This PhD dissertation examines the struggle of residents of four slums in the heart of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, to remain in the city in the face of commercial redevelopment pressures during the first decade of the 21st century.; In 2003, following a decade of forced evictions of the poor from the city center, the Royal Government of Cambodia broke with the past and authorized the redevelopment of the four city center slums as pilots for a major slum upgrading campaign, through the technique of land sharing. The study assesses the extent to which the redevelopment projects succeeded in providing slum dwellers with the basic legal rights promised to them as part of upgrading, which can be regarded as residents’ core citizenship contract with the state—a “citizenship of status”.
