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a new friendship bridge

The current situation in the site on the Thai-Burmese border is a great mixture of the formal and informal cross boundary processes. Goods and persons are brought legally across the first Thai-Burmese friendship bridge; the rest is smuggled across the river on boats. Recently the government of Thailand has approved the building of a second bridge across the Moei River to cater to the increasing need for transportation of goods through the border, as well as to serve the economic border development plan which includes building Special Economic Zones (free trade zones) and warehouses near the border. Authorities are looking for a suitable site. (Mizzima News)

The free trade zone in the border area has attracted the garment industry. Factories that used to use the Burmese labor but suffer from the continuous sanctions on Burma since the mid nineties. In the area around Rangoon (former capital of Burma) there used to be around 300 garment factories. This same amount now operates on the Thai side of the border crossing. These factories employ roughly 100,000 Burmese illegal migrant workers around Mae Sot, who are very vulnerable for exploitation. Due to the economic hardships in Burma there is a huge floating Burmese population looking for unskilled labor.

Burma has rich natural resources including vast timber, natural gas, and fishery reserves and it is a leading source of gems and jade. The main industries are agricultural processing, cement, wood processing, cotton, construction and pharmaceuticals. The increasing sanctions on Burma have limited its trade with other countries. Forty per cent of 6.6 billion dollar export trade goes to Thailand. Thailand has a large infrastructure and an economy increasingly oriented at the service industries. The fact that there are no economic sanctions on Thailand makes it logical that a lot Burmese products reach the international market via Thailand.

The predominantly primary industry of Burma and the developed tertiary industry of Thailand have resulted in a special economic border zone where the secondary industry (manufacture) takes place. The Thai and Burmese governments have collaborated to make this zone exempt of tax and quota restrictions to attract foreign investment. This cross border zone has filled itself with sweatshops and other factories of the service industry, for which the combination of cheap labor and no taxes has provided a profitable climate especially for the garment and textile industries.

The complex spatiality of the state border can be represented in architectural design through such a garment factory, in which all the specifics of site materialize the global problem of fragile states and migration. The program can be seen as a linear process of manufacturing the raw materials to assembled products. Typical asian garment factories tend to be roughly 6 spaces of 500 m2 where the storage, preparation, cutting, sewing, ironing, checking and packing of the material takes place. In the standard typology all spaces are the same floor area as it is in a multistory concrete and brick building due to minimization of the footprint. However, when the typology does not hold the limits of footprint, it can be drawn out and each space can have its specific requirements.

The aim of the architectural statement is also to speculate the effects of the spatial protagonist; a caricaturization of an existing process. Currently the special economic border zone has resulted in the secondary industries taking place on Thai soil with Burmese resources and workers. This means that both goods and persons are smuggled across the border and remaining there illegally. The extraterritorialization (which partially occurs with the special economic zones) will be emphasized if factories physically relocate to the unterritorialized river, and a free state of informal dwellings would form around it. What precautions would the two countries take? What help service would non-governmental organizations offer, when they are finally freed from national legislations?