Paper short abstract:

This paper theorizes urban topographical augmentation as a key modality of governance that has produced racialized and classed difference from the colonial period to the present in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I analyze urban topography as an object of governance and a terrain of biopolitical differentiation. Drawing on archival research in Phnom Penh, Cambodia I argue that topography is a key organizing schema through which racialized and subaltern populations have been categorized and governed from the colonial period to the present. Colonial authorities carved the city's original dikes, shoring up the French Quarter against seasonal inundation and the 'swamped race' of the Khmer. Then, in the immediate post-colonial era, urban planners invited both water and the Khmer middle-class back into the city. In the aegis to 'build the nation,' they reclaimed vast tracks of land, built institutions, enhanced lakes, and expanded the city. Meanwhile, the urban poor and the rural displaced swelled a ring of informal settlements outside of Phnom Penh's outermost dikes. Subsequent transitions from socialist to liberal property regime involved the formation of a land market and the concomitant process of dispossession—processes that again deployed topographical difference to sort the urban population—congealing radically different opportunities for life and livelihood within the city.