[ASIA TIMES]
By Julie Masis
PHNOM PENH - Cambodia's capital today is
unrecognizable compared with five years ago. Then
the tallest structure was a seven-story hotel and
vast areas of the city would have appeared dark
due to a lack of reliable electricity.
Now
there are nine buildings of 20 or more stories and
55 structures of between 10 and 19 stories,
according to the city's department of
construction. More high-rises are on the way:
projects have been approved to build at least 200
additional buildings with more than 10 floors,
including a 60-story skyscraper.
New
apartment blocks are proliferating and land prices are soaring, to as high as
US$3,000 a square meter from around $100 five
years ago.
The building spree has
propelled Cambodia's recent fast economic growth,
the second-highest in Asia after China over the
past decade, and increased consumer spending
power. Prime Minister Hun Sen has presided over
the country's rapid capitalist transformation
after decades of debilitating civil war - although
about one third of the population still subsists
under the poverty line.
Jean-Michel
Filippi, a university professor who leads guided
tours of Phnom Penh, says that when he first
arrived in the city it looked like "a giant
village". Streets were unpaved and muddy;
chickens, pigs, and ox carts roamed freely across
the city; residents often threw their garbage
right out of their windows; there were few
motorbikes and even fewer cars.
His
impression was that the city than was populated
with "non-urban dwellers" who "reproduced the
structure of the village in an urban place". This
was not far from the truth. In 1975, when the
Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh, the radical Maoists
expelled the city's population to the countryside
to build an agrarian utopia. Nearly two millions
lives were lost in the process over the next four
years. After the Vietnamese invasion ousted the
regime, Phnom Penh was repopulated with people who
had never lived in a city.
In recent
years, Phnom Penh has been transformed into a
bustling urban metropolis. Ox carts have
disappeared and dusty roads have been paved and
are regulated by traffic lights. Once quiet
streets are now packed with rush-hour traffic
jams.
The number of vehicles in Cambodia
has tripled in the past five years, reaching more
than 1.5 million for the country's nearly 15
million population, according to the government.
The vast majority of those vehicles have been
registered in the capital. Every day about 80 new
cars are registered in Phnom Penh, compared with
only one car per day in all of Cambodia's
provinces, according to Ung Chun Hour, director
general of transport at the ministry of public
works and transport.
"The number of
motorbikes and cars is still going up, and it's
going up faster in Phnom Penh than in the
provinces," he said.
The growing gridlock
is indicative of rising prosperity. Annual growth
of around 9% over the past decade has been driven
by services and manufacturing, centered around the
capital.
"If we look at the drivers of
growth - mainly garment exports - the factories
are based around Phnom Penh or in Phnom Penh,"
says Neak Samsen, a poverty specialist at the
World Bank office in Cambodia. "There's a lot of
development in Phnom Penh City compared to other
parts of the country."
Until recently,
Phnom Penh's economy was entirely cash-based. The
first ATM machine in Cambodia opened here in 2004.
Now there are more than 500, with one on almost
every corner of the city. Of the 35 different
banks that operate here, only three maintain
branches outside of the capital, says World Bank
economist Huot Chea.
For the city's
residents, the rapid development has translated
into a significant improvement in their standard
of living. While the average income in Cambodia is
still around $1 a day, the average monthly income
in Phnom Penh is three times higher, or about $100
per month, according to National Institute of
Statistics' Cambodia's Socio-Economic Survey for
2010.
While around 30% of the population
still lives under the poverty line (defined by the
government as subsisting on a little less than 75
cents per day), fewer than 1% of Phnom Penh
residents are poor by this definition, according
to a joint World Bank - National Institute of
Statistics Study.
Heng Sinet, a Phnom Penh
college student, said that 10 years ago her family
had no phone or computer, and relied on an old
black and white television set for news and
information. Now, her seven-member household owns
two computers and nine mobile phones.
Sovan Chanrathana, another Cambodian
college student, said that in 2003 she just had
one pair of shoes, two shirts and two skirts to
last her a whole year - and bought her clothing
second-hand. Now she purchases new clothes, owns
three pairs of shoes, rides a motorbike instead of
a bicycle, and can afford to go out to eat.
"Before, when I went to school, I never
bought something to eat," she said. "Now when I'm
hungry, I eat out."
New businesses,
meanwhile, have mushroomed to meet rising consumer
demand. Air-conditioned supermarkets, 24-hour
convenience stores attached, and high-end
restaurants and clothing boutiques have sprung up
over the past five years. The past year has seen
an explosion in Western style coffee-shops
offering up wireless Internet, $3 iced coffees and
freshly baked pastries.
Ten years ago most
people in Phnom Penh didn't even know what a
muffin was, says Dana Langlois, who owns
Cambodia's first American-style cafe, which
celebrated its 10-year anniversary earlier this
year. She estimates that the city is now home to
at least a hundred upscale cafes and says all the
new competition has not hurt her business.
"Now the market is times ten," she says.
"Before you were dealing with 10,000 expatriates,
now you've got a million Cambodians as a potential
customer."
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