Legal geographies of neoliberalism: Market-oriented tenure reforms and the construction of an ‘informal’ urban class in post-socialist Phnom Penh

Abstract

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cambodia’s transition from socialist to market-oriented tenure became associated with severe tenure insecurity for those living in areas of self-built housing in the capital, Phnom Penh. This paper explores the legal geographies of this tenure insecurity by assessing how low-income urban dwellers interacted with a rapidly shifting legal system. Through analysis of historical legal documents, survey data and archived land disputes, it is found that market-oriented tenure reforms were exclusionary by design, and directly resulted in an ‘informal’ tenure system that legally rendered self-built dwellings in a constant state of provisionality. The findings provide a critique of orthodox accounts of tenure reform in post-socialist cities, which propose the deepening of market reforms to increase security. Instead, the paper builds on critical legal geographies of neoliberalism by suggesting that insecurity in Phnom Penh was perpetuated by laws, rather than their absence or the circumventing of laws. The analysis also contributes to understandings of informal tenure by presenting a post-socialist, state-constructed and exclusionary system of informality.