The atomization of heritage politics in post-colonial cities: The case of Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes the politics of heritage in urban Cambodia. Focusing on the capital, Phnom Penh, we argue that urban heritage is shaped at the intersection of global doctrines and professional knowledge, socioeconomic strategies at the national and local scales, real estate developments, and contextual institutional practices. We propose the concept “atomization of heritage politics” to explain the fragmentary and tentacular power relations that determine how built heritage is managed or destroyed. Drawing on heritage literature on Southeast Asian cities, we first argue that academic writers underestimate the role of land issues and localized power relations in shaping urban heritage politics. We contextualize the rise of heritage concerns in Cambodia. Since colonial times heritage strategies have focused on the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Angkor, with urban heritage being of only peripheral concern. Second, we explain how proposals made by international development partners for an overall heritage policy failed, as they conflicted with the rationality of land and power relations, leaving foreign consultants to renegotiate their position in Cambodian politics. Finally, we explore two case studies—the National Stadium and the Renakse Hotel—at the center of virulent, long-lasting political clashes between various forces that took root during the reconstruction of the Cambodian state in the 1980s and 1990s. Together with powerful individuals, families, and companies, the competition and tactical alliances between these forces shape the contested politics of urban heritage in the Cambodian capital.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".