Abstract :
[en] Spatial Analysis of Inner City Retail Sector in Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Evidence of Path-Dependence?
Geoffrey CARUSO (1), Thomas KOLNBERGER(2)
(1) Associate Professor, Geography and Spatial Planning Research Centre, University of Luxembourg. Email: geoffrey.caruso@uni.lu.
(2) Research and teaching assistant, Department of History, University of Luxembourg. Email: thomas.kolnberger@uni.lu
ABSTRACT
The city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is a particularly interesting case study metropolis for a “rush economic evolution” and urban structure formation. The Pol Pot-regime forcefully evicted Cambodia’s urban population in 1975, leaving Phnom Penh a “ghost-city” for years. Phnom Penh had then to reboot urban life with a predominantly new group of inhabitants from scratch. If one adds its rather homogenous and flat physical geography, plus weak political interference in the location of business in the town, Phnom Penh turns to be almost a perfect laboratory situation for understanding inner city location processes.
This paper aims to highlight inner city clustering and agglomeration/dispersion processes through the analysis of a specific process: the spatial location of retail sites and the emergence of sub-centres. The study builds upon a detailed, almost exhaustive, micro-scale dataset obtained from field survey in 2010. The dataset includes over 14000 retail sites associated with some 100 commercial categories. Spatial analysis is conducted to explore patterns of retail concentrations and associations using standard factor and clustering techniques, plus a systematic analysis of Moran’s I, and LISA maps over each type of retail, including sensitivity analysis to the definition of distance weight matrices. Results are discussed in light of the existence of path-dependence and lock-ins in the economic agglomeration, dispersion and association processes within the city
KEYWORDS
Phnom Penh, LISA, agglomeration/dispersion, retail sub-centres
