Is Cambodia’s skyscraper dream a nightmare?

When it was announced Tuesday 3 May that a 133-storey twin-towered skyscraper received government approval to be built in the centre of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s description of the man who ‘knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’.

I have nothing against skyscrapers per se; the aesthetics of some can be agreeable, although most are not, and they have come to typify our ultramodern, urbanised times – the inference of our cities ‘shooting up’ betrays a great deal about addiction to a toxic economic system. However, I do take issue with what skyscrapers represent, which is nothing but a pure, self-serving statistic.

Take the Cambodia Daily article the news of the skyscraper’s approval appeared in. Like a good article should, it reported the what: a twin-towered skyscraper; it reported the where: in central Phnom Penh; it reported the who: financed by the Thai Boon Roong Group, whose owner, Teng Bunma, is alleged to have made some of his wealth from the drug trade; it reported the when: supposedly by 2018; and it reported the how: an investment of more than $3 billion.

However, as to the why, there was scant evidence. This is because most modern skyscrapers rarely lack a why. They might provide office space or housing, but rarely do they offer what is genuinely needed – although capital must always find ways of producing more capital. This is especially true in Phnom Penh, a city that, by most measures, really does not need a 133-storey skyscraper.

Some might disagree with this, but it is hard not to notice that in the past decade alone 628 high-rise buildings – those in excess of five storeys – have been built in Phnom Penh, while the number of condominiums is expected to increase by 641 per cent by 2018. A brief walk around the city in the evening will reveal that the windows of many are not illuminated. The current tallest edifice, the Vattanac Capital tower, had an occupancy rate of just 30 per cent, as of mid-2015. Industry experts have expressed concern about a possible downward trend in the property industry in the coming years. And then there’s the fact that most inhabitants of Phnom Penh earn somewhere between $6 and $8 a day and, by my own rather incomplete calculations, rent of the average high-rise flat starts around $400 per month and many are in excess of $1000 per month.

But, returning to the point, the actual why of the Thai Boon Roong Twin Trade Center – as the Phnom Penh skyscraper will be called – is the 133 storeys. If completed it would be the tallest building by far in Cambodia and one of the tallest in the world.

Tallest, and its immodest cousin, largest, are amongst the hollowest of all adjectives. Aside from egoism, there is no intrinsic value in being the tallest or largest of anything. The largest animal on the planet is no more interesting or complex as the smallest. The tallest human is as functioning as the average heighted. The Northern lamprey, a species of fish, has the largest numbers of chromosomes of any vertebrate at 174. But are humans any less valuable or complex with a poxy 46?

The British writer Will Self once put it that, ‘a skyscraper is always a big swaying dick vaunting the ambitions of late capitalism to reduce the human individual to the status and the proportions of a submissive worker ant.’ But unlike big swinging dicks, size is what matters for skyscrapers.

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