The Floating Urbanism of Cambodia’s Tonlé Sap

Abstract

For decades, the floating villages of Tonlé Sap, a lake in Cambodia, have demonstrated ingenuity by necessity and adaptability to the seasonal rhythms of nature. The villages are examples of ephemeral, floating urbanism, a response to discriminatory land tenure practices that is able to adjust to ever-increasing fluctuations in water levels exacerbated by global warming. The villages’ Indigenous knowledge systems and practices (IKSP) display a distinct intelligence, in which water-based modes of living and livelihoods are connected with a resourceful understanding and use of locational assets. Conducting intensive fieldwork by boat and living in the floating villages for ten days in August 2023, the authors gained knowledge of local expertise through observation and informal interviews. They documented livelihoods and modes of settlement that suggest a pause in the neo-liberal market-driven globalism sweeping Cambodia. Here they relate their research to existing literature and studies (primarily ethnographic and policy-oriented) of the region’s unique monsoon culture of floating villages with a culturally specific identity that combines hierarchy and heterarchy.