City of Water: Architecture, Infrastructure and the Floods of Phnom Penh

This paper is a summary of research conducted during 2011-2012, funded in part by the Fulbright Program and entitled City of Water: Architecture, Infrastructure and the Floods of Phnom Penh. This work documents the relationships between water, architecture, and infrastructure in the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. The objective of the project is to record the architectural and urban conditions sustained by and subject to the cyclical floods of the city’s rivers, to describe the challenges faced by Phnom Penh as it rapidly urbanizes in a flood plain, and to explore the nature and agency of design in relation to these topics, with a focus on education and outreach as tools for engaging the changes facing Phnom Penh. The following text traces the methodological challenges of teaching, researching, and working in Phnom Penh. Research was primarily conducted through observation, photographs, drawings, video, and interviews. In response to the lack of available urban data, a tenet of the research was to share all documents, drawings and statistics gathered or produced via www.cityofwater.wordpress.com as an open sourced and public resource. To address limited information access, a complementary educational and outreach project emerged, the Urban Lab Phnom Penh, during a public festival in Cambodia the 2012 Our City Festival: Urban Currents: Art, Architecture, and Ideas. The Urban Lab was a free architectural summer school for Cambodian university students, an archive of urban research materials (maps, files, books, and articles), an exhibition of student proposals for the future of Phnom Penh, a workshop and exhibition Water Curse or Blessing?! that traveled from Berlin to present 25 projects implemented in Asia, and an installation entitled Mekong Flux that physically graphed upon the city the 10-meter seasonal depth change of the Mekong River.Additionally, several studio and seminar courses were conducted during three semesters, with selected work appearing in the Urban Lab exhibition: Projecting Phnom Penh: Ta Khmao Strip Studio, Making in Cambodia: Fabrication Seminar, City of Water Studio: Housing, Water, + Transit for Tra Bek Lake, and A Contemporary History of Urban Planning + The Future of Phnom Penh Seminar. Following the Urban Lab, this work traveled to New York City for a recent exhibition, Water, Politics, And Art, which presented the City of Water research, Cambodian student work, and Parsons student work in the context of the Living Arts City a Parsons initiative of the Season of Cambodia Festival, a performing and visual artists festival.

Volume Editors
Anthony Abbate, Francis Lyn & Rosemary Kennedy

ISBN
978-0-935502-90-9