The present geography doctorate thesis studies the redeployment of the real-estate residential markets in Phnom Penh, capital city of Cambodia, since the early 1990s. Thirty years ago, the Khmer Rouge implemented a true " urbicide ". For the past couple decade, the urban fabric of the city has quickly evolved with the important investments of local and foreign real estate developers. The implementation of large new urban projects shows the integration of the Cambodian economy into the globalization and the regional urban production logics. They are carried out by private actors looking for opportunities to invest their capital in the new emerging real-estate markets. The big picture hides a more complex local reality: the quest of the urban spaces is the stake of a fierce competition between the different social groups and families. Focusing the analysis on the housing market in the peripheral spaces, this study aims to characterize the hybrid local urban production, based on the transfer and the appropriation of the new ways of building in the towns of South East Asia. In this frame, it appears that the real-estate sector should be considered as a collective urban activity, forming a socio-economic field of its own. In this understanding, the production of new living spaces in the outskirts relies on the residential strategies of its inhabitants and on the management of the municipal territories by the local authorities. The hierarchical organization of the real-estate actors is revealed by the type of capital they use to achieve their strategies. The conquest of the urban areas by different actors, from the inhabitant to the professional property developer, transcends the scales of analysis. The chosen angle is not to wonder whether it is formal or informal, public or private but is to reveal the complex links between the local socio-spatial realities and the organization of the housing market. While considering space as a resource and a capital, those interactions produce some original urban spaces in Phnom Penh.
