ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the development of a cross-border hub between Thailand and Myanmar. Flows defying borders make places, influencing their centrality in hierarchal spatial orders, but are themselves shaped by the territorial implications of national policies. Flows make and shrink places by centring or de-centring them. They literally build cities, the intersections of movement. The chapter provides the theoretical framework based on literatures of world cities and borderlands. It builds a case for a borderland-centred perspective to observe the flows 'feeding' the two cities and connects it to the Indochinese context. The chapter traces Mae Sot's initial growth due to Burmese socialist policies that produced intense smuggling from Thailand through insurgent-held territories. It covers the period since the late 1980s, the transforming political topography of the Thailand–Myanmar borderland and the resulting rerouting of people and goods through Mae Sot–Myawaddy, an ever-expanding cross-border hub.
