Urban resettlement and migration in northeast Thailand: the specter of urban involution.

Focus is on the impact of urban resettlement and migration of the economic and employment structures of regional urban centers in northeast Thailand, and their capacity to take on a wider role as focal points for regional development. The premise is that projected increased population movements to regional urban centers will accelerate the incipient process of urban involution and will work to counteract the benefits being sought through various national and international development initiatives. As migrant and resettled populations face employment choices that are more and more confined to the low-wage service sector, regional urban centers will become less attractive. The pattern of primate-city growth may then be accentuated instead of diminished by these developments, and any renewed concentration on regional development to diminish center-periphery disparities in growth may be seriously jeopardized. Under these circumstances the government of Thailand and even some projects of the basinwide Mekong Development Scheme may be negatively affected. The necessity of dealing with these issues has been recently emphasized by proposals to resettle populations displaced by the multipurpose Pa Mong dam project in rural and urban locations throughout the Northeast. This project would create many instrastructural programs, but it would do so at the cost of having to resettle from 205,000 to more than 400,000 people. Some indications of the extent to which migration and resettlement may add to the incipient process of urban involution in this region can be otained by consideration of 4 areas: patterns of urban growth; relocation behavior of resettled and migrant populations; the urban employment experiences of these prospects for expanded employment opportunities in regional urban centers.