Toxic Development: Waste Flows as a Tool of Dispossession and Urbanisation in Phnom Penh: Understanding the Spatial Politics of Waste Through the Lived Experiences of Urban Poor Environments in Phnom Penh

This thesis exposes how environmental change has affected Phnom Penh’s lakes and wetlands; how people’s lived experience of sanitation has shifted over time in response to flooding since the 1980s; and how flows of water, liquid waste and solid waste are part of a system of sanitary inequality. Phnom Penh’s infrastructural development and environmental trajectories are reflective of its construction boom during the 2000s. Throughout this thesis I analyse how flows of water, liquid waste, solid waste, and floodwater are part of the city’s development trajectory, creating narratives that justify dispossession, displacement, and modernistic beautification. Focusing on the perspectives of people living by water bodies and of scrap collectors, I collated people’s lived experiences of urban change. My findings show that the waste and water flows that they live adjacent to toxify the city’s water bodies and urban poor sites, justifying their framing as ‘slums’, and showing a process of dispossession through their clearing and redevelopment. Dialogue with ministries and non-governmental entities allowed me to trace a network of solid waste management. This revealed how waste management operates in official and unofficial capacities, reliant on a backbone of informal work. Through this, I reveal problems associated with overlaps between solid waste, flooding, and its effects on urban residents near canals and lakes, as part of a broader process of kleptocratic reorientation of land. This thesis highlights how Phnom Penh’s infrastructural transformation is creating unequal variations in flood risk, people’s health, and livelihoods, underpinned by socio-political processes that have deprioritised the city’s political ecology. My findings show that people living near water bodies have experienced a long-term decline in livelihoods, along with an increased health burden, further exacerbated by exposure to poor water quality, shrinking natural environment, and an increased engagement with solid waste, which I argue constitutes a form of violence against them.