ABSTRACT
The far-reaching promotion and adoption of free market economics has produced conditions of globalized urban entrepreneurialism, where Phnom Penh represents a particular example of this wider process (Fauveaud 2014; Springer 2009). The (re)production of cultural spectacles, enterprise zones, waterfront developments, and privatized forms of local governance all reflect the powerful disciplining effects of inter-urban competition as cities aggressively engage in
mutually destructive place-marketing policies. In this chapter, I examine the dilemmas homeless people in Phnom Penh face as a consequence of their enmeshment in a new logic of urban governance being promoted by city officials and municipal planners. I set out to offer a glimpse of how the larger configuration of contemporary capitalism directly affects some of Phnom Penh’s most vulnerable people. I begin by considering how gentrification has been articulated in the context of Phnom Penh, which local authorities have framed as a process of “beautification.” The ongoing pattern of violence utilized by municipal authorities against homeless peoples as a part of this beautifying process is considered. Specifically, I focus my attention on the exclusionary tendencies that have arisen as part of a new municipal order that actively targets the homeless as unwelcome participants in public space. The result is an ongoing process of round-up and exile at the hands of the police, who enforce a strict urban aesthetic that does not include the poor. Out of sight, out of mind. In the following section I trace how city officials have more recently begun promoting the criminalization of the urban homeless and poor through arbitrary arrests and illegal detention, holding them in “re-education” or “rehabilitation” centers. I demonstrate that such centers are not at all what they seem, where the use of euphemism attempts to mask the systemic abuse and internment of marginalized peoples who are unwanted on the streets of the capital city as they are deemed to present a negative image for Phnom Penh. Interviews with homeless people over several years reveal a horrifying narrative of torture, rape, beatings, starvation, and forced labor at the hands of guards and police. A chance encounter with an American-Cambodian returnee on the inside of one of these detention centers reconfirmed the depths of depravity that is taking place.
