Urbanism Notes from Cambodia
What I noticed most in Cambodia was not a building, or a street, or even traffic. It was hammocks.
They hung everywhere. Under houses lifted on stilts. Beneath restaurant tents. Slung between trees. Suspended inside raised gazebos with thatched roofs. And once—memorably—inside a tuk-tuk, where the driver reclined mid-day, cocooned in fabric, his vehicle momentarily transformed. In a country where heat shapes every decision, the hammock felt like a piece of everyday urban infrastructure: portable, flexible, social, and exquisitely responsive to climate.
Cities reveal their priorities not only through what they build, but through what they allow to happen in the spaces between buildings. In Cambodia, rest has found a way to insert itself everywhere.
That sense of improvisation—of the city as something constantly adjusted rather than fixed—reappeared at every scale. Houses on stilts stood next to houses on taller stilts, next to houses barely lifted at all, next to shops and homes laid flat. The ground plane felt negotiable, contingent, and deeply tied to water, flooding, seasonality, and income.
This vertical unevenness mirrored a more jarring horizontal one. Demolished and abandoned lots sat side-by-side with luxury residences. Polished businesses pressed up against very public displays of just-getting-by. There was no softening buffer, no zoning veil drawn between prosperity and precarity. Everything was visible. For a visitor accustomed to cities that work hard to hide poverty—or at least distance it—this proximity felt both unsettling and deeply honest. Cambodia’s urban fabric does not pretend that inequality can be planned away through separation.
And yet, there was beauty everywhere.
Shrines appeared in front yards and shop entrances, their bright orange “gold”catching the light. They were often accented with paint so saturated it felt defiant: reds that refused subtlety, whites that gleamed, greens in every imaginable shade. These shrines functioned as spiritual infrastructure, shaping the everyday city. They took up space unapologetically.
The streets themselves told another story—this one about movement, age, and hierarchy. Children of all ages rode bicycles, darting along street edges and paved shoulders. Adults, by contrast, were almost entirely on motorcycles and scooters, some helmeted, some not. Cars were rare. Buses, vans, tuk-tuks, and remorques dominated, especially those ferrying tourists. Walking, strikingly, was nearly absent. Except for tourists, no one seemed to move through the city on foot.
This absence lingered with me. What does it mean when walking—a mode of movement planners so often champion as universal—is culturally, economically, or climatically sidelined, even in societies where there is deep poverty? In Cambodia, the street is not designed for strolling. It is designed for passing through, for circulating efficiently, for enduring heat and fumes.
On the plus side, one afternoon, I saw a mobile plant store that had been assembled on the back of a medium-sized truck—plants arranged like sculpture, bright leaves of every shape and hue spilling outward, a rolling garden threading itself through traffic. It was one of the most delightful pieces of urbanism I’ve encountered: temporary, beautiful, and entirely unregulated in the way that matters least.
Then there were the gateways.
Along main streets in one town, earthen side streets were announced with astonishingly intricate gateways—ornate, generous, and monumental, as though marking the entrance to palatial compounds rather than everyday neighbourhoods. These gateways did something planners often struggle to achieve: they gave identity and ceremony to the act of turning off a road. They said: something distinct begins here. You are entering a place, not just a street.
At one point, a woman passed by on the back of a motorcycle wearing a green furry costume with yellow ears. I never learned why. I didn’t need to. Cities are also made of moments that resist explanation.
Cambodia’s urbanism is not tidy. It does not aspire to coherence in the way master-planned cities do (but, as we know, cities that aren’t “messy” can be deeply boring). But Cambodian urbanism is deeply legible if you pay attention to how people actually live: where they rest, how they move, what they make visible, and what they adapt to rather than erase.
As planners, we often ask how cities should work. Cambodia quietly asks a different question: how do cities actually work, when form follows climate, income, belief, and necessity more closely than policy?
Sometimes, the answer hangs between two posts, swaying gently in the heat.
