Land Sharing in Phnom Penh: An Innovative but Insufficient Instrument of Secure Tenure for the Poor

Policy makers and housing rights professionals worldwide are interested in “land sharing ” as an instrument of slum improvement and secure tenure provision in urban areas. The technique involves partitioning a piece of land so that it can accommodate land occupants on one portion of the site, and landowners or commercial development on the other portion, thereby solving a land dispute through compromise instead of through force. The net result of land sharing is that residents of informal settlements obtain the legal right to stay in the city, in new housing and on land they have occupied (often for a long time) instead of being evicted. At the same time, private development can also proceed. Several land sharing schemes are currently underway in the capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, as pilot projects of a large-scale slum upgrading program. The results so far are mixed: a land sharing agreement has been signed in the largest of the four settlements, where residents will be re-housed on site to ten, 6-storey apartment blocks, to be built by a private developer in return for the developer’s right to develop on a portion of the rest of the site. But in the other three settlements, the land sharin