What is a city development strategy?

The City Development Strategy was launched a year ago, as a joint program of the Phnom Penh Municipality, ACHR, UNCHS, URC and SUPF to understand the changes happening in the city, to bring the various actors in the city’s urban development process together and to explore ways of managing this change process in a more effective, more equitable way. The CDS has involved an extensive process of research, discussion, planning, training and implementation, using Cities Alliance funds.  

 In important part of the CDS process has been to develop tools and processes within poor communities which strengthen their position as they negotiate for access to secure land and infrastructure with the local government at city, district and ward levels.  In the past five years, over 11,000 families (nearly a quarter of the city’s informal settlers) have been evicted from central Phnom Penh and removed to peripheral areas of the city.  It’s easy to trace the causes of this enormous displacement of the city’s poor population to various public infrastructure projects, city “beautification” drives or private-sector commercial developments.  What’s not so easy to understand are the forces behind these evictions, which are determining how the city develops.  It is these forces the CDS has sought to understand.   

 than beneficiaries of these official and unofficial plans. 

 It doesn’t have to be like this.  In most planner’s minds, the needs of the city to develop and the needs of the poor to have decent, secure housing are not reconcilable.  As a result, most urban development solutions tend to be planned by one group which gets all the benefits, but victimize and impoverish the other.  In fact, cities around Asia are gradually realizing that when space is created for city governments, poor community organizations, NGOs and other stakeholders to talk to each other and plan together, they can design “win-win” solutions which work for the poor AND for the city.  The problem is, Cambodia  is still a society with a shortage of planning knowledge.  From the poorest people right up to the university, it’s hard to find anyone who understands how the city really works or what is really possible.  The CDS offers a chance to create room for this kind of interaction and planning, so it’s not just a few experts, and not just a few poor communities, but a broad cross section of stakeholders in the city. 

  
The first study gathered information about all the major development projects being planned in the city, many of which are likely to have a big impact on poor communities.  Big items on the list include water supply, sewage, drainage, flood control and ring-road projects being developed by ADB, World Bank or JICA, and a city conservation plan by the French.  The study revealed that most of these major projects do not fit into any larger city development plan and are completely ad-hoc in nature.  To make matters worse, most of these organizations have little or no knowledge of each other’s work and often carry out parallel development.

2. Relocation study 
The second study examined the economic, social and physical repercussions of relocation on 7,800 families evicted to 14 resettlement sites since 1998.  In all the relocation sites, income levels dropped, but less where people were able to select land close to sources of employment. In the big government relocation sites farthest from the city, people have suffered the most dramatic income reductions and highest unemployment rates, while shouldering the greatest transport costs.  The study made clear that the farther people are pushed from the city, the worse they fare, prompting many to move back to inner-city slums.  The study also showed that communities which bought their own land found ways to provide basic services with only minimal assistance or through their own initiative, while communities given land by the government have tended to wait passively for these things (which never come) and been “disempowered” by the whole process, as their health and living conditions deteriorate.  The study also analyzed Cambodia’s new land law, which defines ownership in terms of occupation for a certain number of years, but has not prevented land from being bought and sold without the knowledge of the communities which have occupied that land.

Third Step :  Taking a fresh look at poor settlements . . .

 After the khan consultations, SUPF’s seven khan units got busy updating their information on the situation of poor communities in their districts by surveying and mapping all the poor and informal settlements within their districts and plotting them on large-scale district maps.  For planning purposes, an important element was added to this survey whereby all these settlements were classified into three categories:

·         settlements which are secure and can be upgraded in their existing locations.

·         settlements which could redevelop through land-sharing or other compromise land-adjustment. settlements which may have to relocate to alternative land. 

  plans for upgrading

Fourth step :  Upgrading training by doing . . .

 So what is all this studying, participatory information gathering, discussing and mapping leading to?  Getting poor communities involved in planning and getting them to work with ward, district and city officials and NGO allies to implement real solutions to problems of land, housing and infrastructure - within their own districts.

·         Comprehensive community upgrading in 3 communities :  All seven khans were then asked to select three pilot communities within their districts to improve (one to upgrade in-situ, one to relocate and one to land-share), and then from these 21 communities to select three to be implemented immediately, as a city-wide training process to show how these three strategies can transform informal settlements into beautiful, secure neighborhoods.  The comprehensive upgrading of the Ros Reay community (see following pages) was the first to break ground, and is now nearing completion. 
   

·         Comprehensive upgrading in another 35 communities :  The next step will involve broadening the scale of this “training by doing” work.  Each Khan will then select three communities to upgrade in-situ, one to relocate and one to redevelop through land-sharing or land-adjustment. 

·         Comprehensive upgrading in 1 district and 1 ward :  The next step will involve an experiment in integrating all this detailed information on poor communities, development plans and vacant land into a collaborative process of planning secure housing for all - within one district and within one ward.