Preface
In the late 1990s, I was seated on the first floor of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club café on Sisowath Quay in the city of Phnom Penh. Looking out over the Tonle Sap River through the tall trees at the riverside edge, I experienced an indefinable spiritual connection with the city. This only strengthened over the next decade, and in 2008 my family and I relocated to Phnom Penh, where we spent the next nine years living and working with a Christian NGO called OMF International.1
I have always had a personal relationship with Southeast Asia, where much of my life has been lived. I was born in Thailand, where the Thai princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn signed my birth certificate, and I was educated at boarding schools in both Malaysia and the UK, but Thailand remained my home until the age of eighteen. From the age of seven, I considered myself a practising Christian who values the Bible highly in the Protestant tradition. Spirituality has always been important to me and has been integrated into every part of my life. I studied architecture at the University of Liverpool and have been a RIBA-accredited architect since 2001. I first visited Cambodia in my mid-twenties; then, after working approximately ten years in architectural practice in northern England and obtaining a Master’s qualification in Urban Design from Manchester Metropolitan University, I departed for Cambodia at the age of 32. These life experiences have helped contextualise this book. Architecture, urban design, and the art of space/place creation have been my vocation and passion for over thirty years and are the disciplines I continue to explore.
Upon arrival in the city of Phnom Penh in 2008, I realised that to work effectively, it was necessary to engage in a measure of cultural contextualisation through the way we lived. From an ethnographic perspective, we intentionally embedded ourselves as a family into Cambodian life where possible. This involved renting a modest ‘shophouse’ style townhouse within an inner-city Khmer community and not a villa in a gated expat compound. Here, we engaged in local cultural traditions and rituals such as weddings and funerals, whilst also observing the three leading national festivals: Khmer New Year, Pchum Bun (the festival of the dead), and the Water Festival. As practising Christians, we chose to attend a Khmer church where the spoken language of Christian spirituality was Khmer. And to elaborate on this intentional cultural contextualisation, I engaged in formal language learning alongside my academic work at the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA). Access into Khmer culture was facilitated by my growing ability to read, write, and understand the Khmer language. My work at RUFA involved lecturing and teaching design studio workshops. Over a period of nine years, I wrote, co-lectured, and refined a fourth/fifith year course in the architectural faculty entitled ‘An Introduction to Urban Design’.2 This was then successfully handed over to local Khmer leadership and lecturers, whom I mentored and learned from throughout my teaching practice.
Three ‘things’ struck me as I was teaching the ‘Introduction to Urban Design’ course at RUFA. Firstly, alleged international texts on urban design were predominantly European and American in flavour with token East Asian examples sparingly used. Secondly, spirituality was usually limited in academic texts to reference historic pre-industrial examples rather than current twenty-first-century urban layouts. Thirdly, there were very few local Khmer texts about the city of Phnom Penh or Khmer urban design. Once I had taught at RUFA for three years and reflected on the experience, I was compelled to think seriously about commencing post-doctorate study to generate a detailed piece of research that would combine personal interests, an addition to knowledge in the academic fields of urban design and spirituality, and model the value of further education to my Khmer students.3 A theoretical framework emerged that integrated ethnography and phenomenology to investigate the location, type, and character of spatial impacts of spirituality in the city of Phnom Penh. This book builds on the findings of my doctoral research and continues to explore more fully the relationship between spirituality, space, and the Khmer person, to facilitate a deeper understanding of the Cambodian spatial condition and, to underpin the necessity of considering the relationship between spirituality and the built environment when working in the field of architecture and urban design.