For ten years, UNSW staff and students have worked with the Royal University of Fine Arts and Phnom Penh community groups to support grassroots placemaking grounded in Southeast Asia.
Since 2015, more than 400 students from UNSW Sydney and the Royal University of Fine Arts Phnom Penh (RUFA) have taken part in the three‑week Street Life Studies course, in close partnership with residents of the Chen Dam Daek neighbourhood, led by Phnom Penh artist‑educator Vuth Lyno and UNSW Senior Lecturer Eva Lloyd. The course sees students immerse themselves in the neighbourhood’s daily rhythms, witnessing firsthand how space, culture and politics intertwine. Through chores, street-side conversations and shared snacks, they build understanding about how residents shape urban life, deal with its pressures, and imagine its future.
The course convenor, Eva Lloyd, spent several years practising and teaching as an architect on international development projects in Phnom Penh and across Southeast Asia before joining UNSW as an academic. She proposed the Street Life Studies course in response to a gap she reflectively noticed in her own education - the absence of exposure to the forms of “everyday” design intelligence she encountered in Cambodia. On Phnom Penh’s streets, in community groups she collaborated with, and through participatory methods she experienced, she witnessed ways of designing with people rather than for them. Co-developed with architect Giacomo Butte and Kong Kosal, Dean of Architecture and Urbanism at RUFA, the course sought to value lived knowledge rooted in Southeast Asia and broaden students’ design skillsets to include facilitation and advocacy.
Beyond the three-week studio, students can also complete a three‑month Community Design Professional Placement course, where ideas from Street Life Studies are developed and implemented through participatory research and community‑based construction. Past projects include a street mural created with resident artist Leav Kimchhort and a mobile library co‑designed with young community members.
To mark its tenth anniversary and guide the next phase of its evolution, the 2025 iteration of Street Life Studies shifted its focus away from student-led urban design proposals and toward amplifying resident voices by sharing the ‘treasures’ of their neighbourhood as design outcomes themselves. Students helped to materialise these through a collection of neighbourhood treasure hunts and a large-scale treasure map installed on a local street facade. These works challenge dominant narratives of Chen Dam Daek that emphasised built architectural heritage. Instead, residents highlighted intimate forms of community life: the annual drying and fermenting of fish by a small group of women in a hidden alleyway, or regular street gatherings among those who had lost parents during the genocide and grown up in the neighbourhood’s former orphanage. For residents, the treasure hunts offered a space to be heard and became a way to re‑see their neighbourhood through one another’s eyes. For the visiting public, they offered living examples of convivial and resilient neighbourhood‑making shaped by the residents themselves, and a model of participatory urban planning sustained through a university–community partnership.
As UNSW Architecture student Sarah Veas reflected, “we weren't necessarily asked to design anything…it was analysing what had already been done, the local conditions and the people and their stories. That kind of shift in our design thinking became really pivotal… it was about listening and being open to the stories and people around us.”
Across its ten years, Street Life Studies has grown from a course focused on observing street life into a reciprocal university–community partnership working at the scale of the neighbourhood. Grounded in lived knowledges, situated understandings of place and critical approaches to community engagement, it continues to equip students with the skills, attitudes and intercultural capacities needed to navigate complexity and support more equitable and convivial cities.
Thank you to all collaborators who have generously contributed to the development of this course over the past ten years, including Vuth Lyno and the Chen Dam Daek team, Kong Kosal, Phal Piseth and the RUFA team, Dr. Jayde Roberts, Dr. Rita Padawangi, Dr. George Varughese, Hannah Bolitho, Hun Sokagna, Tia Vannvera, Pen Sereypagna, Giacomo Butte, Richard Briggs and Professor Lisa Zamberlan.
Funding acknowledgements: UNSW Arts, Design and Architecture Amplify Grant, UNSW Southeast Asia Work Integrated Learning Grant, UNSW GRIP grant, UNSW Cities Institute, Henry Luce Foundation LuceSEA grant, Southeast Asia Neighbourhoods Network, Stiftung Furstkucher Kommerzienrat Guido Feger, Australian Government New Colombo Plan, Action Change.