This article describes the various imaginaries and practices that underlie the contemporary building boom in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. One such imaginary is of a city of absence. In part, this relates to a discourse of the city in ruin, the result of material-historical processes that destroyed Phnom Penh's urban fabric and society in the 1970s. Yet idioms of ruin and absence have been markedly resilient in Phnom Penh; indeed, they were widely appropriated during the colonial and postcolonial eras to justify experiments in city-making and urban-planning interventions. The article thus aims to relate these older representations of absence to contemporary invocations of the city as tabula rasa — but an explicitly Asian one.
