Positioned within the debates on global and globalising cities, this chapter examines how Bangkok’s urban development, particularly its educational infrastructures, operates as a mechanism of spatial inclusion and exclusion for migrant populations. Education emerges as a critical site where aspirations for mobility are nurtured and constrained, shaped by structural inequalities that delimit migrant futures within the city. Attuned to the author’s positionality as an external observer navigating Bangkok’s extended peripheries, the analysis traces how gendered exclusions, particularly in informal labour sectors, compound the invisibility and marginality experienced by migrant communities. The interplay of these strands reveals the entrenched intersections between migration, education, and urban spatial politics, unsettling dominant narratives of the global city as a uniformly inclusive space. Rather than viewing exclusion as peripheral to Bangkok’s development, the chapter argues that exclusion is foundational to the city’s articulation as a globalising metropolis. In doing so, it calls for a rethinking of education not merely as an economic instrument but as a deeply contested terrain where rights, recognition, and futures are differentially imagined and negotiated.