ABSTRACT
The object of study and analysis for this chapter is the village of Ban Khokmayom in the sub-district of Khan Haam in Thailand’s Ayutthaya Province (Figure 10.1). On the face of it, Ban Khokmayom can hardly be counted as ‘urban’, let alone as a ‘city’. The village is, in administrative terms, located in the countryside and, physically, it is surrounded by fields, although they may be fields that are often idle rather than worked. Yet the character of the village, its economic structure and its social operation, would seem to resonate little with this rural context. The village may be physically set in the countryside, but in other respects it would make more sense to count it as urban. Not only are rural problems – for example, rural poverty – manifested and reproduced in urban situations, but we also see an infiltration, or a spilling over, of urban issues into rural spaces. Indeed, there is a case to be made that isolating ‘the urban’ and ‘the city’ makes little sense given the growing fuzziness of the boundaries that we draw and the categories we create. This re-thinking of the character and extent of urban space – essentially, ‘what’ and ‘where’ is ‘the urban’ – has taken on particular salience in Asia. It is with these conceptual issues and practical debates in mind that this chapter turns to examine migrant labour and contested ‘rural’ spaces.
