Going nowhere fast

While finalising the itinerary for a trip to Phnom Penh, my former stamping ground, I found myself drawing parallels between the Khmer capital and my current home – Bangkok. In their existent state, the Big Mango and The Charming City (a recent moniker provided by Phnom Penh officials) are virtually incomparable – the former parades as an international city, while the latter's advancement continues to be hampered by, amongst other things, cronyism, questionable bureaucracy, land grabbing and rising cases of human rights violations.

Various Phnom Penh developments have come to a standstill in recent years.

What the two do have in common, however, is what I'll coin 'All roads lead to Rome syndrome'. Outside of the capital cities, both nations remain heavily reliant on agriculture and are almost entirely centralised. Yet, while Bangkok, which has been manically built up over the last couple of decades, has cemented itself as a regional development powerhouse, the essentially low-rise Phnom Penh is supposedly on the cusp of its own urban revolution – "Bangkok 20 years ago…" is a phrase often used when discussing the city's future.

This statement may have been believable when I initially moved to Cambodia two years ago, but now it seems almost laughable.

Over the past 24 months, landmark projects and developments in Phnom Penh have repeatedly been scrapped, stalled or, in the case of Gold Tower 42, simply abandoned. Even completed projects have failed to live up to the hype.

As was the case in Bangkok two decades ago, commercial real estate has been the main focus of developers in recent years, but, to date, demand for the current crop of Grade-A (or thereabouts) office space is yet to take off. Moreover, the announcement this month that Cambodia's stock exchange plans to vacate Canadia Tower, one of the city's few high-end office offerings, in favour of a (traditionally preferred) colonial-era villa, doesn't bode well for the reputation of the city's grade-A commercial property, most of which still has a less-than-impressive occupancy rate.

It's going to be interesting to see how well the highly-anticipated Vattanac Capital project fares upon completion in next couple of months, but for the time being at least, Phnom Penh should consider putting its dreams of competing with Bangkok back in the pipe and accept its going nowhere fast.

Article source: http://www.thethailandlinks.com/2013/02/19/going-nowhere-fast/