Pipe Dreams: Sewage Infrastructure and Activity Trails in Phnom Penh

TLDR

Phnom Penh’s sewage system intertwines pipes, roads, economics, demographics, geography, climate change, sludge flows, and residents’ lives, creating unpredictable, material relations where society, technology, and nature intersect. The paper examines how the Japan International Cooperation Agency’s efforts to upgrade the city’s deteriorated sewage infrastructure illustrate a de‑centred anthropology of infrastructure. The study investigates these relations by analysing intersecting activity trails, focusing on Kandal market where sewage, garbage collection, and heavy rainy‑season water flows converge.

Abstract

Focusing on the efforts of the Japan International Cooperation Agency to improve Phnom Penh's run-down sewage infrastructure, this paper offers an example of what a decentred anthropology of infrastructure might look like. The sewage infrastructure brings together a very diverse set of features, including pipes, road networks, economic considerations, demographic change, geography, climate change, flows of sludge and the lives of people in the city. Giving rise to significantly unpredictable and deeply material relations, the paper brings into view infrastructure as sites of immanent ontological experimentation; junctures where relations between society, technology and nature emerge in variable forms. The paper explores these relations by paying close attention to intersecting activity trails. Kandal market in central Phnom Penh is one site where trails of sewage and garbage collection converge with heavy flows of water during the rainy season. Pipe dreams, too, are generated at this conjunction, precipitating out of the pipes.