Children play in the squalid rubbish-strewn area at the rear of dilapidated apartment blocks ...

Children play in the squalid rubbish-strewn area at the rear of dilapidated apartment blocks located just off Phnom Penh's Lenin Boulevard, home to hundreds of squatters living in rudimentary conditions. The area is indicative of the state of Phnom Penh's public and private infrastructure after decades of civil war and neglect at the start of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) mission in 1992. Thousands of landless families squat in poverty on whatever land or buildings they find available, having returned under UNTAC's Repatriation Component after years of exile in the Thai border camps to discover their former homes were already 'owned' and occupied. Many other families have been displaced by fighting, landmines and rural poverty and are drawn to the city where the prospect of jobs appears brighter, swelling the city's population from 615,000 in 1990 to 1.3 million by 1993 and further compounding an already spiralling housing crisis.