Chen Damdek

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Everyday vulnerabilities, Everyday resilience

How do marginalized communities within informal settlements address ‘everyday’ urban vulnerabilities through bottom-up adaptation of their physical environment? This project aims to investigate small-scale, daily, vulnerabilities and the impact of corresponding resilience mechanisms. Such ‘everyday resilience’ can ensure greater capacity to cope, adapt to, and even mitigate larger-scale risks. It also exemplifies grassroots placemaking, arguably playing a very active role in the fostering inclusive and vital cities.  

The Chen Damdek neighborhood has evolved through the community-driven, ‘informal’, adaptive reuse of three religious facilities following the 1979 fall of the Khmer Rouge. Early participative studies have revealed a suite of small-scale but large impact adaptive mechanisms developed by community members in response to daily and chronic environmental, social, and political vulnerabilities. The Cantonese Congregation Temple and Providence Church have been internally converted into a web of interconnected homes central to city services, with access to the still-operational Piphoat Raingsey Pagoda. Domestic interiors are reconfigured throughout the day using modular elements to ensure maximization of limited space for a multitude of users and activities. Internalized corridors and external alleys have become places of communal activity and social cohesion through domestic objects. Openings have been made in façades to create fluid thresholds between exterior and interior space ensuring economic opportunity and surveillance for neighborhood safety. Discarded decorative building elements have become urban furniture and platforms for informal sellers.

Despite these examples of everyday resilience, the Chen Damdek neighborhood is in threat of eviction and the built fabric in threat of destruction due to a lack of secure land titles against a landscape of investor speculation and urban ‘beautification’ processes by local government. The examples discussed do not overlook the realities of poverty and numerous threats posed to communities such as this, however they intend to highlight the nuance of such neighborhoods and the potential for the planning system to empower community- driven interventions in response to everyday challenges. Methodologically, the case study also aims to emphasize the value of a people- centered, micro-scale, on field approach to understanding vulnerability and resilience within urban informal settlements.

How do these issues (and its nature) relate at the city-level (neighborhood-community-city-state relationships)?

A 2012 survey by the Phnom Penh Municipality indicates approximately 15% of the overall urban population of the city (240,000 of 1.6million people) are informal settlers. Further to this, the OCHCR (2012) estimates approximately 120,000 individuals have been evicted in Phnom Penh since 1990, accompanied by the destruction of culturally significant sites of tangible and intangible heritage. Significant focus has been placed on risk assessment of informal settlements in Phnom Penh linked to tenure insecurity, however there are a wide range of risks faced by these communities, and correspondingly, a breadth of user-driven resilience mechanisms that warrant further study. How can investigation of everyday urban vulnerability and resilience highlight creative bottom-up adaptations that might guide approaches to promote community-led urban informality in planning practice and contribute towards greater social justice for marginalized groups?

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