To Jacobs, a well-functioning neighbourhood city street has a little of everything: shops, cafés, schools, libraries, recreation, and destinations that encourage walking day and night. Buildings hold apartments but also neighbourhood shops, doctors’ offices, and office space. Having well-balanced street-level design activates the sidewalks and invites residents outside with their all-important “eyes on the street,” keeping the street safe and neighbourhoods engaged and connected.
Street Fight, Janette Sadik-Khan.
These mentioned qualities are drearily missing in the modern urbanisation practice. The world is becoming more urbanised with more than 4.5 billion people living in cities. In 1898, Ebenezer Howard initiated the Garden City Movement which is a self-contained living pod confined with green corridors; moreover, it was designated different areas for residence, industry, and agriculture. It was seen as the new way of living away from the utmost polluted cities after the Industrial Revolution in 18th century Britain. The first garden city was Letchworth Garden City, in Hertfordshire in 1903. The birth of Letchworth Garden City paved the way for the newly built form in our cities which ultimately led us to suburbanisation. What does it mean by suburbanisation? It is a pattern of living in the population moving from the city centre to settle into the suburbs. As of now, every thriving city in the world has inevitably experienced or has experienced at least a phase of suburban sprawl. In recent years, Cambodia has been experiencing rapid urban expansion as the demand for housing spikes. Phnom Penh is the capital city of Cambodia which was designed to house only half a million people at its golden age during Sangkum Reastr Niyum (1955 – 1970). It was titled the Pearl of Asia due to its neatly planned gridiron street networks and its high-density planning. The perk of the city development comprises 4 to 5 storeys of buildings served as mixed-use where the ground floor is mainly cafes, shops, and restaurants and the apartment units above. During the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, Phnom Penh was abandoned and it was once again occupied after the fall of Khmer Rouge. In the last 10 years, Phnom Penh has undergone rapid urbanisation and is now the home of 2 million dwellers. The growth of population poses a greater challenge to the management of Phnom Penh – as the city was only designed for half of million people. Despite the thriving of the city and the growth of the economy, the city is suffering from an unsustainable method of development which is suburban sprawl. The sprawl of Phnom Penh is mainly taking shape as Borey – a type of gated community in Cambodia. The archetype of Borey comprises row houses with the same design and single detached houses and they all served as single-family housing. According to an article from Phnom Penh Post, more than 178 Borey projects have been completed in Phnom Penh.
Since the sprawl takes shape over the horizontal expansion, it forces the people to spend more time on driving and to drive even further distance. Many problems arise as the traffic gets intensified. People who live in the suburbs must own a vehicle or at least have someone to chauffeur them. In North America, the term ‘Soccer Mum’ is used to refer to women who give up their jobs to chauffeur their children. We can identify the sheer comparison to what is happening to the modern family in Phnom Penh. It is my observation and a few short interviews that many women in Phnom Penh are left without choice but to give up their jobs to chauffeur their children because they live too far away from any essential destination. As more and more people live in suburbs – more private vehicles will be added onto the street. This has put an incredible amount of pollution emitted by private vehicles into the atmosphere harming the health of all the city’s dwellers; furthermore, spending too much time every day commuting will certainly trigger physical and mental health problems such as anger, high levels of stress and anxiety, elevated blood sugar, elevated cholesterol, higher risk of obesity, increased susceptibility to illness, lower sleep quality, lower back pain, increase likelihood of unhappiness and dissatisfaction, and so on. Moreover, driving costs everyone to pay for the road – especially since our roads are built with the car dimension in mind. This means that anybody who does not own a car must also pay for the road construction projects and this includes cyclists, and the lower middle class. Due to the distance of the suburban sprawl to all the essential destinations, it makes the city less desirable to walk. It is hard to make public transportation effective whilst the city is less walkable.
Every year the city is losing its natural resources such as lakes, green fields, wetlands, and shrubs to make way for single-family housing. Phnom Penh is home to 2 million people and the city does not have a water treatment facility yet; the city is exploiting its natural lakes to discharge wastewater from household to industrial wastes making it the only low-cost solution to treating black water. A report from Sahmakum Teang Tnaut (STT) has stated that more than half of Phnom Penh lakes have been filled up and almost half of all Phnom Penh wetlands are lost. The result is made apparent with severe flood events – climate change will only exacerbate the damage to the city. The absence of the natural lakes is also leading to the potential waterborne disease which is likely to affect the health of the people who live along the water channels and rivers. Without the lakes to filter out the pollution, the black water will be discharged to the nearest water bodies such as our main rivers and streams. The effects do not stop there. The entire ecosystem is gone with the loss of lakes and wetlands – affecting both humans and birds.
Cambodian population consists of young people with a median age of 24.6 years old whose activities are needed for sport, education, social interaction, and entertainment. That suburb is an invisible cage that locks its dwellers inside without many options for activities. A foreign report from the suburbs has stated that children who grow up in the suburbs have a tough time adjusting to society due to the isolation within the confinement of the gated community they are living in. With the absence of various activities in the suburb, suburban teenagers are more likely to get bored which is likely for them to smoke more, drink more, and likely to use drugs. Those teenagers will be exploited by the environment they are living in since they are raised in such isolation behind the living pod of the gated-inaccessible community. The result would be a higher rate of anxiety, and depression. Not only suburban teenagers but also adults. The number of cases of homicide and domestic violence is increasing at an alarming rate in the suburbs. The accumulation of boredom, anxiety, depression, traffic madness, and the absence of public interaction make suburban dwellers likely to cause extreme actions.
There are many approaches for the government to remedy the related issues which stem from urban sprawl. Such approaches include urban densification, establishing regional urban authority, and prioritising environmental protection. First of all, urban densification is the opposite of sprawl. The reason we should densify our city neighbourhood is because human society is no stranger to natural ecosystems. With more population and with a diversity of activities, a neighbourhood block will thrive. Look at the Orussey district in Phnom Penh, the district consists of a focal point, high-density housing, and – most importantly – human-centric design. The focal point can be in the form of a marketplace, a public park, a public venue, a religious site, or a historical site. By having a focus point of urban design, it makes the place more attractive for growth and desirable. High-density housing around the focal point of Orussey market is mixed-use housing with the ground floor serving as a restaurant, cafe, corner store, hardware store, etc. This is the perfect embodiment of Jane Jacob’s definition of a well-functioning neighbourhood. High-density housings will not do without human-scale design. It needs to have wide enough pavement for pedestrians to go about their business safely, a street proportional to the width to the building height ratio (not exceeding the 1:6 ratio), and a reasonably sized urban block that makes walking desirable. One bonus is the safety of the street since there will always be activities happening on the street throughout the day and night which automatically makes every shop owner self-policing for their neighbourhood. Secondly, the government should establish regional urban planning authority to decide where to put the city parameters by establishing green corridors, countryside preserves, establishing countryside reserves, prioritising urban infill projects, establishing an incentive programme for ideal urban development practices, and halting and re-evaluating the on-going gated community projects in the city. Lastly, to protect the existing natural resources in Phnom Penh the government should involve the Ministry of Environment. Putting all-natural lakes and wetlands of Phnom Penh under the authority of MoE for ecological preservation and environmental protection. Imposing strict made-made infrastructure activities is necessary. Overall, urban sprawl is the root cause of most issues in the city, not just in Phnom Penh city but every city in the world. What planners can do is reintroduce traditional neighbourhood planning with modern technology while working to preserve the existing natural resources and food sources surrounding the city. Human society is no different than the animal world, we must live as a diverse ecosystem so that we can practice the most sustainable way of living. It is time to rethink, and we must put the people at the heart of city planning rather than expecting people to spend ⅓ or more of their time commuting between work and other destinations.