Runaway land prices, market euphoria, and an open economy together generated effects that continue to reverberate throughout Phnom Penh today. Beginning in the 2000s, Asian capitalists gave new buoyancy to Phnom Penh’s built environment when land once again became an object of intense speculation. But unlike earlier booms, the relationship between land and space was fundamentally reworked by foreign developers proposing large construction projects theretofore unseen in Cambodia’s otherwise low-slung capital. In this talk, Sylvia Nam (assistant professor of anthropology, University of California-Irvine) highlights the making of Phnom Penh’s first condominiums to argue how the condominium as a go-to urban form was never self-evident nor guaranteed despite its proliferation.

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