but is in fact implicated within these systems. As explained in this chapter, these entanglements between formality and informality in land use planning are not unique to the case of Phnom Penh, and different studies in the global south (Roy, 2009; Wigle, 2014; Gilbert and De Jong, 2015) now suggest these relationships are deeply intertwined in urban production. For Roy (2009), informality exists at the very heart of the state and is an integral part of the territorial practices of state power. This same conclusion is supported in the case of Phnom Penh.

As the case of Phka evidences, the relationships between formality and informality in land use planning, in particular the state’s involvement in urban informality, are characterized by producing and reproducing social and spatial inequalities through the ‘graying of spaces’ (Wigle, 2014; Gilbert and De Jong, 2015; Yiftachel, 2015). In this case, land legal frameworks made Phka residents’ land tenure security vulnerable by placing them in a ‘gray space’ and a state of ‘permanent temporariness’ (Yiftachel, 2009), waiting for their legal status to be defined by the state. This happened even when the ad-hoc occupation of the settlement was initially tolerated by the state, and even when people lived securely in the settlement for many years. Thus, the condition of informality associated with Phka was derived from an exclusionary legal architecture (Flower, 2018) which perpetuated tenure insecurity by providing residents of informal settlements with second-tier documents giving them limited possession rights over their land. As explained in Section 7.2, the ‘graying of spaces’ and ambiguous classification of informal settlements by the state has become ‘the rule rather than exception’ in cities of the global south, forming a ‘new mode of urbanism’ (Roy and AlSayyad, 2004; Yiftachel, 2015). It is widely documented that informal settlements like Phka are placed a planning limbo used deliberately by the state to manipulate the classification of urban informality to pursue their interests in land (Yiftachel, 2009;

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Wigle, 2014; Rolnik, 2015). In this way, gray spaces point to the structural process that sees residents of informal settlements in contemporary cities confined to an inferior citizenship status based on their class or cultural identity (Yiftachel, 2015).

The vulnerabilities associated with ‘gray spaces’ and their residents are exacerbated by the state which, in a position of power, uses ‘informality from above’ (Roy, 2009; Yiftachel, 2015) and ambiguity as a strategy to accumulate and make profits from land and development. These processes of un-mapping and de-regulation are also a common characteristic of the behaviour of governments across cities of the global south (Roy, 2009; Wigle, 2014; Rolnik, 2015). In the case of Phka, the settlement was excluded from SLR as a result of the state having interest in the land adjoining parts of the settlement. Informality was used to create ambiguity in the classification of state public land and to manipulate planning instruments and regulatory frameworks to transfer state public land to state private land and subsequently sell land to developers. These processes are exacerbated by a lack of comprehensive and transparent land registration, making land claims and rights difficult to assess in Phnom Penh, creating uncertainties on which settlements were considered ‘legal’ and/or ‘illegal’. Lindstrom (2013) explains that in many cases ‘illegal’ settlers were not aware of their status under the Land Law 2001, as they could have resided on their land in full knowledge of local authorities and even be in possession of documents to claim ownership or legal possession. However, they were considered ‘illegal’ by the law because their possession might have commenced after the law was passed, or because they occupied or bordered state land. This clearly shows how urban informality can be used as a ‘governmental tool’ (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012) by the state to pursue its development interests at the expense of ordinary citizens. Also, this shows what many other studies in the global south argue about planning’s implication in urban informality. In this case, planning and regulatory frameworks were used by the state to legitimize their practices even when these did not comply with the law. In this light, Wigle (2014) through his research in Mexico argues that the state’s implications of informality are part of a larger strategy of spatial governance in which planning knowledges and techniques are used to create social and spatial inequalities in cities of the global south.

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My findings evidence the political nature of land access in contexts like Phnom Penh, and the failure of land laws and planning frameworks to guarantee tenure security for people living in informal settlements. The exclusion from SLR was exacerbated by the commodification of land and lakes in Phnom Penh, and as other cases in Phnom Penh show (Keo, Bouhours & Bouhours, 2015) particularly targeted land occupied by the urban poor as they are vulnerable citizens that can be easily manipulated and controlled by the state. These findings highlight again the systemic and structural conditions that characterize formal and informal relationships in Phnom Penh, and the importance of acknowledging that efforts to guarantee tenure security for residents of informal settlements, not only in Phnom Penh but in the global south, need to engage with the unequal power relationships that exist between actors in cities (Deininger & Feder, 2009).

A key point to make is that exclusion from SLR and the potential threats of eviction that this created, constituted an exclusion of the individual and collective sense of belonging to place, and thus the citizenship rights of residents of Phka. In this chapter I explained how the residents’ individual and collective practices, born out of their struggle to survive and rebuild their lives after the Khmer Rouge regime, transformed Phka into a place where a sense of belonging to land, housing and community were established. These social and spatial relationships are an expression of the consolidation of identities shaped by race, ethnicity, class, and other cultural factors and sense of belonging of subjects in space, with diverse meanings transcending ‘exchange’ value (Lombard, 2015). In the case of Phka, a collective identity and belonging was formed between residents out of their struggle to rebuild a life after the civil war, and their need to work together to access resources. The collective sense of belonging of residents of Phka highlights the importance of recognizing collective values in planning and urban development. This broadens the scope of conventional accounts that picture urban development models as reserved for the individual and obscure the intangible and collective ways that communities have to relate to their places of residence and the city which are acknowledged widely in the literature (Blomley, 2004; Lemanski, 2008; Keenan, 2010; Ortiz Flores, 2012; Lombard, 2014; Mathivet, 2014; Rolnik, 2014; Apsan Frediani, 2015). In the case of Phka, collective action was particularly important as a means for residents to build internal power, negotiate marginalization and exclusion from basic services and improve their quality

164 of life. This resembles other studies in the global south evidencing the importance of collective action for urban poor communities in negotiating exclusion and marginalization in cities (Beard, 2003; Archer, 2012; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2015).

However, as some studies suggest, there are still questions on whether collective action is able to transform the structural conditions that lead to exclusion and marginalization in the first place (Beard, 2018). The next chapters analyze these complexities. In the case of Phka, rather than taking a passive attitude toward their vulnerable condition, residents built on their collective identity to mobilize their collective citizenship at a broader scale by advocating for tenure security. This process demonstrates how ‘gray spaces’ are also ‘spaces of possibilities’ where different forms of citizenship can arise to contest social and spatial injustices (Yiftachel, 2015). Also, the next chapter exposes how ‘gray spaces’ stretch over a power spectrum of actors (Yiftachel, 2009) in which powerful actors are able to legitimize their informality at the expense of vulnerable people such as residents of Phka, but at the same time these ‘subjects’ can exert power and agency to secure land tenure. Thus, rather than an oppositional relationship setting mutually exclusive categories such as legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate, authorized and unauthorized, and official and un- official, urban informality is better understood as a negotiated relationship (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004).

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Chapter 8 Formal and informal relationships in planning and governance in Phnom Penh

8.1 Introduction As explained in Chapter 7, the exclusion of Phka from SLR, the ambiguities associated with planning and land legal frameworks, and the use of informality by the state to manipulate these frameworks to their advantage, made residents of Phka vulnerable to forced eviction led by the state. This vulnerability increased due to the neoliberal development ambitions of government authorities to create a global city in partnership with local and international elites. As explained in Chapter 5, Phnom Penh had a legacy of forced evictions and human rights violations, with over 12,000 families experiencing threats of eviction in 2014 and 77 eviction sites identified in 2016 (STT, 2014; 2016). Forced evictions were based on the argument that informal settlements were illegal and/or illegitimate because they occupied state or privately owned land. This happened when there were clear inconsistencies in the mapping and classification of state and private land (Bugalski & Pred, 2010) and thus people residing in informal settlements were not aware of their ‘illegal’ status under the law (Lindstrom, 2013). Also, as in other cities in South East Asia, legitimacy needs to be discussed in the light of authoritarian political contexts (Beard, 2003). This requires the understanding of practices that people living in informal settlements use to make their claims and rights visible and their voices heard where there are no formal spaces of participation in governance structures. Thus, discussions on the legitimacy of informal settlements and the practices of people living in these settlements are necessarily related to power, urban citizenship and political recognition.

In this chapter, I address secondary research question number 3: How are collective practices of urban poor communities used to legitimize their claims to land and citizenship in Phnom Penh? To answer this question, I explain key conditions that led residents of Phka to organize themselves successfully in collective action in the complex context of Phnom Penh to resist the potential threat of eviction resulting from the exclusion from SLR. I discuss the relationships between learning and collective action, and explain how collective action evolved from ordinary (Staeheli et al., 2012) to insurgent acts of citizenship (Holston, 2009) where residents used collective action

166 to develop strategies to use the formal system to their advantage and influence invited spaces of participation (Miraftab, 2009). I explain how these collective strategies were used by residents to build ‘power with’ (Ife, 2016) and expand this power through collective action to influence spatial, political, economic and social structures (Castells, 1983). In this way I explain the relations that exist between the practices of urban poor communities, state actors, donors and civil society organizations in the governance and planning of cities. This challenges the formal/informal dichotomy that classifies the practices of residents of informal settlements as ‘informal’ and/or ‘illegitimate’ (Roy, 2005; Lombard, 2015), and shows the relevance in understanding formal and informal relationships as a negotiability of value (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004). Overall, the research findings I present in this chapter give visibility to different forms of planning and actors that collectively organize themselves in face of exclusion, marginalization, and threats to dispossession, and call for these practices to be better understood, recognized and supported by the state and the planning profession (Simone & Pieterse, 2017). Also, these findings demonstrate how gray spaces are spaces of possibilities where different forms of citizenship can arise to contest social and spatial injustices in cities (Yiftachel, 2015).

The chapter is divided into six sections. In Section 8.2, I explain the relationships between legitimacy, urban citizenship, informal settlements in Phnom Penh. Following this, in Section 8.3 I explain the conditions that led residents of Phka to organize themselves successfully in the complex context of Phnom Penh. In Sections 8.4 and 8.5 I explain how collective action in Phka evolved from ordinary (Staeheli et al., 2012) to insurgent acts of citizenship (Holston, 2009), and the strategies used by residents of Phka to make their claims to land visible to the state and gain political recognition by receiving land title under SLR. The chapter ends with a conclusion in Section 8.6 where I discuss the knowledge that the case of Phka brings to urban planning and governance in Phnom Penh.

8.2 Urban citizenship and legitimacy in Phka In response to exclusion from systematic land registration (SLR) and the potential risk of eviction, residents of Phka used their collective agency gained through the initial struggle to place explained in Chapter 7, to organize themselves and exercise strategies to make their claims to land visible and persuade government authorities to

167 undertake additional Systematic Land Registration (SLR) in their settlement. The collective strategies used by residents of Phka can be conceptualized as practices of insurgent citizenship (Holston, 2009) that residents used to negotiate their value and rights to the city spatially and politically (Rolnik, 2014). Rather than exercising confrontational resistance against the state, the collective practices of residents resembled Sandercock’s (1998b) concept of a thousand tiny empowerments, showing that insurgency does not necessarily begin with grand and overt acts, but instead with smaller actions that can potentially lead to transformation of structural conditions that create dispossession in cities (Castells, 1983).

Discussions on legitimacy of informal settlements in Phnom Penh, like Phka, need to be linked with questions of power, urban citizenship and political recognition. Conceptually, urban citizenship questions who is ‘legitimate’ and included and excluded from rights, entitlements and protections as urban citizens (Hammet, 2017). Traditionally, urban citizenship has been considered as a place or territorially rooted identity embedded in, and through, a set of known rights and obligations to both residents and the governing authority (Hammet, 2017). These rights and obligations are prescribed under national laws, constitutions and other legal instruments. Despite their potential for securing rights for citizens, these legal instruments need to be critically examined. On the one hand, legal instruments, in contexts of political corruption and governance complexity such as Cambodia, do not automatically guarantee the protection of the rights of citizens. On the other hand, most legal instruments, in particular those related to securing land rights, reproduce liberal assumptions that need to be questioned in the light of their ability to recognize rights outside liberal models (Porter, 2014).

Thus, more than something prescribed under the law, it is useful to conceptualize urban citizenship as a practice. Urban citizenship is practised by citizens themselves as well as the state, and in the global south they typically negotiate exclusion and marginalization in contexts of colonial legacy and inequality (Lemanski, 2017). As explained in Chapter 7, in the context of urban informality, citizenship is conceived as a process, a struggle enmeshed in the materiality, identities and politics of urban life (Yiftachel, 2015). This process is closely related to ‘gray spaces’, which on the one hand see residents of informal settlements in contemporary cities confined to an

168 inferior citizenship status based on their class or cultural identity, and on the other hand see various forms of citizenship arise, creating new sites of social and political change (Yiftachel, 2015). This shows that citizenship involves both a spatial and a political dimension. As the case of Phka shows, citizenship struggles happen between exclusionary practices of citizenship by the state that ignore its obligations and purposely seek to marginalize and exclude vulnerable groups for living in areas considered ‘illegal’ under planning frameworks, and practices of planning that happen outside the state (Lombard, 2015).

In Phnom Penh, the question of who is legitimate and valued, in informal settlement upgrading practices, not only needs to account for the practices of the urban poor but also of non-state actors such as civil society organizations. From the interviews I conducted, government officials, local academics and Khmer representatives from some international development organizations expressed a weakening attitude toward the practices of most civil society organizations in the country. The history of confrontations around human rights violations between some NGOs characterized for their human rights approaches and the state had generated a lasting mistrust between these actors. This happened even when only seven per cent of civil society organizations in the whole country were focused on advocacy and human rights (Mooney & Baydas, 2018). Despite the robust and dynamic civil society in Cambodia, the national government had developed tactics to control the activities of civil society organizations. The legal framework was, in fact, a key tool to execute control over civil society (Mooney & Baydas, 2018). In particular, the Law on Associations and Non- Governmental Organisations (LANGO) gave the Ministry of Interior the power to shut down any NGO that in their eyes conducted activities that endangered security, stability and public order, and raised its voice against the activities of the state. The LANGO required all civil society organizations to maintain political neutrality to be legitimate under the law, and was used by the state in increasingly creative ways to conduct debilitating investigations and shut down civil society organizations that threatened the state’s interests (Mooney & Baydas, 2018).

In the context of upgrading informal settlements, the negative and weakening perceptions toward the practices of urban poor communities and civil society organizations described above enhanced a mind-set, which supported the state and

169 private sector as having legitimacy to drive decisions on informal settlement upgrading. Interviews with government officials and private planning consultants showed a reluctance toward community participation in development processes. One consultant who was also an academic said:

The involvement of communities in development is very hard. For me this is a fashion and a kind of development approach just to show off. The idea is good, but results are very small. The status of communities is still fragile, still on and off, so much mobility among them, because of family migration, job availability on the area, etc.

Until very recently, the new General Department of Housing engaged with urban poor communities and NGOs working with the urban poor. This only occurred with a selected few NGOs that could constructively engage with government and contribute funds and information to assist government-led development of public housing and informal settlement upgrading. From the interviews I conducted, it was clear that the NGOs that were allowed to engage with government had to follow the state’s mind- set. For example, one senior staff member from an NGO working closely with government said:

In the past our NGO worked directly with the urban poor and low-income people giving direct loans; however, the repayment of loans started to be very low and we ended up losing a lot of money. Because of this I don’t want to work directly with them anymore. Working with micro-finance institutions is more effective and efficient.

Statements like the one above need to be critically considered, because even when community engagement in upgrading processes has not been simple in Phnom Penh, their failure has been widely attributed to the practices of the state (see Talocci & Boano, 2017). Thus, these kinds of statements are constituted by power relationships that marginalize and shift blame to the urban poor in a context of hierarchical power structures in society and great inequality. This highlights the complexity of how formal and informal relationships operate within planning and governance in Phnom Penh, and the importance of analyzing power as key to understanding these relationships. This understanding involves discussing how vulnerable groups build power to move

170 forward their claims to urban citizenship and political recognition in the authoritarian political context of Phnom Penh. Studies in other authoritarian political regimes in South East Asia, such as Indonesia, have found that vulnerable groups such as the urban poor and Indigenous peoples use ‘covert planning’ practices such as conducting minor upgrading and participating collectively in state-driven processes as a learning process to build collective agency and action that serve to engage in insurgent planning (Beard, 2003). These covert planning practices are then used for more radical purposes such as influencing structures of power for decision-making and recognition of rights.

This is different from other contexts of the global south such as Latin America where a range of democratic spaces of participation such as participatory budgeting exercises in Porto Alegre, Brazil (Cabannes, 2017), and consultation processes for the development and implementation of land use plans in Bogotá, Colombia exist for citizens, including the urban poor, to have a say in land use frameworks implementation and the development of the city (Brugman, 2017). Also, in Brazil, the City Statute is a national legal framework directed to strengthen local planning and land management toward more equitable and sustainable development. Within this legal framework various planning instruments have been developed and used to negotiate value and recognize the right to the city of the urban poor (Fernandes, 2007; Rolnik, 2013b). Despite the well-established critiques of participation in cities (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Miraftab, 2009) the importance of these mechanisms cannot be underestimated, especially when compared to the situation in Phnom Penh.

Overall, studies demonstrate that forms of ‘radical planning’ are possible in highly restricted political environments as an outcome of a social learning process that enables collective action (Beard, 2003). In the following section, I explain the social learning process and the key conditions that led residents of Phka to organize and endure in collective action to develop political strategies to make their claims to land and citizenship visible to the state.

8.3 Learning collective action in Phka As other studies in Phnom Penh have found (Ward & Mouyly, 2013; Beard, 2018), not many urban poor communities in Phnom Penh have been able to sustain collective organization and action over time, and in fact not many poor communities have been

171 able to organize at all. As Beard (2018) acknowledges, this finding cannot be separated from the history of conflict in one of the world’s most violent attempts to force collective behaviour into every aspect of society under the Khmer Rouge regime. Also, as explained in Chapter 5 collective action and solidarity in Phnom Penh were impacted by Cambodian culture characterized by hierarchy, patronage and acceptance of the social order (Hughes, 2006); the history of violent forced evictions which impacted the internal trust within communities and their leaders who many times were closely associated with the government (Springer, 2013; Beard, 2018). Furthermore, Cambodia’s transition to a market economy had transformed traditional patterns of exchange and reciprocity leading to greater individualism (Ledgerwood, 2002). Despite this, there is evidence that urban poor communities in Phnom Penh do organize and can work together in collective action to overcome poverty and inequality (see Kerr & Phonpakdee, 2008; Leonhardt, 2012; Phonpakdee, Sok and Sauter, 2012; Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2018). Thus, understanding the reasons and conditions that led residents of Phka to build, maintain, strengthen, and scale up collective action is key for understanding formal and informal relationships in the light of my research questions.

In Phka, collective action emerged out of a social learning process experienced by residents that was incremental and time-dependent. This process was born out of residents’ struggle to build a place to live and belong in the city as explained in Chapter 7. As other studies in the context of informal settlement upgrading in Asia show, collective action, including community-driven practices of upgrading, do not happen by themselves. These processes are complex, and need sustained nurturing, balancing and support for their growth from an external partner or organization (ACHR, 2017). This support includes developing capacities within communities, correcting and learning from mistakes, and adjusting to local and changing realities of cities and communities (ACHR, 2017). Thus, the collective process in Phka necessarily developed thanks to having the support of an NGO, the Urban Poor Development Women (UPWD), which supported residents to trust each other, mobilize and organize in collective activities. As explained in Chapter 7, the savings group and the development of small infrastructure such as the access road, water and electricity were effective strategies that not only improved the quality of life of residents but built social capital, trust, and collective agency between residents.

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Further to having the support from an NGO, leadership was a key condition enabling collective action in Phka. As explained in Chapter 6, leadership in Phka was characterized by supporting an informal network of representatives rather than one individual leader. At the time of the research, there were two representatives, a man and a woman, who were more active in community affairs. In addition, other three women informally supported community activities. This de-centralized and gender- balanced network of representatives broke down the hierarchical and patriarchal nature of leadership characterizing Cambodia and enable power to be distributed more equally among representatives and community members. I found that representatives were associated with NGOs rather than government authorities. For instance, the two principal representatives volunteered and were hired by NGOs as ‘community trainers’ to support other people in informal settlements in Phnom Penh to be organized based on their skill and experience. All leaders from the management committee were aware of distributing power and expressed their role as being facilitators of the community process and ensuring that the members were in control of all decisions made. Dara, a community leader explained:

Our role as representatives is exactly that, to be representatives. The structure and decision-making processes of our community are designed in a way in which power and responsibility are in hands of the members, not the committee.

Representatives from the Urban Poor Development Women (UPDW) explained that this behaviour made Phka’s leaders different from other leaders in Phnom Penh. Most leaders exerted influence and control over the members, affecting their trust and opportunities for collective action. These findings are validated by other studies in Phnom Penh which analyze the complexities of leadership in urban poor communities and collective organization (see Ward & Mouyly, 2013; ACHR, 2017; Beard, 2018). These studies explain how collective action in urban poor settlements can be affected by the detrimental actions of leaders who sometimes abuse their power and take advantage of members and collective resources. However, leadership in Phka had been a learning process. Staff from UPWD explained that good leadership had not always been the case in Phka. The initial committee representing Phka in the 1990s was difficult, as one person controlled the information and resources from the members, inhibiting people from trusting each other and working collectively. After

173 years of mobilization supported by UPWD, leaders emerged from this process. One staff member from UPWD provided an example:

Before, one of the community leaders was violent with his wife, but thanks to the awareness built about these issues he changed and became a gender activist and an example for men in Phka.

Representatives explained that their leadership was successful because of good facilitation skills and the ability to mobilize members from ‘inside their heart’. Dara and Darany explained that, thanks to their involvement with UPWD, they had learnt methodologies such as games, problem trees, the river of life, and songs to facilitate the involvement and interest of residents in meetings and discussions as seen in Figure 8.1. These skills motivated the members to communicate and discuss issues with each other, share ideas, and work collectively. Also, representatives were aware of the need to enhance the collective spirit of the community, and for this they organized parties on special occasions such as the celebration of Phka community anniversary, Khmer New Year and other cultural traditions. Darany explained that good facilitation skills were a key condition that increase their capacity as leaders to share power with community members, facilitate spaces for people to discuss, decide and resolve issues as a community, and encourage people to believe in the collective process. The role of facilitators and supporters of community processes is acknowledged in the literature as necessary to facilitate the mobilization of urban poor communities in community-led housing and infrastructure processes (see Luansang, Boonmahathanakorn & Domingo-Price, 2012; ACHR, 2017).

Another key dimension enabling collective action in Phka was the capacity of residents to learn to work through their differences. As explained in Chapter 6, Phka’s residents had different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. This inevitably created power differences and diverse interests among residents. However, Darany explained that over time residents learnt to manage differences between them and work together toward collective goals. For example, in the initial stages of their organization the committee secretly made allowances for poorer people to contribute less money in the savings group or to development projects; however, at the time of the research most residents understood and accepted this. For instance, it was openly accepted that wealthier residents contributed larger amounts of money to the savings group, but it

174 was the poorest residents who most benefited from this resource. This demonstrates that Phka had strong social capital that had grown over years spent working together.

Figure 8.1 Phka’s representative facilitating a meeting

Despite learning to overcome differences, small conflicts between residents in relation to land and day-to-day life in the settlement had manifested over the years. Most were issues related to the management of waste and noise; however, there was a wealthy household which people called ‘the excellency’ that had experienced conflicts with the families that worked together in Phka. Residents explained that ‘the excellency’ was never involved with the community. This household only contributed a very small amount to the development of the road after people asked several times. On one occasion, this household damaged the road when the family hired heavy trucks to bring construction materials to their house. As a result, people were upset and organized a toll for the trucks to make the household pay a tax for repairing the road. When this household showed interest in joining the community activities to opportunistically take advantage of possibilities to register the land, residents purposely ignored their willingness to participate in this activity and excluded the household from the land registration process.

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Further to learning to work through differences, achieving tangible results from collective efforts was another key condition that enable collective action in Phka. In this case the connection to electricity and water, and the upgrading of the access road, led to tangible results that improved the quality of life and sense of place in Phka as explained in Chapter 7. These results gave value to collective action and provided incentives for community members’ participation in collective activities. Not many urban poor communities in Phnom Penh had been able to achieve tangible outcomes from organizing together, and this impacted on their collective organization. For example, I visited one informal settlement located not far from Phka. People in this settlement had been ‘relocated’ from central Phnom Penh by the Municipality in the 2000s after a fire destroyed their houses. NGO staff working in the settlement told me that the municipality had basically dumped people in the middle of a rice field without support. The municipality allowed people to occupy the land ‘temporarily’ while they found a suitable location for their permanent relocation; however, no options had been given to the people living there at the time of the research, almost 10 years after their initial relocation. This settlement was evidently much poorer than Phka, as seen in Figure 8.2.

Figure 8.2 Informal Settlement near Phka

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The representatives I interviewed explained that people did not invest in the settlement because they felt insecure and uncertain about their situation. Furthermore, local authorities did not allow them to make investments in roads or other types of ‘visible’ infrastructure. People in the settlement experienced challenges around their collective organization. For example, the community representative explained that in the past people has saved money together, but the person responsible for the fund mis- managed the money and people lost confidence in the leaders and collective process. Furthermore, he explained that over the years various NGOs and development organizations had supported them to engage with local authorities to discuss plans for their relocation under the Circular 03 Policy, requiring input and efforts from the members. However, there was never a tangible result from this process, so people lost hope in his credibility in him as a leader or the possibility that working together would bring any change to their living conditions. Because of this, the representative explained that people in the settlement were individualistic in their mind-set and unwilling to organize:

If they see something is working and would benefit from it, they support it, but if they see something is not working people criticize and judge others.

My perception from this interview was that as a result of losing trust in their leaders, and not receiving a change in their lives from working together, people in this settlement felt stuck and no vision for the future remained. There was no trust in each other, their representatives, local authorities or in the possibility that things could change. There was very little hope. Talking to the representatives about their future expectations made me feel sad; many did not know what to say, and a type of ‘emptiness’ could be felt in the atmosphere. The women present expressed the need to build trust between people in the settlement again, and for this they thought it was a good idea to enter into a voluntary saving scheme where people saved for one year continuously and then received all their money back with interest at the end of the year. With support from World Vision Cambodia, they had managed to involve 20 families so far, and hoped more people could understand the benefits of entering the scheme and build trust again between each other. It was evident that the lack of trust, leadership, and the capacity to achieve tangible results were conditions impacting the development of collective action in this settlement. As a result, people continued to

177 live in very poor conditions and to be marginalized and exploited by government authorities and other powerful actors.

Residents of Phka explained that the exclusion from SLR united them in a stronger way than they had experienced in the past. The case of wealthy residents was particularly interesting. Most of the wealthier residents I interviewed recognized that they joined community activities, including the saving group and monthly meetings, to receive information about how to gain land registration from the government. Wealthy residents considered the savings group as small and insufficient to support the investments they wanted to make in their housing and livelihood. Thus, the reasons why they saved were to support other poorer residents in the community, but mainly to support the process for land registration. It was clear that the collective action that developed as a response to the exclusion from SLR and potential threat of eviction, was born out of those initial ordinary citizenship acts (Staeheli et al., 2012) and the collective agency and trust that residents developed during the initial stages of organization explained in Chapter 7. Raksmei, a wealthy resident said:

I feel proud of our community, we got organized and now trust each other, and we have a very good management committee. We have developed many things together, the road and access to water and electricity. The issue of land unified us more.

From the findings presented in this section I can conclude that the collective action experienced by residents of Phka was a result of a social learning and time-dependent process were residents acted organically between themselves and with support from an NGO, and independently from government. A study conducted by Beard (2018) in Phnom Penh shows that a key reason why residents of one informal settlement in Phnom Penh were not able to organize in collective action was mainly because their leadership acted as an extension of the government. In the case of Phka, residents were able to build trust thanks to having good leadership that challenge the hierarchical and patriarchal nature of Cambodian leadership. This enabled residents to become financially organized, overcome socio-economic differences and achieve tangible results in upgrading that improved their quality of life. These conditions are recognized in the literature of social movements for incentivizing citizenship practice

178 within the urban poor in South East Asia (see Papeleras, Bagotlo & Boonyabancha, 2012).

The experience of Phka sustains conceptualizations of learning as a complex and time-dependent process involving the practices and interactions through which knowledge is created, contested and transformed (Beard, 2003; McFarlane, 2011). Boonyabancha & Mitlin (2012) explain learning as key to the practices of social movements and fundamental for successful slum upgrading programs such as the Asian Coalition for Community Action Program (ACCA) in Asia defined as ‘a learning programme bringing together core principles for effective pro-poor urban development to be explored, refined and re-conceptualized through linked collective processes at settlement, city, national and regional levels’ (Boonyabancha & Mitlin, 2012, p. 404). The learning process experienced in this program show an incremental way toward collective action and empowerment of the urban poor, resulting in the urban poor being recognized as legitimate and highly productive residents and citizens of the city (Boonyabancha & Mitlin, 2012). Also, as Beard (2003) finds in a case of covert planning in Indonesia, the initial experience of residents of Phka gave them a palpable sense of collective agency, including the ability to identify good leadership, identify collective needs, organize financially, conceptualize their own plans and build the power necessary to implement them. As explained in the following section, residents applied this knowledge and experience to mobilize strategically for a more political end, a land tenure claim. This shows how learning is a process of potential transformation central to urban citizenship and political strategies and tactics of resistance that seek to consolidate, challenge, and/or alter dominant sources of knowledge and systems creating dispossession in cities (McFarlane, 2011).

8.4 Strategies to make claims to land and citizenship visible to government authorities Building on their collective learning process, residents of Phka developed strategies to make their land claim and exclusion from SLR visible and gain recognition from the state. This visibility is important when considering the vulnerabilities and marginalization that residents experienced in the city explained in Chapters 6 and 7. As for other urban poor communities in cities of the global south, visibility was used as a strategy for political recognition of citizenship and land rights (Roitman, 2019).

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These strategies can be conceptualized as practices of insurgent citizenship (Holston, 2009) and forms of planning that happen outside the state but are part of the overall governance spectrum of practices shaping urban development (Beard, 2012). This view helps in moving forward the formal/informal dichotomy in governance processes and gives value to the practices of vulnerable and marginalized groups as being important actors contributing to governance and planning in cities of the global south (Simone & Pieterse, 2017).

Because of the structural and power complexities associated with obtaining land title in Phnom Penh, the principal strategy used by residents of Phka to make their land claim and exclusion from SLR visible was to build networks and alliances with other actors in the city. For this, residents built on their relationship with UPDW to engage with other NGOs and international agencies in Phnom Penh to obtain their support for their exclusion. These NGOs included Community Managed Development Partners (CMDP), Community Empowerment and Development Team (CEDT), Sahmakum Teang Tnaut (STT), and World Vision Cambodia, whose work and ideology I explained in Chapter 4. These NGOs received funding from GIZ to provide technical support to urban poor residents to make their claims to land visible through mapping and enumerations as further explained below. Engaging with these actors was important for the residents of Phka to expand their internal power through external networks and alliances with actors that had knowledge and political influence over land-related matters in Phnom Penh. This process is directly related to the conceptualization of power provided by Foucault (1982) as something fluid that circulates among all individuals and networks, and the proposition by Ife (2016) of ‘power with’ which emphasizes the principle that we do not act alone but together in solidarity, opening up the possibility of collective rather than individual power. In this case, the role of GIZ was particularly important as at that time it was the main funding agency of the land rights program for the National Government and was working within the Ministry of Urban Planning, Land Management and Construction (MUPLMC), and thus had direct access to key government officials with influence in land matters.

Also, representatives of Phka actively engaged with other urban poor communities in a community-based network known as the Solidarity of Housing and Land Tenure Community Network, comprising 24 informal settlements in Phnom Penh. Members of

180 this network had experience in collecting and sharing information about land legal frameworks, evictions, savings groups and organizing demonstrations in the city on important dates such as Habitat Day to make claims to land visible to authorities. Joining this community network was a way for residents of Phka to expand their power and connect with other communities facing similar issues. These networks were most powerful as they could show the spatial dimension of the problems associated with exclusions from SLR, evictions and land tenure insecurity at a city scale affecting the urban poor in Phnom Penh (Keo, Bouhours and Bouhours, 2015) and demonstrating that their case was not isolated.

As the experience from the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) and Slum Dwellers International (SDI), shows, building networks is a powerful and effective strategy for the urban poor to gain power and be recognized as important actors in governance processes (Boonyabancha & Kerr, 2015). These networks help empower the urban poor by reducing their isolation and catalyzing collective action within poor communities and various actors to penetrate the structures of power in cities and achieve access to land, housing and infrastructure at the city scale (Boonyabancha, 2009; Leonhardt, 2012). Thus, networks are a key strategy when conceptualizing slum upgrading as transformation as I explained in Chapter 3, as by empowering the urban poor, networks help to include a political dimension in upgrading processes transforming marginalization and exclusion (Herrle, Ley, Fokdal, 2015).

In this case the networks enabled residents of Phka to learn and build knowledge about the Land Law 2001 and Systematic Land Registration (SLR) and understand the legal situation in which they found themselves. For example, residents learnt how they could claim their possession rights to the state and the documents they needed to organize for this. These documents included ID cards, family books, marriage certificates and birth certificates. These documents were essential for all members of the household, in particular women, to be recognized in the land rights claim process. These documents were collected and organized by all residents of Phka, and presented to authorities in combination with their soft titles. Furthermore, by sharing information with other poor communities, Phka representatives allied themselves with other two urban poor communities that experienced exclusion of SLR in the same village, to make their land claims stronger to authorities. In addition to collecting and

181 organizing documents to claim possession rights, residents of Phka produced information about their settlement and exclusion case by carrying out profiling, enumeration and mapping processes with support from UPDW, CEDT, CMDP and STT. Residents produced information about the number and characteristics of households in the settlement that were excluded from SLR, and the dimensions and boundaries of land plots.

As explained in Chapter 3, enumerations are one of the principal strategies used by urban poor communities in the global south to build power from within and use that power to build relationships with government authorities, gaining a position as a valuable actor in development processes (Patel, Baptist and D’Cruz, 2012). Both the knowledge and information that residents of Phka developed through these processes can be conceptualized as sources of power that urban poor communities use to increase visibility and claim rights to the state. The information collected through enumerations was digitized using spatial data by NGOs and organized in community profiles given to each resident. Importantly, residents mapped their understanding of the boundary between Phka and the lake.

The reference of the boundary used was based on a government sub-decree issued by the government in 2012 which gave the precise spatial coordinates to define the area of the lake. Even when I collected these documents I decided not to use them in the thesis as they provide exact references to the location of Phka. Finding out the origins of the sub-decree was difficult for me as discussing the exclusion case with government authorities was not possible. However, NGOs and Phka representatives explained me that the sub-decree was obtained through the research that residents conducted about the legalities of their case in collaboration with community networks, researchers, NGOs and GIZ.

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Figure 8.3 Resident’s hand-drawn map of Phka

Further to building networks and producing information, Phka’s residents made their claims to land visible by conducting small physical upgrades in their settlement. These included upgrading the access road as explained in Chapter 7 as well as other small upgrades in lanes around the settlement. Also, residents carried out clean-up days to collect garbage across the settlement to ensure its maintenance and good image as seen in Figure 8.7

Figure 8.4 Cleaning activities in Phka

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The incentive behind these activities was the belief that if residents demonstrated their capacity to contribute to upgrading and maintaining the settlement, the state would give land title to residents and further support the upgrading of the settlement in the future. Darany, the community leader, explained:

Our efforts in developing and upgrading infrastructure had been to increase our chances to secure land tenure. We wanted to demonstrate to authorities that we are active, and we can take care for our community. They should give us land title.

Thus, apart from improving living standards, investing in upgrading activities was a strategy to make land claims visible and secure land tenure. As explained in Chapter 7, upgrading practices in Phka were supported by the community savings group. This evidences what other studies in the global south argue about finance being a source of power for urban poor communities (Archer, 2012; Roitman, 2019). Finance can transform power relationships and support the urban poor in becoming a valuable and active actor in upgrading processes (Boonyabancha, 2009). As explained in Chapter 3, by being financially organized communities have power to negotiate and persuade government authorities to be recognized, as well as leverage additional financial resources for upgrading. In this regard, finance is used as a political strategy to obtain recognition of the urban poor as citizens in contexts of weak institutional support (Boonyabancha, Carcellar & Kerr, 2012).

All the strategies explained in this section contributed to develop a counter-planning process to the exclusion of Phka from SLR where residents used the formal system to their advantage to legitimize their claims to land (Sandercock, 1998b; Holston, 2009). Overall, these practices are forms of insurgent citizenship (Holston, 2009) where the practices of those traditionally considered as informal interact with the formal sphere of the law, moving forward formal and informal divisions in planning and governance spaces (Ley, 2012). This process shows the various possibilities that ‘gray spaces’ offer to practice citizenship out of the struggle for justice and including in contexts of high inequality experienced in many cities of the global south (Yiftachel, 2015).

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8.5 Strategies to gain political recognition In the case of Phka, residents used public forums organized by the coalition of NGOs and GIZ to make their exclusion case visible to the public and legitimize their claims to land. The forums were organized by civil society organizations and GIZ, and government representatives were invited to participate. Thus, the forums were used as an opportunity to pressure the state to recognize the citizenship and land rights of urban poor communities excluded from SLR such as Phka. These urban forums were invited spaces of participation (Miraftab, 2009) created by NGOs and donors designed within the status quo and power dynamics of actors in the city. However, as recognized in the literature, these forums supported a learning process between actors able to bridge different forms of knowledge and build relationships (McFarlane, 2011). The forums differ from invented spaces of participation (Miraftab, 2009) recognized for being spaces that challenge the status quo and power dynamics and allowing vulnerable groups such as the urban poor to decide their terms and conditions of engagement with other actors in the city (Miraftab & Wills, 2005). However, both invented and invited spaces of participation offer opportunities for insurgent practices of citizenship (Holston, 2009) to claim rights to the city, as in the case of Phka (Miraftab & Wills, 2005).

In this case, representatives of Phka used the public forums strategically to engage with government representatives and make a legal case against their exclusion. Here the legal and spatial information that residents of Phka collated was used to establish communication with government authorities and make their case legitimate within the government’s ‘language’. Also, the forums offered opportunities for representatives of Phka to informally discuss their exclusion case with the General Director of the LASSP of the MUPLMC, and the Deputy Director of the Municipality’s Land Department at various times. These informal relationships were important for residents of Phka and their allies to persuade key officials within the relevant government departments that could provide alternatives to register the land and issue formal land titles. Importantly, the forums were used to make Phka’s exclusion case a public issue known to different government, non-government and international organizations. In making the exclusion case known the public was acknowledged as a key strategy to pressure government authorities to recognize the citizenship and land rights of residents of Phka, as one staff member from an NGO explained:

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I think it is very likely for Phka residents to obtain legal title because everyone knows about their situation now, it is a public issue that many institutions and organizations are aware of.

In the literature, the success of urban forums is attributed to the intensity, openness and quality of the forums, the commitment of state authorities to the participation of the urban poor, ceding decision-making powers to the forum, and having pressure from civil society (McFarlane, 2011). In the case of Phka, it was clear that collective action was the mechanism used to open strategic opportunities to engage with key actors in government with the authority and influence over the land registration system. Collective action facilitated what theoretical discussions in planning acknowledge as working within the ‘cracks’ of the system (Yiftachel, 2015) or having ‘room for manoeuvre’ (Safier, 2002; Levy, 2015) to strategically leverage political opportunities for achieving social and spatial justice in cities.

After various encounters and informal discussions, the MUPLMC gave the opportunity for Phka and the two other excluded communities in the same village to re-apply for systematic land registration (SLR). In 2016, almost seven years from their exclusion from SLR, the cadastre team from the MUPLMC surveyed the land plots of the residents and gave households a ‘survey receipt’ as a guarantee that their plot would be registered under the SLR process, as seen in Figure 8.5. The survey occurred even when, by law, additional SLR was not allowed to be conducted once land had been excluded from the SLR, evidencing the success that public forums had in providing spaces for Phka representatives and their allies to influence government officials. Interviews with a commune authority representative explained that other residents excluded from SLR in the village questioned why only Phka and the other two allied settlements had obtained additional SLR in the village. These findings suggest that the additional SLR occurred because of the mobilization process led by GIZ, the coalition of NGOs and organized poor communities. Despite this, it is also possible that the government used the issue of titles as a political strategy to gain votes in the last Cambodian National election.

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Figure 8.5 Document given to residents after SLR in January 2016

The survey by the MUPLMC was only the second out of four steps of the SLR process. At the time of the research, residents were waiting for the public display of the results of the survey and the issue of their titles. However, the MUPLMC had failed to meet the deadline for the two additional steps to be completed. The community leaders explained that the process for finalizing the land registration had been constrained by several factors. The first factor was the withdrawal of GIZ from supporting land rights programs in Cambodia. At the time of the research, GIZ had left the MUPLMC and cut funding to the NGOs providing support to Phka. This hindered the communication between government authorities and Phka. The second factor was a lack of cooperation and coordination between government levels. Community leaders explained the different attitudes of the MUPLMC and the Municipality. The MUPLMC was more open to considering land claims from poor communities, not just because this institution had commitments with GIZ, but also because the new minister in place had a history of engaging with land claims of poor communities. In contrast, the municipality had exposed a lack of willingness to give land to the urban poor. Finally, the leaders highlighted the 2018 national elections as a factor that could potentially affect the land registration process if changes were made in legislation and/or government representatives. Despite this, residents of Phka continued advocating for their case, and after I finished my field work in Phnom Penh I got news from my networks in Cambodia that Phka residents had received individual land titles in October 2017.

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This case shows one of the various ways in which formal and informal relationships are negotiated in governance spaces in cities of the global south. Collective action was the principal means to open opportunities for recognition. However, in this case the collective organization of residents of Phka moved away from radically mobilizing against structural conditions and political power, to exerting a form of Holston’s (2009) insurgent citizenship in which residents strategically learnt to use the formal system to their advantage to legitimize their claims to land. As one of the community leaders explained:

Our advocacy strategies are different from those used by communities like Boeng Kak Lake who use strong advocacy to stop development. We use soft advocacy.

This statement shows the intention of residents of Phka to use ‘soft advocacy’, which for them meant using the strategies described in this section to make their case visible and legitimate, and productively engage and work with government authorities to obtain land title and recognition. This differs from the case of Boeng Kak Lake, in which affected communities radically mobilized against the government to protest about their exclusion from SLR and further eviction. Thus, despite both strategies wanting to achieve political recognition and land tenure security, the ways followed to achieve these were very different. Even when some residents of Boeng Kak Lake did receive recognition and land titles at the end, as a result of their advocacy process and pressure from international development agencies, many of the community activists suffered from incarceration and violence and ultimately broken communication and relationships with government authorities. This shows the realities of authoritarian political regimes in cities like Phnom Penh and demonstrates the need for strategic engagement if governments are to be influenced (Beard, 2003). However as discussed further in Chapter 9, the use of invited spaces of participation and the recognition of land claims by receiving individual title do not transform the power and structural conditions that create social and spatial injustices in cities. This poses another level of complexity to understanding formal and informal relationships and their contribution to social and spatial justice as discussed in Chapter 9.

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8.6 Conclusion In this chapter I explained how the collective practices of residents of Phka were used as the key avenue to legitimize their claims to land and citizenship in Phnom Penh. This demonstrated that formal and informal relationships in governance spaces are characterized by a negotiability of value of citizenship and legitimacy (AlSayyad & Roy, 2004). Within this negotiability of value, collective action is necessary for overcoming the vulnerabilities that the urban poor face in cities in the global south like Phnom Penh, characterized by inequality, authoritarian governance, and processes of accumulation by dispossession enabled by the commodification of land and housing, and neoliberal and market-oriented policies (Cabbanes, Yafai & Johnson, 2010; Herrle, Ley, Fokdal, 2015). This happens because the negotiation of citizenship and legitimacy is evidently and necessarily a negotiation about power. As the case of Phka shows collective action allows vulnerable groups to build ‘power with’ (Ife, 2016) and resist threats of eviction caused by unaccountable governments that use informality and ambiguity to manipulate planning and legal frameworks to their advantage.

As evidenced in this chapter, and as recognized in the literature, collective action necessarily emerges from a social learning process (Friedmann, 1987; McFarlane, 2011). The experience of Phka shows how Sandercock’s (1998) ‘thousand tiny empowerments’ are manifested in planning processes, arguing that insurgent forms of planning do not necessarily begin with grand, explicit acts but instead with smaller actions that can lead to transformations of structural conditions of power and inequality. The case of Phka explains how collective action emerged as a result of a social learning and time-dependent process were residents, with support from an NGO, organized into collective action independently from government. Factors such as a de-centralized and gender balanced model of leadership, the capacity to overcome socio-economic and cultural differences, and achieve tangible results from working together that improved quality of life, were key learnings that led Phka residents to engage and endure in collective action and insurgent citizenship. As explained in the chapter, in the context of Phnom Penh organizing into collective action is a difficult process, and no many urban poor communities can do so. Thus, the experience of Phka illuminates important factors that contribute to collective action in a complex system which provide important lessons for planning knowledge and informal settlement upgrading interventions as discussed in Chapter 10.

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In the authoritarian political context of Phnom Penh, the negotiability of value of people living in informal settlements is more complex, as democracy is not enforced, and thus no democratic spaces of participation exist for citizens to have a say in how the city is developed, and or to voice concerns over the implementation of the law. As explained in this chapter, no mechanism or space exists for the urban poor and other citizens in Phnom Penh to contest and appeal exclusions from SLR, the implementation of the Land Law 2001, and Phnom Penh’s master plan. This is different from other contexts of the global south such as Latin America where a range of democratic spaces of participation exist for citizens, including the urban poor, to have a say in land use frameworks implementation and the development of the city (see Fernandes, 2007; Rolnik, 2013b; Cabannes, 2017). Despite the critiques of participatory processes in cities (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Miraftab, 2009; Porter, 2014) the importance of these mechanisms is not to be underestimated, especially when analyzing the governance situation in Phnom Penh. However, the evolution of participatory spaces in cities has always been and continues to be characterized by a power struggle, a negotiability of value and collective action (Cabannes, 2017).

Thus, in Phnom Penh as many other cities of South East Asia the urban poor rely on practising covert planning and insurgent citizenship, inventing spaces of participation or using the limited invited spaces (Miraftab, 2009) opened by donors and civil society organizations to make their claims visible to the state. As the case of Phka shows, within invented and invited spaces of participation (Miraftab, 2009) the urban poor need to develop collective strategies such as building networks and saving groups, building relationships with key organizations and key actors in cities, conducting legal research and producing information through enumerations to gain power and expand this power to influence the structures of government to gain the possibilities to access land, housing, infrastructure and, in some cases, political recognition (Boonyabancha, 2009; Patel, Baptist and D’Cruz, 2012; Herrle, Ley & Fokdal, 2015).

These collective strategies are then sources of power that the urban poor use to achieve visibility and recognition in cities (Herrle, Ley & Fokdal, 2015). The case of umbrella organizations like Slum Dwellers International and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights in Africa and Asia, and the results that the associated community networks have achieved in empowering the urban poor to become valuable actors in

190 upgrading processes, and accessing secure land and housing, demonstrates that these strategies are possibly the only avenue to navigate structures of power in contexts of weak institutional governance and authoritarian political regimes (Beard, 2003; Boonyabancha, 2009; Archer, 2012; Leonhardt, 2012; Roitman, 2019). Thus, rather than being ‘informal’, the practices of the urban poor need to be recognized as part of the ‘formal’ sphere of city governance processes. This understanding challenges the formal/informal dichotomy that labels informal settlements as illegal and undermine the practices and mechanisms used by people living in informal settlements as illegitimate (Lombard, 2015).

Despite this, there is still much to be done within the planning profession and governments in the global south for the collective practices and strategies of the urban poor to be recognized, understood, valued and supported (Simone & Pieterse, 2017). The case of Phka, is then important for planning knowledge because it shows that the ‘collective’ has a key role to play in urban development, even when this condition is generally obscured by dominant development models, in particular those relating to land and property (Blomley, 2004; Rolnik, 2014). This is particularly important to point out because, as discussed in Chapter 3, within the formal/informal dichotomy there is also an individual/collective dichotomy as most formalization efforts perpetuate individual models such as individual property rights. The individual/collective dichotomy was manifested in the case of Phka by residents achieving recognition through Systematic Land Registration (SLR). As argued in Chapter 9, this type of ‘recognition’ needs to be questioned as it is embedded within the neoliberal paradigm, which obscures more emancipatory ways to be recognized in cities that support collective claims to social and spatial justice. As Porter (2014) argues, there are costs of being recognized by dominant systems of land and property. These costs need to be seriously considered if social and spatial justice is to be achieved in cities. In the case of Phka, SLR and ultimately individual title was the only available option for residents to receive recognition of their citizenship and land rights. This happened even when the case clearly shows the consolidation of a collective process among residents that reflects collective relationships to ‘place’ and belonging in the city, as well as collective action playing a key role in building the agency and power of residents to advocate for land title and recognition. Thus, even when title was important for residents, this form of recognition did not progress social and spatial

191 justice, neither transformed the spatial, political, economic and social structures of the city. This shows that even when collective action acted as a ‘social phenomena in which social actors engage in common activities for demanding and/or providing collective goods’ (Beard, 2018, p. 3), in this case it was not an available mechanism that ordinary citizens used to transform spatial, political, economic and social structures (Castells, 1983). The next chapter discusses the complexities with receiving recognition under SLR in contexts of weak governance and rapid urban growth such as Phnom Penh, and the limitations of this system in securing recognition and spatial and social justice in cities.

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Chapter 9 The implications of market-led planning solutions to informality for spatial and social justice in Phnom Penh

9.1 Introduction As discussed in Chapter 3, within the formal/informal dichotomy there is also an individual/collective dichotomy perpetuated by formalization efforts, making individual property rights the preferred alternative for formalization with the aim to ease land markets and economic investment (Porter, 2011). As the debate in the literature indicates, market-led planning solutions to informality such as the process of Systematic Land Registration (SLR) in Phnom Penh do not automatically guarantee land tenure security for the urban poor (Payne, Durand-Lasserve & Rakodi, 2009; Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013); mainly because these type of formalization programs fail to account for the power inequalities between the urban poor, the state and other powerful actors that are at stake in cities. As elaborated in Chapter 3, market-led solutions to informality seek to improve tenure security for residents of informal settlements; on the other hand, these seek to increase security for domestic and international investors and promote economic development (Rolnik, 2015). This represents a complex contradiction (Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013). This contradiction is particularly concerning in the speculative environment that characterizes land markets in cities like Phnom Penh, where residents of informal settlements constantly compete for location with multinational corporations and foreign investors (Rolnik, 2013). Furthermore, even when land registration might be important for urban poor residents (Varley, 2017), the claims to recognition of these residents to the right to the city, and social and spatial justice, go beyond receiving land title. Thus, as Porter (2014) argues, mechanisms and processes for recognition in planning, which in the context of upgrading can include land title and compensation, are embedded with neoliberal logics and assumptions masked under promises of ‘rights’.

As explained in Chapter 5, Systematic Land Registration (SLR) in Cambodia was introduced by international donors as part of the Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP) after the country opened itself to the global economy during the United National Transitional Authority of Cambodia (UNTAC) period in the 1990s. Here, neoliberalism was adopted as the economic model of the country, following ideals

193 driven by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Springer, 2013). SLR, a western formalization and market-led solution to informality, replicated the assumptions proposed by de Soto (2000), in which title and individual property are considered the answers to end poverty by enabling land markets and access to credit (Grimsditch, Kol & Serchan, 2012). However, these types of market- led solutions to informality in Cambodia have not deal with structural issues causing poverty and injustice in Phnom Penh; in fact, authors argue that these have resulted in increasing inequalities in Cambodian society at the expense of vulnerable groups, in particular people living in informal settlements (Flower, 2018). Thus, the benefits for the urban poor from SLR in Phnom Penh, as with other market-led solutions to informality in the global south, need to be carefully considered. This enquiry makes sense considering the large investments by bi-lateral and multi-lateral donors into SLR as a key mechanism for strengthening land rights in the global south. Even the World Bank, the largest single financier of such programs in the global south, has started to carefully consider their challenges and effectiveness in delivering broader social outcomes such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (The World Bank, 2016).

In this chapter I address research secondary question number 4: How do market-led solutions to informality threaten the tenure security and recognition of the claims to justice of the urban poor in Phnom Penh? To answer this question, I explain the causes of market-based displacement experienced by residents of Phka based on their individual financial practices and a process of gentrification experienced in the settlement. Further to this, I explain how SLR intensified market-based dispossession, already experienced under conditions of informality, because of the financialization of land and housing and the lack of support toward maintaining residents’ collective support systems. This is important because, as explained in Chapter 8, collective action was a key mechanism supporting resident’s struggle to mobilize against exclusion and marginalization. Furthermore, I explain that even though SLR was important for residents of Phka, their claims for recognition and social and spatial justice went well beyond receiving land registration. Thus, I argue that for social and spatial justice to truly be achieved in Phnom Penh structural causes such as power inequalities between the urban poor, the state and other powerful actors in the city need to be addressed. Based on this discussion I demonstrate how the case of Phka

194 supports Holston’s (2009) arguments stating that even when insurgent practices of citizenship are able to contest socio-spatial inequalities, these practices do not always make structural changes in the contexts in which they operate, and thus do not always achieve social and spatial justice in cities.

The chapter is divided into five sections. Following this introduction, in Section 9.2 I explain vulnerabilities experienced by residents towards market-based displacement based on their individual financial practices. In Section 9.3, I explain processes of gentrification and social change in Phka and how these threaten the tenure security of residents by enabling processes of market-based displacement and diminishing the collective support systems of residents of Phka. In Section 9.4, I explain the feelings and ideas for political recognition of residents of Phka and the limitations that receiving recognition under SLR has for achieving social and spatial justice in the context of Phnom Penh. The chapter ends with a conclusion arguing that market-led solutions to informality pose important limitations to achieving social and spatial justice in cities, as these fail to intervene within the root causes of tenure insecurity, power inequalities and political (un)recognition. The conclusions of this chapter help me answer the principal research question of this thesis by sustaining the need to move forward from the formal/informal and individual/collective dichotomies that continue to present market-led formalization programs as key solutions to urban informality in cities of the global south. These arguments lead to a key point in my final conclusion of the thesis presented in Chapter 10 highlighting the need to open spaces for collective action in planning as a way of building and maintaining power within vulnerable and marginalized groups and contest structural causes of social and spatial injustice

9.2 Individual financial practices of residents of Phka In my research I found that having formal land title was not a necessary condition influencing residents of Phka’s investments in land, housing, and livelihood. Residents had been accessing various sources of finance, in particular MFIs, to invest in their houses and livelihoods. Both MFIs and banks accepted the soft titles of residents of Phka as collateral for loans. The financial products accessed by residents of Phka from banks and MFIs were everyday general loans, rather than mortgages or any specific housing product. Interviews with bank officials indicated that banks had to become more flexible in their requirements for collateral to be able to compete with

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MFIs. This happened because MFIs were the most popular source of finance that low- income groups in Phnom Penh accessed, thanks to having flexible requirements for collateral and repayment of loans. This case can also be found in other cities of the global south such as India and Bangladesh (see The World Bank, 2017). However, in Phnom Penh MFIs’ interest rates were high, ranging from one to two per cent per month or fourteen to twenty-four per cent per annum. Thus, even when MFIs filled in a gap by providing finance to low-income and poor residents in Phnom Penh, these institutions also represented a risk, in particular to poorer residents, to fall into debt and lose their land. As explained further below residents of Phka had lost their land because of falling into bad debt; also other research in Phnom Penh and other parts of Cambodia show cases where urban poor families that have borrowed money from MFIs, have fallen into debt, loan foreclosure and ultimately lost their land (see for example STT, 2012; Liv, 2013). This is not only the case in Cambodia, as with the introduction of commercial banks into MFIs and the expansion of their links with global financial markets, many of these institutions around the world have become increasingly commercialized and thus do not serve their original promise of serving the poor (Kabeer, 2005; Rolnik, 2015).

I found that the interest rates offered by banks were not as high as those of MFIs, ranging from nine to eighteen per cent per annum. However, access to loans and good interest rates depended on the client’s profile and their ability to meet the bank’s criteria to access loans. For instance, having the capacity to demonstrate a stable income and savings deposits were as important as having land title as collateral. Thus, most residents of Phka could not access loans from banks and/or take advantage of lower interest rates, even if they had hard titles. These findings are in line with other studies that demonstrate that despite the assumption that having land title will enable access to credit for the urban poor from banks, this is not always the case, as banks require other conditions such as stable income to access credit (see for example Field & Torero, 2006). Also, interviews with bank officials explained that the bank’s clients with soft title that borrowed more than USD $30,000 were expected to obtain hard title within two years of obtaining the loan. If the client failed to obtain hard title within this timeframe, the bank charged up to three per cent per annum of the total amount of the loan until the client obtained hard title. Thus, most families that could access banks in Phka could only borrow up to USD $30,000.

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In Phka, the investment practices of residents were influenced by the poverty status and economic conditions of each household, their stages of life, and life events they had experienced. I found that the decisions of residents and the risks they took or were prepared to take to invest in housing and livelihood, constituted risks to their security of tenure in the long term. However, for many, having access to finance and the opportunity to improve their houses and livelihoods was important and, in some cases, necessary. Many households in Phka experienced overcrowding and had two or three families living together under one roof. This situation had become unbearable for some and made families take the risk to borrow money even when they did not have stable incomes and many job opportunities. As Figure 9.1 below shows, even when residents could make positive changes in their lives in the short term by borrowing and investing in their houses and businesses, these investments also represented risks of losing their land in the long term.

I found that residents were very ingenious in finding ways to borrow money from different sources to address their needs, without considering the risks they could face to their security of tenure by falling into debt. In some cases, residents used the formal title of their relatives in the provinces as collateral to obtain loans. In other cases, people with larger blocks of land had ‘informally’ subdivided and registered these subdivisions with village or commune authorities and used the various ‘soft titles’ to obtain multiple loans from various sources, including banks, MFIs, family members and informal lenders. In Phka, informal lenders charged up to three per cent interest per month on loans if people had collateral, and ten per cent per month without collateral. Thus, various residents had multiple loans and carried a great amount of debt on these loans. The debt portfolios of residents provided risks to the tenure security of people in Phka. In fact, one of the community leaders acknowledged that she had subdivided and sold part of her land to cover one of her debts. Other studies in the global south have examined debt portfolios among the urban poor, concluding that debt is one of the main reasons why people remain in poverty (ACHR, 2014b; Martinez & Ribera-Acevedo, 2018). Specifically, debt from informal lenders and predatory interest rates are attributed to maintaining a vicious cycle of indebtedness and poverty (Martinez & Ribera-Acevedo, 2018). Also, debt affected the life quality of families by creating stress and unhappiness.

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Figure 9.1 The risks of becoming a home owner

Chivy was 32 years old and lived with her husband and two small children within the contested boundary of the lake and Phka. The family came to Phnom Penh from Kampong Cham Province. At that time, she worked in a garment factory and her husband owned a truck used for various jobs.

Like many other migrants, Chivy rented a small room with her family. After some time and with small savings the couple occupied land and constructed a small wooden house in Phka.

Once in Phka Chivy borrowed USD $8,000 from an MFI to buy land, drain the water and construct a concrete house. The loan charged 1.6 per cent interest per month with a repayment period of 48 months. Chivy used her mother’s land title in the province, and the land receipt given by the MUPLMC after the SLR survey as collateral for the loan.

The couple also sold their truck and developed eight rooms to rent at the back of their house. They received an income of USD $250 per month from their rental business. The couple had to make repayments of USD $350 per month for their debt and were facing an uncertain time as the husband lost his main job and was only earning USD $7 per day. Chivy’s experience is an example of the investment risks that residents of Phka were prepared to take to improve their living conditions, however as this case shows these risks could also impact on the security of tenure of residents.

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Vannary, a 55-year-old woman, explained:

I don’t feel happy to have a debt; I am not free and sometimes I feel stressed. But borrowing the money to expand my house was necessary. I am happy to have a bigger house and have my family living closer together.

This statement shows that even when families valued the changes that access to finance and housing investments was able to make to their living conditions, having a housing debt represented a stress in their lives. Like Vannary, many residents I interviewed shared these feelings. In this sense, household debt can be conceptualized as a factor inhibiting the right to the city and the progression of social and spatial justice in Phka. This financialization and commodification of land and housing, and the impacts on tenure security and quality of life of ordinary citizens, now happens worldwide, in cities of the global north and south, and affects ordinary people from various socio-economic backgrounds, not just the urban poor (Rolnik, 2013a; 2015). Here, efforts to conceptualize access to land and housing as a human right are essential in progressing just ideas over these subjects and highlighting the dangers that the commodification of land and housing pose to urban dwellers worldwide (Mathivet, 2014).

Despite this, I found that there were families who were very aware of the risks of taking up loans without having a stable income or the capacity to repay loans and preferred not to borrow money from external sources. Some of these households had been living in Phka for a long period of time, and had seen neighbours lose their land because of loan default. However, these households also experienced the need to improve their housing conditions. They also did not have stable jobs and income opportunities, so they sold or planned to sell part of their land to gain money and improve their houses. This situation was experienced by residents that at the time of research were wealthier (and had benefited from selling parts of their land), as well as poorer residents who were waiting for their land to be ‘formalized’ under SLR so they could sell part of their land for a higher price to newcomers to the area, as seen in Figure 9.2. Other studies in the global south have found that it is common among urban poor households when receiving title to want to sell land to obtain an immediate financial benefit from it (Payne, Durand-Lasserve & Rakodi, 2009). Also, the bargaining power between small plot owners and developers or wealthier residents is unbalanced, thus newly

199 formalized households may agree to sell their property under adverse terms and conditions (Durand-Lasserve & Selod, 2009).

Figure 9.2 Waiting for formal title to sell land

Trung and Sophat arrived in Phka in 1993 and bought a large plot of land with their savings. The couple were in their 50s and their income was earnt by Trung running a moto taxi for USD $7 per day. They received support from their daughter, who worked in a dental clinic, of about USD $120 per month.

When they moved to Phka they built a small wooden house by themselves. The old house leaked when it rained and was very small to accommodate their children. So, they borrowed money from Sophat’s relatives to upgrade it. At that time, Sophat worked in a factory and she was able to contribute to paying back the money to her relatives. At the time of the research, the couple wanted to upgrade to a concrete house as most of their neighbours had done.

However, the couple was afraid and reluctant to borrow money. They stated: ‘we have little income and are afraid of falling into bad debt. We have witnessed how our neighbours fell into debt and lost their land’. Also, ‘we have talked to the bank and is unable to lend us enough money to upgrade our house because we don’t have a stable income. We don’t want to borrow from MFIs because the interest rates are too high. We contribute to the saving group to support our neighbours, but we prefer not to borrow from the savings group. We are afraid of debt’.

Trung and Sophat planned to sell half of their land and with that money upgrade their house. This was possible as their plot of land was large enough to be subdivided. They believed their land had increase value over the years; however, they were hoping their land will be registered and formalized by SLR and

offer them better returns for the sale.

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Further to the above, I found that most residents of Phka did not conduct any financial planning to make sure their investments in housing and livelihoods were sustainable over time. For example, most families I interviewed had developed rental rooms within or adjacent to their houses and rented these rooms to migrants coming from the provinces. Rental rooms were important sources of income to people in Phka; however, for some families these did not represent a good investment in the long term. It seemed that because some families, in particular wealthier families, had benefited from developing rental rooms, poorer households also thought that they would benefit from making these investments. However, there was no financial planning to ensure that returns on investments would be made in the long term. A researcher who had worked with Phka’s residents over the years explained:

In Phka most people develop rental rooms, everybody borrows money from the banks and MFIs because they see it is easy to collect money from rentals. But for me this is risky because people invest a lot of money, but they get a low return. There is a need to calculate, if you build a renting room, then how many years will it take you to get the money invested back? Also, people have to pay interest rates, and they need to think about renovation and depreciation. But local people, I don’t think they know about renovation and depreciation and they do not calculate this. So, they don’t really think about the future and there is no proper planning in their business investment. For me this is a risk especially because they don’t have a regular job. So, in some cases the institutions can take over their land. There are many cases in Phnom Penh and the rural areas.

Most renters I interviewed did not have the financial capacity to invest in land and housing, even when they wanted to. Most of these families lived day-to-day to cover their daily expenses such as rent, services, food, and if possible, send their children to school. Most renters had come from the provinces and still preserved their land; thus, many wanted or had no option but to work in Phnom Penh for a while and return to the province in the future. Most investments that this group made were on developing a livelihood activity, such as buying carts to sell food in the streets. As home owners, these residents had a diverse debt portfolio. Most women I interviewed worked in the garment factories around Phnom Penh and lived on the minimum wage.

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Thus, this group constituted the poorest people in Phka, and perhaps the most insecure, as their tenure security was subject to their landlords.

Despite this, rentals provided an affordable option for migrants to live in Phnom Penh and work and earn an income. In Phka, most rental rooms were of good condition. However, some renters said that the rooms were small and hot, and/or built on top of garbage in wooden houses, so people were affected by bad smells and mosquitoes. Apart from complaints about noise and garbage, most renter-landlord relationships seemed to be on good terms. In a couple of cases, renters had been living with landlords for a long time, developing close relationships and important support networks. At the time of my research it was too early to tell the impacts that SLR and title formalization would have on this particular group. Other studies in the global south have shown that rents are likely to increase after formalization processes due to the extra costs borne by landlords (Durand-Lasserve & Selod, 2009; Payne & Durand- Lasserve, 2013). In this sense, renters cannot apply for compensation and usually are not eligible for resettlement; also owners of formalized land may also have renewed incentives to evict tenants in favour of more profitable use of their land (Durand- Lasserve & Selod, 2009). These reasons could potentially affect renters in Phka. Also, this group was particularly vulnerable to dispossession as people did not have access to social networks and support as other residents in Phka had.

I found that health was a key factor affecting the financial circumstances of poor families in Phka, as most did not have access to formal welfare support systems. The lack of access to welfare support systems affected people’s housing investments and households’ loan repayments. For example, Rady, a young man living in one of the poorest households in Phka, experienced an accident while working as an electrician. This accident and bad health haunted Rady’s life, inhibiting his capacity to invest in his house and improve his family’s living conditions as other residents of Phka had been able to do. He explained:

I want to improve my house, but I cannot afford to do so. Because of my accident I have no savings and my income is very little. My son has tuberculosis and I have to support his treatment plus other expenses of my family. I have considered borrowing money from an MFI, but I am scared of the high interest and falling into debt.

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Health also affected women who had to spend money on child birth and maintaining their babies’ health. Also, the elderly experienced health problems that put pressure on families’ incomes and living standards as no formal support for health was available to them. Many of these residents relied on the community savings group, in particular the health fund (explained in Chapter 6) to access finance. A young mother explained:

When my baby was born, I borrowed USD $200 from the community savings group to pay for the hospital, baby’s goods and food. The community savings are important because they can be used as a revolving fund to support all members. Money can be accessed quickly for basic needs and emergencies. This gives the community a better source to borrow money from and stops people from borrowing from informal lenders who charge very high interest rates.

Other studies in Cambodia and the global south have demonstrated the importance of community saving groups to act as welfare systems for the poor (Archer, 2012; ACHR, 2017). In Thailand, for example, many urban poor community networks had been running their own community welfare funds to which saving members contributed one baht a day or USD $1 a month. These funds are a fundamental support for the wellbeing of the urban poor, and in 2009, the government initiated a policy where local governments matched the amount contributed by people to these funds to double the funds’ capacities (ACHR, 2017). These findings show the importance of strengthening the informal systems developed by urban poor communities as part of land formalization and slum upgrading programs. Despite this, some residents acknowledged that in times of great need, they had to borrow from informal lenders. Most people borrowed from these lenders for emergencies and when they had other loans with the savings group.

I found that residents who had borrowed money from MFIs, banks, and informal lenders had stopped contributing to the savings group as they needed their money to repay their debts. A resident explained:

I used to contribute to the community savings and borrowed money to support my business in the market. I borrowed up to USD $500 in monthly intervals and used to contribute to the savings and borrowed from it constantly. I had to stop

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contributing to the savings five months ago because I have a debt with the MFI; I also stopped borrowing because I am afraid I cannot continue to pay back the loans to the savings group.

These findings show how the financial pressure that individual households experienced in meeting their housing costs affected the collective activities and support systems that residents had developed in Phka. This is important to highlight, because as explained in Chapter 8, collective action was the key mechanism used by residents to secure their land rights, in this case through receiving title through SLR. Thus, the loss of collective activities and action in Phka also meant the loss of residents’ systems of support, and thus made residents of Phka vulnerable to dispossession either by the state or the market. This point is further developed in Section 9.3.

The findings in this section identified vulnerabilities to tenure security of residents of Phka, associated with their individual housing and livelihood investments. These findings show that market-based displacement in Phka was occurring in conditions of informality as residents had and were vulnerable to losing land because of debt, lack of financial planning in their investments, and the need to sell land to obtain short-term financial returns. In this sense, I argue that a market-led solution to informality such as SLR exacerbated these vulnerabilities by widening the debt portfolio of residents, encouraging the sale of land due to the potential of increased returns and decreasing support for collective support systems such as the saving group. Renters, the poorest group of residents in Phka, were also vulnerable to dispossession from the potential rent increases resulting from formalization. Thus, an individual and market-oriented model of formalization made residents of Phka vulnerable to dispossession because of the financialization of land and housing, and the commodification of land and housing rights to financial assets (Rolnik, 2015). The next section contextualizes these vulnerabilities within the urban development dynamics of Phnom Penh.

9.3 Gentrification and social change in Phka Phka is an attractive neighbourhood because of its central location, only seven kilometres from the centre of Phnom Penh, and surrounded by services, businesses and job opportunities, as explained in Chapter 6. One of these services was a popular middle-class Catholic school located walking distance from Phka. In addition to this,

204 the area had good connections to water and electricity, well-cared for infrastructure, and at the time of the research was in the process of formalizing land titles. Phka was also a relatively safe area with good community spirit, where it was safe for children to play in the street, and neighbours had overall good relationships with each other, as shown in Chapter 7.

Gentrification as a process of market-based displacement affecting the urban poor is well recognized in the literature on cities of the global north and south (Lees, 2000; Slater, 2006), and is one of the complexities associated with the formalization of informal settlements (see Payne, Durand-Lasserve & Rakodi 2009; Payne & Durand- Lasserve, 2013). The good conditions of Phka benefited its residents, but also created conditions for gentrification to occur. Over time, wealthier people had started to arrive in Phka from the inner-city areas of Phnom Penh. A wealthy resident explained:

I moved here because living areas are bigger and offer more space that my old house near Orrusey. The positive changes in the area like having the wetland filled, accessing connections to water and electricity, and the SLR survey made me feel more confident and encouraged me to invest in my home. I also planted flowers outside in the road which was built by the people in this community.

New residents bought land from ‘original’ residents that had lived in Phka for years. The old residents sold their land because of having to pay debt and/or poverty needs and were displaced to the outskirts of the city. Dara, one of the community leaders, explained:

People have sold their land because they need money as they have no jobs. They move to the outskirts of the city where they can find cheaper land.

Also, Loncham, a long-term resident expressed:

I worry about people selling their land and become landless. The house next to me has been sold eight times. I think most people will not sell the land because families are economically stable, but I worry [about this].

The impacts of gentrification on the tenure security of residents of Phka were high, considering the rapid pace of urban growth and urban transformation in Phnom Penh,

205 the inability of the state, and urban planning in particular, to respond adequately, and the implication of the state in by-passing land and planning legal frameworks. Phnom Penh is a city with fast rates of urban growth, which has experienced constant transformations in its urban form and prioritized business and economic growth, as explained in Chapter 5. Urban development, driven by foreign investors in alliance with the state, bypassed land laws and planning legislation. In this light an academic explained:

Planning [in Phnom Penh] is behind physical development, and development is moving very fast, and the government prioritizes economic development. We need comprehensive planning that is on time and that is enforced. I still can see a missing part, really, a missing part. It is like a running game between an old turtle and an athlete, planning [in Phnom Penh] is an old turtle and urban development is a very big master athlete.

The statements above show that rapid urban growth incentivizes processes of gentrification in Phka. Here market-led solutions to informality increased the risk of market-based displacement of the ‘original’ residents of Phka, in particular poorer households, as the security associated with the SLR survey and future land title generated attraction to the neighbourhood, and encouraged wealthier residents to purchase property in the area.

The incentive to sell land among residents was particularly manifested within the younger generation in Phka. Older people who had lived in Phka for a long time, and had gone through the struggle to obtain services, built a place and community and advocated for tenure security, valued their land and community in a different way than younger generations. Older people had a stronger sense of belonging and attachment, leading people to better understand the value of keeping the land for the future, and to ensure their family wellbeing over time. This sustains the conceptualization of place as a dynamic, heterogeneous process constructed in space by social relationships, giving space a social meaning, emphasizing its use value (Massey, 1991). As discussed in Chapter 2, place involves emotional attachments that people form with particular spaces, based on different uses, meanings and values (Cresswell, 2004). Lotus, an old woman who was a refugee in a Thai refugee camp during the Pol Pot regime, explained:

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My land is part of my life because it provided me with a place to settle and a place to raise a family. I want to keep the land for my children, and I expect that they take care of it in the future. I want to subdivide my plot in four to give land to all my children. I also feel happy to give renters a place to live in Phnom Penh because I know how difficult is to live without a home.

In contrast, most younger people in Phka saw land as a profitable asset and a way to make money, a view that risks the security of tenure of families in the long term. The perception among younger generations can be attributed to the impact of Cambodia’s transition to a market economy which had transformed traditional patterns of exchange and reciprocity leading to greater individualism (Ledgerwood, 2002). The current development model in Phnom Penh perpetuating neoliberal logics (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2009) such as individualism, privatization, and commodification of urban space as explained in Chapter 5. Older people, especially older women, who had lived in Phka for a long time were aware and concerned about this pattern and thus reluctant to give control of their land to their children. Nak, an old lady who had lived in Phka since the 1990s, explained:

I want to keep the land for my grandchildren. Because of this I have maintained this land in my name rather than subdividing it among my children because I am afraid they will sell it.

Also, at the time of the research, most people participating in collective activities such as the saving group were those original residents who had been organized and worked together since the 1990s. Most of these people were getting old and even when they continued to save money and benefited from these savings, their involvement and energy to support community activities had started to diminish. The involvement of the younger generation in the savings scheme and collective activities was limited, and this impacted the endurance of collective activities in Phka. From the interviews I conducted, young women were aware of the savings group and community activities and had learnt from the process that their parents had been through. Some of these women expressed interest in joining the savings group and being involved in community activities in the future. However, overall, young people were not as involved in collective activities as their parents were. Their focus was more on individual rather than collective goals, and their need to find development and job

207 opportunities to make a life in Phnom Penh. These generational changes can also be attributed to the change and transformation experienced in Phnom Penh at the time of the research, influenced by the neoliberal values of individualism and commodification, shaping the life aspirations of younger generations.

I also found that the processes of gentrification and social change described above affected the collective solidarity of residents of Phka. For example, some newcomers were supportive of community activities like the savings group and had opportunistically joined these activities to register land. However, not all newcomers were supportive of community activities. Long-term residents complained that wealthy and new people were individualistic in their thinking and were changing the way original residents related to each other in the community. Srey, a young mother who grew up in Phka, explained:

Most of the newcomers are better off and want to live in a formal way. But the community people have an informal way of living, and that disturbs newcomers. People of upper classes live within certain rules. They don’t make noise, or talk to their neighbours, they also like to buy things from the malls, rather than on the street or local shops. But poor people, community people, we want our children to play in the street, to talk to our neighbours, and have social connections. So, there is a clash between both ways of living.

Also, residents explained that gentrification, as well as socio-economic differences that had grown between long-term residents over time, had negative impacts on collective action in Phka. For example, long-term residents mentioned that in the past when people were poorer and had greater needs, their collective spirit was stronger, and they were more active working together. As seen in Chapter 7, this collective organization reached its peak when people organized to advocate for tenure security. However, at the time of this research, after people had met their basic needs and secured land title, the collective action of residents diminished. Yaro, an old resident, explained:

Before the relationship between community members was strong and we used to understand each other and collaborate together. Nowadays our relationships are not as strong as before. When people were poorer, we worked together and

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supported each other. But now some people are better off than others and relationships have changed. There are less people participating in community activities and in the savings group. Also, newcomers are narrow-minded, they keep for themselves and do not share much with the people living here.

Bona, another old resident, complemented this view, saying:

Before, during difficult times people in Phka were very active. Now that times are easy people are not very active in community activities.

All the above points to the different ways in which the model and pace of urban development in Phnom Penh have affected the collective values and process experienced by residents of Phka. This has been evidenced in other studies in South East Asia, showing how the collective action of urban poor communities can be ephemeral and delicate rather than endure over time (Archer, 2010). What is important to understand here is that the loss of collective activities and spirit in Phka constituted a loss of support systems, such as the saving groups and social networks, that residents of this community used as a key mechanism to move out of poverty and resist a process of exclusion from SLR that constituted a threat to their security of tenure. As explained in Chapters 7 and 8, collective action was used as the mechanism for residents of Phka to build ‘power with’ (Ife, 2016) and expand this power to influence the political structures of the city. Other studies in the global south have also identified collective action as the key mechanism used by vulnerable groups such as the urban poor to develop strategies and resist state- and market-driven evictions (Cabannes, Yafai & Johnson, 2010). Thus, the loss of collective action in Phka constituted a loss of power in this community, making residents vulnerable to multiple forms of dispossession.

In Phka, residents were concerned about changes in the neighbourhood arising from the ‘proposed’ developments in the lake, as explained in Chapter 7, as well as the empty plot located in the centre of the neighbourhood. Most people I interviewed were concerned about these developments, not just because of threats to their land security, but because of the ways these could impact the collective spirit of the community. Darany, one of the community leaders, said:

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I worry about having a condominium built in the empty land plot [located at the centre of the community], it would affect community, people’s lives and the community feeling.

However, this view was not shared by all residents. Akara, a middle-income resident, explained that he saw benefits in developments like this happening within the community:

I think the development of the condo is positive and I am happy to live together with rich people because I can learn from them, educate more and self-develop.

Overall, most people I interviewed from the community, academia and non- governmental organizations were critical of the development model of Phnom Penh, in particular the way it was changing the traditions of Khmer people by transforming collective values into individual priorities. An academic explained:

The way urban development is happening in Phnom Penh is re-enforcing and encouraging division. This happens through master planning and the division of land uses, because these also divide people and change the Khmer concept of living together.

These statements help demonstrate how the model of urban development was transforming the social relationships of people living in the city, leading to a change from collective to individual values. This was specifically driven by the transition of Cambodia to a market-driven economy, the logics perpetuated by neoliberalism (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2009) and the commodification and financialization of land and housing (Rolnik, 2015). As explained in this chapter, these changes constituted a threat to residents of Phka, as the loss of collective values and action diminish their collective support systems, which are the only available mechanisms for residents to maintain and build power and resist processes of accumulation by dispossession in the city and navigate through the governance and planning structures creating social and spatial inequalities in Phnom Penh. These threats show the limitations that a market-led response to informality such as SLR has in intervening in processes causing injustice and dispossession as further explained in the section below.

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9.4 Limitations of SLR in securing social and spatial justice in Phnom Penh As explained in Chapter 3, Porter (2011) argues that market-led responses to informality do not necessarily address questions of social and spatial justice but perpetuate a model of property that prioritizes exchange value over the use rights of people living in informal settlements. In the context of Phka, this means that achieving recognition through SLR obscured claims to social and spatial justice of residents seeking transformation of social and power relationships, and recognition of other ways to belong and experience the city, in particular collective relationships to place. As is common in authoritarian political contexts, discussing political issues related to social and spatial justice with members of the community was not easy due to their sensitivities. I found that people were very careful about the statements they made regarding the political situation in Phnom Penh and did not want to share their views. Thus, during my research I asked and listened to people’s life aspirations in the short- and long-term future. Even when people in Phka expressed different needs and priorities, most wanted to have social and economic opportunities to make a simple life in the city, to be able to support and provide for their families, and live in a peaceful environment where they could be free to have a happy and secure life, like everyone else in the city. Thus, for people in Phka it was important to obtain economic benefits from urban development and to be able to maximize these for their families and community. For the community leaders the idea of justice was influenced by the injustices, such as forced evictions, that many urban poor communities had experienced in Phnom Penh as explained in Chapter 5. Thus, justice was about protecting vulnerable people, and making sure that there was not inequality among people living in the city. Community leaders acknowledged the importance of participating in decision-making in the city for issues that affected them, and how this involvement should serve to make people reflect about society. One statement made by Phka’s community leaders captures this:

We want to see the city develop, but in a way that benefits both the poor and the rich, where equality can be achieved between the rich and the poor. At the moment the poor always cry when development starts, how is this fair?

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Thus, even when receiving land title through SLR progressed the ideas of justice for residents Phka, there were other dimensions that needed to be recognized if social and spatial justice was to be achieved. Particularly, residents’ claim for justice was a claim for equality and even when they did not directly recognize this, it necessarily involved engagement with the power structures creating social and spatial inequalities in Phnom Penh. Thus, having recognition of land rights through SLR was a necessary step toward social and spatial justice in this community. In fact, most NGOs and urban poor communities in Phnom Penh widely advocated for the transparent implementation of SLR in Phnom Penh and dedicated all their efforts for this purpose in the name of justice (Flower, 2018). However, as the debate in the literature suggests, SLR do not always work in securing land rights for the poor and can in fact exacerbate market-based displacement and dispossession which, as the case of Phka shows, already happens in conditions of informality (Durand-Lasserve & Selod, 2009; Porter, 2011; Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013; Rolnik, 2015). This is particularly the case in contexts of weak and corrupt governance structures such as in Phnom Penh. Thus, in order to achieve social and spatial justice, more attention needs to be given to the power inequalities that create processes of dispossession in cities.

In this light, my findings show that while SLR was important for residents to feel secure and recognized, the feelings of security extended to the collective identity, solidarity and support that existed between neighbours in this particular community. This sustains arguments in the literature explaining that tenure security is a matter of perception (Durand-Lasserve & Selod, 2009) and needs to be analyzed within the specificities of local context. As explained in Chapter 7, residents built social capital over the years out of a collective struggle to build a place to belong in the city. Relationships of original residents living in the settlement were characterized by trust and solidarity. As explained in Chapter 8, this collective agency was used by residents to organize and engage in a political struggle for their land rights to be recognized by the state. Thus, many residents I interviewed acknowledged the collective feeling as important for feeling secure in the settlement. Residents expressed that knowing they were in the same position as their neighbours made them feel more secure than solely receiving title through SLR. Kosal, one of the residents, expressed:

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Before I felt insecure, I used to hear in the radio about eviction cases in Phnom Penh, like the case of Boeng Kak. But at this stage, I don’t feel worried. I know that everyone here is in the same situation [as me]. I have been part of the advocacy process together with my neighbours. We have built solidarity, and that is important for protecting each other and our land. We have obtained information on our situation and received additional SLR. I feel secure because of this.

Also, Sinith, a middle-income resident who had invested in his house over the years, explained:

It has been very important for me to invest in my house. I don’t feel worried about tenure security because I have lived in the area for a long time together with the other people in the community who are in the same position as me.

Thus, residents’ feelings of security in their place of residence were directly related to having a collective identity and the support from their neighbours. This collectiveness was more important for residents to feel secure than having land title under SLR. For instance, in one case receiving title was seen as an inconvenience for residents who preferred to continue to make land transactions informally. I interviewed Rachana, a housewife who bought a house from a previous owner in Phka but decided not to take part in the SLR process. Rachana owned a house in her home town in the province of Takmao and was only living in Phka to allow her children to go to school. Rachana had a soft title but did not want to obtain land title under SLR because she wanted to sell her house in the near future and move with her family to Takmao. She explained:

Without SLR the sale of the land is easier, less complicated and less expensive. I prefer not to register my land, so I can sell the house easily when my youngest daughter finishes school and move to my other house in Takmao.

Having a formal land title certificate was important as a means for residents to have the legal basis to protect their land from the state, and a means to make the state accountable in the case of any conflicts that could occur with the boundaries of state public or private land. One resident explained:

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I still feel insecure because of not having land title certificate. My security increased when the authorities came to survey the land. But I do not feel one hundred per cent secure. I want the authorities to finish the SLR process, show us the results of the survey, and ensure there are no conflicts regarding the boundaries of my property.

Importantly, residents not only perceived land title as an instrument to feel secure and have recognition of their land rights, but as a financial incentive. In this case, and as discussed in Section 9.2, residents of Phka had been obtaining loans from banks and MFIs with their soft title. Having a formal land title certificate only allowed residents to access better interest deals offered by financial institutions. Thus, most residents explained that the reason why they wanted to obtain land title was not only to feel more secure in their land, but also to be able to access low-interest loans from banks and MFIs. Leila, a young mother who developed various businesses in her home, explained:

Getting land title is important for me to feel more secure; but also, to access lower interest from banks.

Thus, in this sense title was beneficial for residents. However, as discussed in section 9.2, valuing land financially, or for its exchange value, made some households in Phka, in particular the poorest households, fall into bad debt and losing their land because of this being confiscated by financial institutions. These findings demonstrate that receiving land title through SLR is not only insufficient for recognizing broader claims to social and spatial justice and rights to the city of the urban poor, but in some cases can exacerbate processes of accumulation by dispossession in cities (Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013; Rolnik, 2015). Also, even when title gave some residents a higher level of security, and the possibility to be compensated if the land needed to be confiscated, in the complex governance context of Phnom Penh this security could be easily diminished by the actions of the state and its powerful allies in the city.

The case of the recent demolition of the White Building in central Phnom Penh and forced displacement of its residents, in the name of ‘beautification’ and ‘modernization’ of the city, shows the impacts that the rapid pace and neoliberal model of urban development can have in the dispossession of the low-income residents, even when

214 they have land title. The White Building was built in 1963 as the first attempt to offer urban housing to low- and middle-income Cambodians. The building was located in one of the most attractive and expensive neighbourhoods of Phnom Penh (Figure 9.3). Residents owned the apartments and over the years had sold or transferred this ownership to family members and newcomers. The building was home to 493 families, who owned and had titles for their apartments. The building was famous for its style of architecture and for being a vibrant community hub with artists, musicians, civil servants, teachers, business owners and poor people living in it (Simone, 2008).

Figure 9.3 The White Building in Phnom Penh

The building’s physical condition had deteriorated over the years and it had a bad reputation for drugs and prostitution. In 2017, the Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction announced plans by the Japanese firm Arakawa Co to redevelop the White Building (Meta & Baliga, 2017). The redevelopment plans were made by the state, without the involvement of residents, and involved tearing down

215 the building and replacing it with a 21-storey high rise. Residents were consulted on these development plans and most of them were compensated (below market price) to leave the building. No alternative accommodation was given to residents, and most had to find a new and affordable place to live in Phnom Penh (Moung, 2017). Media articles voiced the views and feelings of many residents of the White Building, expressing great sadness at leaving their place of residence and community. Residents also expressed feelings of intimidation and fear when dealing with government authorities (Meta & Baliga, 2017; Moung, 2017). This case is an example of the development dynamics that are currently occurring in Phnom Penh, and how ordinary citizens, in particular the urban poor, are vulnerable to state- and market- driven dispossession. This case also shows the leverage that powerful actors such as the state and foreign investors have over poor residents, even when they have land title. These findings point to the arguments of the costs of being recognized (Porter, 2014) through market-led solutions to informality, and the inability of this type of recognition to truly secure rights and social and spatial justice of vulnerable groups. Thus, cases like the White Building show that market-led solutions are not enough to be recognized in cities like Phnom Penh, with rapid urban growth and weak governance, and thus the importance of maintaining the collective support networks of the urban poor in order for these communities to continue to be empowered and resist processes of dispossession by developing different strategies.

9.5 Conclusion In this chapter I have demonstrated the limitations of the individual/collective dichotomy perpetuated by formalization programs and the costs of being recognized (Porter, 2014) through market-led solutions to informality such as SLR. In this case, SLR, a market-led response to informality, was found not only to be insufficient to recognize the ideas of social and spatial justice of residents of Phka, but also to exacerbate vulnerabilities to market-based displacement and dispossession which were already happening in resident’s living conditions of informality, threatening their security of tenure and citizenship rights. These findings are also acknowledged in other cities of the global south (Payne, Durand-Lasserve & Rakodi, 2009) and are thus key to illuminating the dangers of the informal/formal dichotomy and the assumption that the integration of informality into formal systems, in this case systematic land registration (SLR), is the most appropriate solution to informality in the global south

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(Acuto, Dinardi & Marx, 2019). Furthermore, these findings show a dangerous duplicity in systems of planning. On the one hand, planning systems uphold and embody rights and their protections, but on the other hand, they work to regressively deny the very same rights by enabling processes of accumulation by dispossession (Porter, 2014). Importantly, these findings show how the achievement of rights, in this case land rights, under market-oriented systems influenced by neoliberalism, ignores the more fundamental claims of the right to space (Lefebvre, 1976), and reduces political questions to regulation through procedure (Porter, 2014).

As discussed in Section 9.4, the ideas of justice of residents of Phka related strongly to feelings of equality. Most residents wanted to be able to benefit from the growth of urban development and living in Phnom Penh, to provide for their families, and a simple, happy and secure life. Residents were not against the government, but as discussed in Chapter 8, they wanted to positively engage with authorities for the recognition of their citizenship rights. Despite residents not acknowledging this directly, their claim to justice and equality was inherently political, as inequality in cities of the global south is inherently shaped by a wide range of structural power and political forces, such as developing proper participation mechanisms to be able to shape decision-making (Lemanski, 2017). Thus, even when title was important for residents of Phka to feel recognized as other studies in the global south have shown (Varley, 2017), their ideas of justice cannot be fulfilled by only receiving title. These points were not reflected nor voiced by residents, nor the NGOs and development agencies they worked with. Instead most of these actors related their struggle of land rights to receiving land title through SLR without critically considering the impacts and disadvantages of these systems, especially to the urban poor (Grimsditch, Kol & Serchan, 2012; Keo, Bouhours & Bouhours, 2015). My arguments are supported by Flower (2018) who points out structural dimensions within the design of tenure laws in Cambodia disadvantaging residents of informal settlements that are not so evident and widespread within the public. The author points to the need to strengthen the political dimensions of insecurity, and the need for further research to aid understanding of insecurity in systems that experience severe disruption such as political, economic and social upheaval in cities such as Phnom Penh.

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As acknowledged in other studies of cities of the global south (Payne, Durand- Lasserve & Rakodi, 2009; Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013), SLR exacerbated the vulnerabilities of residents of Phka to market-based displacement and dispossession. Obtaining title through SLR in Phka widened the debt portfolios of urban poor residents. In a few cases this appears to have been favourable as residents could access lower interest rate loans from banks and MFIs than those obtained with informal title. However, in most of the cases having formal title would only allowed people to increase the amounts of money they borrowed, without accessing lower interest rates, because they continued to not have a stable job or savings deposits. Household debt was high in Phka, creating stress on residents and threatening not only their security of tenure, but their rights to the city (Rolnik, 2014; 2015), especially for those residents that could only access finance from MFIs and informal lenders charging high interest rates. I also found that people did not have any type of support for planning their investments in housing and found themselves making risky investments that could jeopardize their security of tenure. It is common in Cambodia and other studies in the global south for urban poor residents to live in a cycle of debt and poverty, and lose land as a result of loan default (STT, 2012; Liv, 2013; Martinez & Ribera-Acevedo, 2018).

Further to this, processes of gentrification and social change produced by the rapid pace of urban growth and transformation experienced in Phnom Penh, had seen many of the people living in informal settlements dispossessed by market-based displacement. In Phka, SLR and the opportunity to have a registered title together with the location and good physical condition of the settlement attracted newcomers, mostly wealthier, to the neighbourhood, and this enticed original residents of Phka to sell land to obtain a short-term financial return. Thus, as other studies have found (Durand-Lasserve & Selod, 2009), land regularisation can incentivize processes of gentrification and dispossess residents of informal settlements such as Phka. This touches on the argument about the effectiveness of formalization depending on the location of informal settlements, where land is not attractive or earmarked for development (Payne, Durand-Lasserve & Rakodi, 2009). In Phka the poorest households, such as those with smaller plots and renters, were particularly vulnerable to dispossession by gentrification processes, as developers or wealthy residents with more resources and power could easily coerce these residents into selling plots

218 cheaply and rents could increase without notice (Durand-Lasserve & Selod, 2009). Gentrification processes have been shown to affect other poor and low-income residents in Phnom Penh, such as in the case of the residents of the White Building discussed in this chapter. In this case, even when residents had title and ownership of their property, these rights were easily coerced and ‘bought’ by the state at below market prices to make room for the beautification of the area in the hands of foreign investors. This decision was made without providing any type of affordable housing options for residents. This shows the power inequalities and vulnerabilities that poor and low-income groups face in Phnom Penh and calls for the need for donors supporting land rights programs in countries like Cambodia to take additional measures to empower these groups and build their knowledge and capacity to hold governments accountable and resist these types of dispossession.

The last but most important point in this conclusion is that SLR by being embedded with market logics designed to ease land markets, perpetuated an individual model of living, and to relate to land and housing, which inherently diminished the collective agency and support systems that residents of Phka had created over the years. This also happened because of the individualism perpetuated by the neoliberal model of urban development in Phnom Penh. For example, the differences between younger and older generations, not only in valuing land but also in participating and supporting collective activities such as the saving group, and the decrease of membership in the saving group because of people having to pay housing and livelihood debts. This is particularly important because, as explained in Chapters 7 and 8, collective action was the mechanism that residents used to build power from within and expand this power to influence and interact with political structures of the city in their search for recognition. Thus, the loss of collective action was also a loss of power within this community that made them vulnerable to dispossession by the state and the market, even when they had obtained SLR. It is here where the dangerous duplicity in systems of planning is in evidence (Porter, 2014). On the one hand, SLR upholds and embodies the promise of land rights and their protections; but on the other hand, works regressively to diminish collective action and empowerment between residents and thus deny the possibility to access the very same rights (Porter, 2014). This is particularly concerning because of the proposed development plans in land plots bordering Phka and the growing interest in the neighbourhood. As the case of the

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White Building shows, it is not enough to have land title in contexts of rapid urban growth, political corruption and weak enforcement of laws as in Phnom Penh.

As other studies in the global south have shown (Cabbanes, Yafai & Johnson, 2010; Herrle, Ley, Fokdal, 2015) the urban poor need to be organized, build networks at scale, and find ways to maintain and use collective action if they want to be secure in cities. Thus, even when SLR and other legal instruments can help the cause of poor communities to demand tenure security in their place of residence, it is also important to be organized in collective action. Residents of Phka acknowledged this point when they recognized that their feelings of security not only related to having title but mostly to building solidarity and working together with their neighbours. These findings are important in providing solutions to the political dimensions of insecurity that have been highlighted as key lessons of land titling and land formalization programs (Hutchison, 2008; Deininger & Feder, 2009; Flower, 2018; Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013; The World Bank, 2016). The next section builds on the points identified in this chapter to provide the final conclusion for the thesis and argue for the need for planning to support spatial and political collective processes that support the urban poor to maintain collective action and power to resist processes of political and market-based dispossession.

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Chapter 10 Conclusion

10.1 Introduction On behalf of Khmer people, we would like to say thank you all donors for your help to improve the human rights, housing rights, and the living conditions of people in Cambodia. But if we focus on the result, it is very low. Because the UN and international donors do not have enough capacity to make the government work in the right way. People here, they are suffering from the bad activity of the government. People cry every day… no house, no land, most of the land belong to the rich and powerful, and millions of Cambodians move out to work in Malaysia, Thailand, and Korea. We don’t want to see this; we want people to stay here.

As this statement from an interviewee representative from an NGO shows, Cambodia is a country that hurts. Throughout history Khmer people have been subject to injustices, oppression and many types of dispossession by various political regimes. When talking to my colleagues I can still feel the excitement around the promises of rights, democracy and freedom that were brought by the United Nations Transitional Development Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). Promises that if we look at Cambodia today have not materialized. Many people in Cambodia have lost hope in the possibility for change and social justice. Despite the country’s economic growth, very high levels of poverty remain and inequalities continue to rise. Aggressive processes of accumulation by dispossession and political oppression in urban and rural areas continue to happen, even when Cambodia has had millions of dollars invested in aid. Thus, it is clear that traditional planning and development interventions are not working for the people that most need it in this country and they are far from achieving social justice.

In this thesis I have explained how formal and informal relationships are manifested in practices of informal settlement upgrading in Phnom Penh. Throughout the analysis of the findings I maintained that urban informality was a structural product of capitalist development (Rakowski, 1994), and argued that power relationships are key in understanding formal and informal relationships. In this line, I evidenced the limitations

221 of traditional planning and legal frameworks ingrained with binaries, in providing security to people living in conditions of informality, as well as in developing appropriate responses to progress social justice by improving the quality of life and recognizing the rights to the city of people living in informal settlements in Phnom Penh.

My findings explain how, in the context of Phnom Penh, the binary mentality of planning systems associates urban informality with illegitimacy and illegality used as justification for forced evictions by a powerful elite. These findings are in line with other studies on urban informality in the global south, which explain how binaries in planning create a formal/informal dichotomy that undermines the informal by placing the formal as more desirable and superior (Acuto, Dinardi & Marx, 2019). Also, my findings show that within the formal/informal dichotomy there is an individual/collective dichotomy as most processes of formalization imply conversion toward an individual model of property rights that obscures collective forms in the organization of land and housing. This is derived from a narrow capitalist view which reproduces the idea that only private property can ensure financial security and opportunities to increase individual wealth (Fernandes, 2011).

As the case of Phka shows, these interlinked dichotomies obscure the collective relationships and values that the urban poor have with their place of residence, as well as undermining the collective support systems that build power within poor communities used to negotiate exclusion and marginalization. Also, the individual/collective dichotomy marginalizes collective arrangements for upgrading informal settlements, making us believe that formalization in the way of private property rights is the only available solution to informal settlements. Millions of dollars have been spent by international donors in funding the government’s large titling programs to register and formalize individual property in urban areas across the country. One of the principal promises of these programs has been to secure land for the urban poor and contribute to their social and economic development, a promise that eventually led to all international donors withdrawing their support from land programs in Cambodia, because of the government’s inability to be accountable in the transparent implementation of these programs, as I demonstrated in the case of Phka.

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In this conclusion I argue that it is imperative for civil society, international donors and academics to understand that if you are not powerful in Phnom Penh the principal avenue to secure land, housing, livelihood and citizenship rights is to unite in collective action. This argument arises from the definition of collective action as ‘a broad range of social phenomena in which social actors engage in common activities for demanding and/or providing collective goods’ (Beard, 2018, p. 3) and the available mechanism that ordinary citizens can use to transform spatial, political, economic and social structures (Castells, 1983).

This conclusion focuses on answering the principal research question of the thesis based on the findings discussed in Chapters 4 to 9:

 How can the understanding of formal and informal relationships in settlement upgrading in Phnom Penh inform planning knowledge for the development of just cities in the global south?

The answer to this question is organized in two sections. The first section addresses formal and informal relationships in the context of informal settlement upgrading in Phnom Penh. The second section discusses the contribution to knowledge of the thesis to planning and social and spatial justice in the global south. To do this, I revisit the answers to the four secondary research questions posed in Chapter 1. As explained in the conceptual framework presented in Chapter 3, my analysis of the research questions is guided by theoretical propositions on social and spatial justice (Harvey, 1973; Young, 1990; Dikec, 2001; Soja, 2010), specifically processes of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004) that result from the financialization of land and housing (Rolnik, 2015). Within this framework I used the theoretical understanding of space proposed by Lefebvre (1974), emphasizing space’s inherent use value and acknowledging it not as a neutral container but as dynamic and created by social and power relationships. I also used a broader conceptualization of power, not as sustaining a direct one-way relationship between those that exert power and those on whom power is exerted (Lukes, 2005), but as relationships that are more fluid and circulate among all individuals (or groups) (Foucault, 1976; 1982).

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10.2 Formal and informal relationships in informal settlements upgrading in Phnom Penh In Chapter 5, I discussed key historical, political and social, and economic structures shaping the understanding of and policy responses to urban informality, in particular informal settlements in Phnom Penh. I evidenced how a discursive formal/informal dichotomy has been used in Phnom Penh since colonial times as a governmental tool (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012) by powerful actors and systems of planning to progress modernization and the interests of the colonizers in land and development. This continues under neoliberalism, as the state uses the formal/informal dichotomy as a governmental tool (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012) to progress the interests of domestic and foreign investors in urban land and development of a world class city. This happens despite the legacy that the civil war left in the country, making it hard to differentiate between formal and informal due to the destruction of all land records. Also, this happens in a context of ‘disjointed governance’ (Paling, 2012) where ambiguity and informality in planning is used as the principal strategy by the state to pursue its interests in urban development, in a context where personal relationships between the state and the business elite pervade the formal bureaucratic structure and any form of urban legislation. This creates a complex structural political environment of corruption and land grabbing, which is hard to infiltrate, not only by civil society but also by international donors with more leverage to influence government structures. In both processes, colonization and neoliberalism, the use of the formal/informal divide as a governmental tool has occurred at the expense of vulnerable groups and has marginalized and excluded traditional and informal systems of organization in the city.

These structural conditions explain why the state favours market-oriented policies and increasingly supports the private sector including private financial institutions and developers as the legitimate actors to intervene in informal settlements upgrading, even when a variety of practices within civil society and urban poor communities that support collective arrangements to land and housing have been proven to achieve promising results for the upgrading of informal settlements in Phnom Penh, as the case of the former Urban Poor Development Fund (UPDF) shows. This chapter explains the complexity embedded in formal and informal relationships in the context of Phnom Penh and points to the need to dismantle the formal/informal and

224 individual/collective divide in planning theory and practice. Thus understanding the nature of formal and informal relationships helps to better inform planning knowledge and interventions able to address the power inequalities that exist between the state, its allies and people living in conditions of informality, such as the residents of Phka, whose history, context and vulnerable characteristics are explained in Chapter 6.

In this light, in Chapter 7, I evidence formal and informal relationships in land use practices in Phnom Penh to contest the long lasting formal/informal divide perpetuated by the state and planning frameworks in this city. I evidence formal and informal relationships by de-constructing the condition of informality associated with Phka and analyzing the exclusion of Phka from Systematic Land Registration (SLR). I explain that the condition of informality associated with Phka was derived from the land legal frameworks that were introduced in the country after these were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. The Land Law 2001, in particular, made Phka residents’ land tenure security vulnerable by placing them in a ‘gray space’ and a state of ‘permanent temporariness’ (Yiftachel, 2009), waiting for their legal status to be defined by the state under SLR. This happened even when the ad-hoc occupation of the settlement was initially tolerated by the state, and even when people lived securely in the settlement for many years developing informal land records as their own systems of recognition of land rights. Thus, the condition of ‘informality’ in Phka was inherently subject to the state’s decision and conformance of the settlement with what was considered ‘legal’ and/or ‘formal’ under planning and land administration systems. In this way, gray spaces point to a structural process that see residents of informal settlements in contemporary cities placed within an inferior citizenship status (Yiftachel, 2015).

Furthermore, the exclusion of Phka from SLR shows how informality was used by the state to create ambiguity in the classification of state public land and manipulate planning instruments to transfer state public land to state private land and subsequently sell land to developers. This analysis shows how the state is implicated in the production and reproduction of urban informality in Phnom Penh, demonstrating that informality is not something that takes place outside the state and formal planning systems but is deeply implicated within these systems. Furthermore, the case of Phka evidences how the vulnerabilities associated with gray spaces are exacerbated by the state and its powerful elites to make their practices legitimate, even when these

225 happen outside the law. This situation evidences the political nature of land access, and the failure of land laws and planning frameworks to guarantee tenure security for people living in informal settlements in Phnom Penh’s context of ‘disjointed governance’ (Paling, 2012). Importantly, the exclusion from SLR also constituted an exclusion of the collective sense of belonging to place of residents of Phka, formed out of residents’ struggle to rebuild a life after the civil war, and their need to work together to access collective resources. Recognizing the collective relationships of residents of Phka to place broadens the scope of conventional models that picture the city as reserved for the individual, obscuring collective and intangible ways that urban poor communities relate to their places of residence (Rolnik, 2014). In the case of Phka this is particularly important as collective relationships to place serve as an avenue for residents to organize into collective action and build internal power to negotiate marginalization and exclusion from basic services and improve their quality of life.

In Chapter 8, I provide further evidence of formal and informal relationships in urban governance in Phnom Penh. In this analysis I demonstrate that formal and informal relationships in governance are characterized by a negotiability of value (AlSayyad & Roy, 2004) of citizenship and legitimacy. I particularly give evidence of the importance of collective action for the urban poor to be able to build ‘power with’ (Ife,2016) and navigate the structures of power that create exclusion and marginalization in Phnom Penh. In this case, collective action by residents and other key actors in the city, in particular international donors, was the principal mechanism that the urban poor used to negotiate value, including citizenship, legitimacy and land access. This shows that rather than being ‘informal’, the urban poor and civil society collective practices such as building networks, producing information through enumeration and mapping processes, getting financially organized and conducting small infrastructure upgrades are used as strategies and sources of power to create counter-planning processes to achieve visibility and recognition. This shows that ‘gray spaces’ can be spaces of possibilities where different forms of citizenship arise to negotiate exclusion and marginalization (Yiftachel, 2015). Even when in this chapter I show the importance of collective action, I acknowledge that this is not a simple process, particularly in Cambodia, as the country experienced one of the world’s most violent attempts to force collective behaviour into every aspect of society under the Khmer Rouge regime

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(Beard, 2018). Thus, not many urban poor communities in Phnom Penh were able to sustain collective organization and action over time or organize at all. However, the case of Phka, points to important conditions that facilitate the emergence and endurance of collective action such as a decentralized and gender balanced leadership, support from an NGO, learning to work through differences, and achieving tangible results from being organized that improve quality of life and increase security in the city, are essential for people to believe and endure in collective action. I conceptualize collective action as being necessarily linked with a social learning process which is central for the potential transformation of the structures of power creating dispossession (McFarlane, 2011). Despite this, I argue that recognition in the form of being granted individual title did not progress social and spatial justice, neither transformed spatial, political, economic and social structures of the city. This shows that in the case of Phka collective action acted as a ‘social phenomena in which social actors engage in common activities for demanding and/or providing collective goods’ (Beard, 2018, p. 3), however, it was not an available mechanism that ordinary citizens used to transform spatial, political, economic and social structures (Castells, 1983).

In Chapter 9, I further evidence the problematic associated with the formal/informal and collective/individual dichotomies by questioning the recognition of Phka’s residents’ claim to land and citizenship under Systematic Land Registration (SLR),a market-led solution to informality supporting individual property rights. The case of Phka clearly shows a key point of the debate on tenure security for the urban poor, which is that even when receiving land registration is important for residents (Varley, 2017), this increases the vulnerabilities of low-income residents to market-based dispossession, that are already happening in conditions of informality, threatening their security of tenure and citizenship rights (Payne & Durand-Lasserve, 2013). My findings show that apart from SLR being important for feeling secure, it was also used as an economic incentive by residents. In fact, more than SLR the relationships between neighbours and the process of collective organization were the key facotrs that made people feel more secure in the neighbourhood. SLR in Phka widened the debt portfolios of urban poor residents in a context were household debt was already high creating stress on residents and threatening not only their security of tenure, but their rights to the city (Rolnik, 2014). Also, having land registered attracted newcomers to the neighbourhood, mainly wealthier people, and incentivized original residents of

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Phka to sell land to obtain short-term financial returns. In addition, the individual investments of residents had started to affect the sustainability of collective support systems such as the saving group, and the transformation of the neighbourhood had started to impact negatively on the collective organization and action of residents. This inherently diminished the collective agency and sources of power that residents of Phka had created and used over the years. Thus, the loss of collective action was also a loss of power within this community, which made them vulnerable to dispossession by the state and the market even when they had rights to land. This was aggravated by the financialization of land and housing, and the rapid urban growth and transformation that the city experienced, generating processes of gentrification and social change which affected the values of younger generations toward the land. Gentrification processes have been shown to be affecting other poor and low-income residents in Phnom Penh, such as the case of the residents of the White Building in central Phnom Penh. In this case, even when residents had title and ownership of their property, these rights were easily coerced and ‘bought’ by the state at lower than market prices to make room for the beautification of the area in hands of foreign investors (Meta & Baliga, 2017; Moung, 2017).

In this light, the case of Phka shows how the achievement of rights, in this case land rights, under market-led systems influenced by neoliberalism, can reduce political questions such as the fundamental claims to urban space and the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1976) to regulation through procedure (Porter, 2014). This means that recognition through market-led solutions to informality by the state supports a type of recognition embedded within the neoliberal project that obscures more emancipatory and political ways to be recognized in cities that support diverse claims to social and spatial justice, such as those by residents of Phka who wanted to be treated as equal citizens in the city. Thus, as Porter (2014) argues, there are costs of being recognized by dominant systems of land and property such as SLR. These costs emerged out of the binary mentality ingrained in planning systems and are a leading cause of processes of accumulation by dispossession which need to be seriously considered if social justice is to be achieved in cities.

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10.3 Thesis contribution to planning knowledge and social justice in the global south The case of Phka is not different from many other cases where the rights to the city of vulnerable groups in the global south are being threatened by processes of accumulation by dispossession. In urban areas, the financialization of land and housing, the implementation of large-scale development projects, and even processes of post-disaster reconstruction are leading to the dispossession of the most vulnerable such as the urban poor (Rolnik, 2015). As seen in the case of Phnom Penh, these processes are enabled by the close links between politicians and domestic and foreign investors, and the ability of governments to use informality to legitimize their inappropriate use and manipulation of the law. These facts present a challenge for planning which is recognized across many cities of the global south. In the context of Phnom Penh, the planning practices led by the state were easily manipulated to sustain processes of accumulation by dispossession rather than being used as a process and mechanism to benefit the public good.

However, as the case of Phnom Penh shows, planning is not something that happens only within the state (Sandercock, 1998b; Beard, 2012; 2018; Herrle, Ley & Fokdal, 2015; Apsan Frediani & Cociña, 2019). In the context of upgrading informal settlements, there are various collective initiatives by actors outside the state that are navigating through structures of power to secure land, infrastructure, livelihood opportunities and political recognition (Sugranyes & Mathivet, 2011; Patel, Baptist & D’Cruz, 2012; Boonyabancha, Carcellar & Kerr, 2012; Cabannes, 2017; Algoed, Hernadez Torrales and Rodriguez del Valle, 2018). My findings show that collective action is necessary for vulnerable groups such as the urban poor to be empowered and to be able to negotiate the exclusion and marginalization they face, living in conditions of informality, as well as to resist state and market-driven dispossession. Thus, there is a great need for systems of planning and informal settlement upgrading interventions to develop and implement financial, social and spatial strategies to re- distribute power by enabling collective action. If this is not possible within the state, as in the case of Phnom Penh, then it must be supported by actors outside the state, such as international donors and civil society.

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The variety of collective strategies and instruments supporting collective forms of land tenure, housing, and finance that can be applied as alternatives to individual property rights for the upgrading of informal settlements are increasingly being documented in the literature. These instruments are not homogenous and include various modalities; their diversity is a result of the multiple uses, legal practices and cultures, as well as social struggles that have enabled their creation and continued existence. The mechanisms that I mention include housing cooperatives, community land trusts, community development funds, and communal tenure. The Baan Mankong Slum Upgrading Program in Thailand is perhaps the most recognized example that has been successful in pursuing the option of collective title and complementing the regularization of informal settlements with financial mechanisms that serve to empower the urban poor, scale up their support systems to the city scale, and in some cases change the vertical relationships of power to more horizontal relationships between the urban poor and the state (Bonnyabancha, 2009). Also, Algoed, Hernández Torrales and Rodriguez del Valle (2018) demonstrate that residents of informal settlements in Latin America are starting to choose community land trusts for the regularization of their land and reject individual titles as these lead to market-based displacement. Furthermore, international donors, in particular those of Scandinavian countries such as Sweden, have started to apply innovative programs such as the Tenure Facility and the Mekong Land Governance Project, based on systems of flexible finance in which grants and technical assistance are given directly to civil society organizations to test or strengthen collective models of land organization.

These initiatives have in common the capacity of being strategic in using finance as a means to empower vulnerable groups and gave them the opportunity to act independently from the state, as well as to enable the emergence and testing of alternatives in different political and socio-economic contexts. Also, these initiatives intervene strategically in space as a means to reduce land speculation produced by the financialization of land and housing, and thus protect vulnerable groups from being dispossessed by market forces. Thus, these initiatives have the potential to transform the structures that create exclusion, marginalization and dispossession by providing alternatives to individual property rights in the upgrading of informal settlements. Theoretically these initiatives demonstrate a capacity to transcend the formal/informal and individual/collective dichotomy and recognize the urban poor as a valuable actor

230 in development processes, as well as valuing diversity and difference in systems of land and housing within informal settlements upgrading.

My intention with this thesis is not to impose an idea of how things should work, especially in Phnom Penh. Even when my findings clearly show the importance of collective action in upgrading interventions, I acknowledge that for these processes to be understood and applied requires time, and a change of culture and way of thinking. Cambodia has a very hierarchical society and thus power relationships, even at the community level, are complex. Also, due to the conflict and history of the country, people are individualistic and do not trust one another. But from my time living, working and doing research in Phnom Penh I understood that people in Cambodia want many of the same goals in life. A secure place to live, opportunities to learn, grow and provide for their families, and in general to have a peaceful and simple life. There are many common causes that can unite people, as the case of Phka shows. Thus, collective action within informal settlement upgrading interventions in Phnom Penh, as in other cities of the global south, can be possible, especially if urban poor communities, civil society, and donors understand its benefits to securing land and housing rights. All urban actors, in particular urban poor communities, need to know the limitations associated with the individual model of property rights, and the existence of alternatives such as collective tenure arrangements, to individual systems of land, housing and finance, and have the right to choose and make decisions about what model is good for them. The experience of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) and the Urban Poor Development Fund (UPDF) show the complexities associated with collective action in Phnom Penh. These initiatives show in particular how collective action is vulnerable to ‘elite capture’ in this complex political context. However, I argue that these initiatives should not be hardly judged; these are innovative processes that have taken years to flourish and deep commitment and sacrifices of the people involved. It is important to share knowledge of the achievements and challenges associated with these mechanisms, learn from these and continue to improve and innovate these systems. Also, there is a need to find appropriate strategies to scale-up the collective initiatives that work.

I call for researchers and professionals to continue to produce evidence and information that can be shared with civil society, donors, governments and private

231 sectors on the limitations and challenges that traditional systems of planning and individual property ingrained with binaries encounter in contexts of rapid urban growth and weak governance systems like Cambodia. I also call for researchers and professionals to produce evidence and information of the benefits, lessons and challenges associated with collective action, and associated alternative models to the organization of land and property, as well as innovative initiatives and instruments that can serve to generate and stimulate collective action in cities. I call for learning and exchanges to continue to be supported by donors and universities with participation from actors from various sectors and interests in informal settlements upgrading interventions. In this way further research can ensure we all learn and respect alternatives and differences in cities and the binary mentality of donors, governments, civil society, urban poor communities, researchers and professionals can be transcended and, in this way, we can move closer to creating more inclusive and socially just cities.

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