Peri-urban Thailand is a site for the coming together of rural and urban people from various class, economic, and value backgrounds. In many ways, the peri-urban is Thailand’s new frontier to which people are migrating from diverse directions and with different expectations of the place. Its physical and social changes have been even more dramatic than urban and rural areas. The previously agricultural communities in the countryside surrounding Chiang Mai have increasingly been drawn into the city’s peri-urban zone through connections by roads. Despite the pace of change, there is limited scholarly attention to peri-urban areas. Studies of migration in developing countries including Thailand also mainly focus on rural to urban migration through the process of agrarian change. This case study shows similar movements of urban middle class people from city to non-urban areas to that observed in the wider field of counter-urbanisation in developed countries. The processes of mixing of different groups in the peri-urban village help to redefine the village as place, both in physical and social dimensions. Physically, place is remade as a result of proximate residential patterns bringing together different groups previously living far from one another. Socially, as revealed through a partly auto-ethnographic study, peri-urban place-making today is an outcome of everyday processes of class formation. A key tension in the peri-urban village is between the expectations and desires of different social groups. While local aspirations are towards modernity and livelihood enhancement, urban middle class migrants still hold on to rural images shaped by public representations of the elites. Class defines how people position themselves in relation to one another through values and lifestyle, and study of social relations in the peri-urban village thus differs from the productionist emphasis of earlier agrarian studies
