URBAN POOR IN PHNOM PENH Building an urban … · people’s movement in Phnom Penh, Cambodia Asian...

Environment&Urbanization Vol 13 No 2 October 2001 61

URBAN POOR IN PHNOM PENH

Building an urban poorpeople’s movement inPhnom Penh, Cambodia

Asian Coalition for Housing Rights

SUMMARY: This photo-essay shows how the urban poor and their organiza-tions are working with government agencies, NGOs and international donors inPhnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, to develop homes and neighbourhoods and incomegeneration and, where needed, to manage relocation schemes. It also describes howthe city’s urban poor developed their own Solidarity and Urban Poor Federation,drawing on the advice of similar federations from other countries. The process wasmuch helped by the interchanges between urban poor groups within the city and bythe visits by urban poor representatives and city officials to projects managed byurban poor federations in other countries. The Federation’s work centres on linkingand supporting community savings groups that develop their own schemes. TheFederation also supports community-mapping and surveys to document conditionsin the city’s many low-income settlements. The essay emphasizes the strengths andresources that the urban poor can bring to developing housing and jobs if externalagencies allow them to do so and support their organizations.

I. INTRODUCTION

IN THE EARLY 1990s, Cambodia was practically starting anew, afterdecades of war, upheaval and dislocation. There were large numbers ofNGOs and aid agencies in the country, most of them operating in thewelfare mode, delivering what they felt the poor needed. There was aprevailing assumption that poor people were too weak to organize them-selves, that they couldn’t trust each other or articulate their needs. Becausethey had survived so much, the city’s poor were, in fact, very strong but

The Asian Coalition forHousing Rights (ACHR) isa regional network ofgrassroots groups, NGOsand professionals involvedwith urban poordevelopment processes inAsian cities. Over the pasteight years, ACHR hasmarshalled teams fromaround Asia and Africa tohelp poor communitygroups, professionals andgovernment officials inPhnom Penh develop andtest community-drivensolutions to problems ofhousing and poverty in thecity. This photo-essay wasprepared by Thomas Kerrand Maurice Leonhardt.

Address: Asian Coalitionfor Housing Rights, 73 SoiSonthiwattana 4, LadpraoRoad, Soi 110, Bangkok10310, Thailand; tel: (662)538-0919; fax: (662) 539-9950;e-mail: [email protected];website: www.achr.net

Cambodia’s booming capital Phnom Penh continues to draw low-income migrants who come looking for work in the city’s factories,markets and construction sites. Although its growing economydepends heavily on the cheap labour that these people provide, thecity has been unable to offer them much in return by way ofaffordable housing or assistance and the urban poor have been leftmore or less on their own. Despite these big problems, the city’s new-found energy makes Phnom Penh a city of hope, whilst the traumasof the recent past have resulted in a lack of rules and establishedpractices that mean the state is more welcoming of new ideas andfaster changing than many of its more consolidated Asianneighbours. Severe budget shortfalls have made the governmentincreasingly open to unconventional ways of getting things done.

this strength was atomized and therefore latent. Harnessing this strengthto create an organization which poor people owned and looked after, andbuilding a broad-based support system for that organization, has been thegoal of ACHR’s contribution in Cambodia.

II. CREATING AN ORGANIZATION WHICH POORPEOPLE OWN . . .

THERE IS NO city in the world that has simply become loving and caringof its poor. Poor people need to be strong, need to know what they want,need to prepare themselves in order to negotiate with the city for what theyneed and to give the city good reasons to listen to them and becomeinvolved.

62 Environment&Urbanization Vol 13 No 2 October 2001


Since it was formed from savings schemesin 1994, the Solidarity and Urban PoorFederation (SUPF) has worked to getcommunities to come together and work outtheir own ways of solving the problems theyall face – problems of insecure land andhousing, problems of flooding, inadequateprovision for water supply and sanitation,problems of health and education, andproblems of finding access to affordable creditfor emergencies and for boosting livelihoods.The communities have experimented freely tofind solutions that work for them. Such openand collective learning has been critical tohelping communities recover from the past.People have had to rediscover theirconfidence in themselves and in each other.

ACHR has sought to catalyze a process to network thestrength of the poor and channel it into clear activities tobuild a people’s organization. This process has involved:• First visits to Phnom Penh to check out the situation,

meet groups, identify some NGOs and communitypeople and form a core group.

• A survey of poor settlements across the city – a first inPhnom Penh – to establish new contacts.

• A seminar held with key organizations – themunicipality, the UN, NGOs and all the communities –to discuss the survey data together and build a commonunderstanding.

• Savings and credit groups started in severalcommunities, linking communities on a regular basis,working together to meet their daily needs.

• An housing exhibition, to explore people’s ideas abouthow to find land, build decent communities and designaffordable houses for themselves, and to use these plansto negotiate with government for secure land.

• Exposure trips to other groups in the region.• Setting up the Urban Poor Federation as a concrete

focal point of assistance, giving loans immediately,linking to savings groups and institutionalizing apartnership between the poor and the city.

• Projects in housing, income generation andinfrastructure to build confidence in the process andshow everyone that anything is possible.



Mapping: Here, community people are mappinghouses, pathways, services and problems in the sprawlingBasaac riverside slum. Low-income communitiesunderstand their own problems best and, when theycollect the data, analyze problems and develop solutions,they become the driving force behind communitydevelopment, not the recipients of someone else’s idea ofwhat they need.

Box 1: Defining a universe: who are we and what are our problems?

• About 35,000 families (180,000 people) live in 502 low-income settlements within Phnom Penh’s sevenmunicipal districts.

• Five per cent of these families live along railway tracks, 5 per cent along roadsides, 9 per cent on rooftopsof downtown buildings, 26 per cent on river banks and along canals, and 40 per cent on open land.

• In addition, there are growing numbers of poor tenants who rent makeshift shacks around the factoriesor who live in crowded sub-divided rooms in the city centre or in isolated but insecure circumstances.Adding these would raise the total to about 450,000 people or about 40 per cent of the city’s 1.1 millionpopulation.

• Forty-four per cent of the families living in low-income settlements have no toilet, 70 per cent have to buytheir water from private tankers at eight to ten times the municipal rate and 60 per cent have to buy elec-tricity from private sources at 10-30 times the official municipal rate.

• These people include factory workers, construction labourers, skilled tradespeople, market and street vendors,cycle-taxi and motor-taxi drivers and scavengers among others, and earn an average of US$ 1 per day.

Savings: Whenpeople in low-incomecommunities save theirmoney together andmake collective decisionsabout how to use thatmoney, they areacquiring themanagement experienceand negotiating skillsthat they will need totackle largerdevelopment issues.When you boost savingsand credit on a largescale in Phnom Penh,you boost the basicmechanism by whichpoor people will begin todeal with their problemscollectively, withstrength rather than inweakness and isolation,with trust rather thanwith suspicion.

Surveying: Since 1994, SUPF has carried out no less than five surveys of Phnom Penh’s informalsettlements. Each has been more accurate and more comprehensive than the last and each represents afurther refinement of the poor’s understanding about their own lives and communities. Each survey hasfurther strengthened the Federation and created the city’s most reliable database on the lives and livingconditions of the city’s poor. Box 1 gives a few statistics from SUPF’s most recent 1999 survey of the city’spoor settlements.

III. SHOWING GOVERNMENT THAT THE POORCAN MAKE GOOD DEVELOPMENT PARTNERS

IN 1994, THE Phnom Penh municipality’s only way of dealing with theresidents of informal settlements that were in the way of development proj-ects was to evict them, and the only way the poor and the city related toeach other was as adversaries. Eight years later, the municipal and nationalgovernments are working in close, friendly partnership with the Federa-tion on a variety of housing, infrastructure, planning and income genera-tion projects at city, district and community levels. Evictions without otheroptions have all but stopped. This considerable transformation hasn’thappened by accident . . .



Cambodia’s recent history has left communities almost at the samelevel as the government in their experience of managing cities andhas more or less leveled social differences between high-levelmunicipal officers and poor people. Because both communities andthe government are eager to learn, there has been an opportunity tohelp build their knowledge together, through joint exposure visits toother countries, through collaborative housing projects, through jointmanagement of the development fund and through district-levelcommunity programmes.

Partners not adversaries: As thepolitical situation stabilizes, PhnomPenh manifests the samecontradictory forces we see in citiesacross Asia – a demand for lots ofcheap labour, increasing pressure onurban land, escalating land pricesand increasing conflicts between thepoor’s housing and the city’sdevelopment needs. With nomechanism to provide other optionsfor low-income communitiesdisplaced by development, the cityfinds its own plans difficult toimplement. The government has abig stake in seeing these conflictsresolved and if communities canshow them ways of doing so whichwork both for the poor and for thecity, they will go along with them.This 1997 model house exhibitionwas SUPF’s first big, publicpresentation of their housing ideas tothe government and thegovernment’s first chance to see thepoor not as adversaries but aspotential development partners. Thepeople’s message was simple: “We can design our own communitiesand build our own houses. All we need is secure land.”



In all the federation-managedhousing projects so far, thegovernment has unambiguouslyacknowledged that providing secureland for the urban poor is a publicresponsibility and it has found waysof providing free, secure alternativeland for families displaced bydevelopment projects – despite thegovernment’s extremely limited finances.This concrete step represents agenuine commitment to supportingthis kind of community-centereddevelopment and has helped to re-orient many key institutions awayfrom a confrontational approachtowards a more constructiveproblem-solving approach toproviding secure land and housingfor the city’s poor.

One of the best ways tocreate a common vision ofwhat’s possible is to inviteofficials from the municipaland national governmentsalong on exposure visits tocommunity-driveninitiatives in other countries.After the model houseexhibition in 1997, the first“integrated” exposure tripswere made to India, SouthAfrica and Thailand, inwhich NGOs and high-ranking district and cityofficials travelled togetherwith slum dwellers to othercountries to see community-driven housing projects. Thiswas a departure foreveryone in the region –something unthinkable inmany Asian countries – andhas provided an example toothers. These learningexcursions have gone a longway in expandingeveryone’s options, creatinga common vision of what’spossible, strengtheningfriendly working bondsbetween officials andcommunity leaders and havepaid off in almostimmediate, on-the-groundcollaborations back home.

IV. AFFORDABLE PEOPLE-MANAGED HOUSINGOPTIONS

FOR MOST OF Cambodia’s urban poor, secure land is their first priority.Most of SUPF’s energies have gone into preparing for the day they obtainsecure land – saving for housing; making inventories of potential housingsites; planning affordable house models; and exploring land tenure optionsthrough dialogue with the city, NGOs and aid organizations. The Federa-tion has now completed three housing relocation projects and is workingwith the city, NGOs and aid agencies on several others around Phnom Penh.



A city of squatters:Not too long ago,everyone in Phnom Penhwas a squatter. In 1979,when people first beganto emerge from the jungleinto an empty, dilapidatedcity, they camped out inempty buildings and litopen fires to cook theirrice. When all the housesand flats had beenoccupied, newcomersbuilt shelters whereverthey could find space,along river banks andrailway tracks, on streets,in the areas betweenbuildings and on rooftops.These became thrivingcommunities and home toa new generation of citybuilders and were theonly solution to the city’scritical shortage ofaffordable housing for thepoor – a solutionincreasingly at odds withthe city’s developmentplans.



In just 20 years, that abandoned, broken-downcity has become a market-oriented boom town. Stateownership of land has given way to extensive landspeculation in which market forces and an uncertainland registration system have been bad news for thepoor, who are evicted, pushed aside, bought out for apittance and forced to find shelter in increasinglyinsecure circumstances. SUPF has been critical indeveloping alternatives.

Communitycontracts: The work offilling the new land,building latrines,digging wells, layingroads and plantingtrees to stabilize thebanks was carried outefficiently andinexpensively bycommunity memberswith UNCHS funds, by“community contract”.Instead of hiringoutside contractors,this system draws oncommunity skills andkeeps profits in thecommunity. Inaddition, low-incomefamilies get a chance toearn a little extra cashwhile building up theirown community’sinfrastructure.

Training for everyone: Making the AkphivatMean Cheay relocation project a reality involved theclose collaboration among members of a wide-ranging group: the land was chosen by thecommunity, purchased by the municipality anddeveloped by UNCHS according to plans thecommunity designed with young architects at theUrban Resource Centre. The district chief helpednegotiate, the Urban Poor Development Fund (UPDF)gave house-building loans, the community built theirown houses and SUPF turned each step of the processinto training for communities across the city. TheUrban Poor Development Fund is a community-managed loan fund that was seeded by the AsianCoalition for Housing Rights and the municipality.

V. TAPPING THE REGION’S POOL OFCOMMUNITY WISDOM

IT’S NO ACCIDENT that Phnom Penh’s urban poor have found that theirbest guides and strongest allies have been low-income people from feder-ations of slum communities in other parts of the world who have offeredtheir experience to friends in Cambodia. People-to-people exchangescontinue to be a key strategy in helping build, strengthen and scale-up thecommunity development processes in Phnom Penh.



People-to-peoplelearning: When poorpeople travel to cities inother countries and see forthemselves how people insimilar circumstanceshave dealt with problemsof eviction, housing, basicservices and credit, itopens their minds,expands their options andcreates a far-flungsolidarity which crossesborders. It’s unfilteredlearning, direct from thesource to those that need itmost.

The pool of communitydevelopment experience in Asiaand Africa is immense.Cambodian community membershave travelled to look at pilothousing projects, savings andcredit programmes, model houseexhibitions, toilet-buildingprojects and governmentnegotiations in India, Thailand, SriLanka, Nepal, Pakistan,Philippines, South Africa andZimbabwe. At different stages,people have brought ideas backfrom all these places and almostimmediately have applied them inthe Cambodian context. Ideas thatworked were adapted, refined andscaled-up. Ideas that didn’t workwere dropped.



“Integrated exposure visits” to communityinitiatives in other countries have includedmunicipal officials and NGOs from early on,offering people at community, government andNGO levels a chance to learn together. Over thepast five years, at least 100 community leadershave gone on exposure trips, along with 20professionals from NGOs and 25 municipal anddistrict officials from various levels. All seven ofthe city’s district (khan) chiefs have now been onexposure trips and all are working withcommunity and NGO representatives ondevelopment committees at khan level. Thisform of joint functioning is becomingincreasingly acceptable in the city.

Good friends in India and Thailand: It was sidewalkslum dwellers from Mahila Milan women’s savingscollectives in Bombay who helped the Cambodians set uptheir first savings and credit groups in Phnom Penh and whoshowed how saving is vitally linked to getting secure landand housing. In Thailand, which is culturally similar andsomething of a “big sister” to Cambodia, community leaderssaw negotiated alternatives to eviction such as land-sharingand on-site reblocking in canal and riverside settlements.Later on, it was leaders from the Thai Community Networkand staff from UCDO who helped set up the jointly managedUrban Poor Development Fund in Phnom Penh.

VI. DOING TOGETHER WHAT NO GROUP CANDO ALONE

OVER THE PAST six years, SUPF has not worked in isolation. Theelements of comprehensive, lasting and large-scale solutions to PhnomPenh’s urgent problems of land, housing, basic services and livelihoodrequire cooperation and partnership – partnership with other stakehold-ers in the city development process, with the municipal and nationalgovernments, with professionals, with NGOs and with national and inter-national development organizations. Partnership-building has been a bigtheme in all the work in Phnom Penh.



The problems of landand housing for PhnomPenh’s urban poor are toolarge and too complex forany group to solve alone.Communities may be verywell organized but withoutthe cooperation of citymanagers, withoutresources, without land,they cannot make decent,secure communities forthemselves. City managers,on the other hand, mayhave good redevelopmentpolicies for informalsettlements and all the bestintentions but, without thecentral involvement of theorganizations of the poor inthe redevelopment process,the clashing requirementsof urban development andlow-income housing willnever go away. Complexproblems require complexsolutions and complexsolutions involve lots ofpeople and carefulcollaboration.

Making friends: Afterspending a few days withMahila Milan and theNational Slum DwellersFederation in Bombayalong with communityleaders from settlementsin his own district, thedistrict of Chamkarmonchief, Mr Lor Rhy, andcommunity leader MenChamnan came backhome and wasted no timein starting to collaborate,which eventually led tothe Akphivat Mean Cheayrelocation project.



Urban Poor Development Fund: This Fund was set up inMarch 1998 with an initial capital of only US$ 60,000, of whichthe first US$ 5,000 came from people’s own savings. The fundprovides loans for housing and income generation throughsavings groups and community federations and, because it isjointly managed by the poor, the city, NGOs and regionalsupport organizations, it helps strengthen partnership. To date,the fund has provided house-building loans to 300 families infive relocation projects and income generation loans to 1,200families in all seven districts.

Urban Resource Centre: Theteam of young professionals at theUrban Resource Centre has becomeone of SUPF’s closest partners,helping communities to develophousing layouts, explore cost-savingconstruction techniques, formalizesettlement maps, produce workingdrawings for municipalpermissions, computerize surveydata, interpret during exposurevisits and document communityprojects.

District CommunityDevelopment ManagementCouncils: Over the past year,community developmentmanagement councils (CDMCs)have been established in each ofPhnom Penh’s seven districts.The objective of these councils isto create space for communityleaders, district officials, localNGOs and other stakeholders towork together in ways whichstrengthen the people’s processand increasingly systemizes and makes routine theirinvolvement in planningdecisions which affect theirlives, their districts and their city.



The work in Phnom Penh has involved the sustained support of many groups outside the country.Five aid agencies in particular – MISEREOR, the Department for International Development (DFID),SELAVIP, Homeless International and Oxfam – have provided support to the Urban Poor DevelopmentFund’s revolving loan fund and management, to the Solidarity and Urban Poor Federation’s operation,to young professionals from both inside and outside Cambodia who have worked with communitiesas part of the Urban Resource Centre, and to the many exchange visits to and from other countries inthe Asian and African regions.

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