Several privately funded affordable housing developments have broken ground in Cambodia but, as urban migration intensifies, can the country meet the urgent demand for social housing?

Architecture students Seang Satya, So Vitou and Yeng Sereyroth's winning design for
Architecture students Seang Satya, So Vitou and Yeng Sereyroth’s winning design for
a low-income housing development by WorldBridge Land.

On a hot and steamy April morning in 1967, Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew cruised Phnom Penh’s wide, leafy boulevards in a convertible Mercedes. His chaperone was Cambodia’s late King Father Norodom Sihanouk, at that time the country’s head of state. The two young leaders drank in the scenes before them: buttercup yellow colonial villas and state buildings; the gilded spires of pagodas; and the minimalist, jagged lines of hundreds of bold new buildings designed as part of the ‘new Khmer architecture’ movement. Struck by what he saw, the Singaporean Prime Minister turned to his host and mused: “I hope, one day, my city will look like this.”