Zone, city, border, corridor: Recombined territoriality, infrastructural coupling, and geoeconomic regionalization across the China‐Laos nexus and beyond

Through its growing impact on different scales, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has shaped the recombination of such territorial elements as cities and borders, with transformative consequences for place‐making and regional development. This impact has become especially visible across a number of hitherto relatively peripheral and largely unconnected localities and livelihoods that have received connective projects via infrastructural coupling, with locally embedded and regionally connective impacts. To investigate these related issues, this paper examines how zone, city, border and corridor have been recombined via the BRI's infrastructure‐enabled geoeconomic regionalization across the China‐Laos borderlands. This analysis sheds much light on new interconnections among rail‐enabled geoeconomic regionalization, asymmetrical cross‐border flows, special zonal development, incipient city‐making and infrastructure‐induced change in local lives, especially in northern Laos.