In Bangkok’s most desirable neighbourhood, Thong Lor, children have just one communal spot where they can run around with soft grass under their feet and the sky above their heads.

It’s a lawn, it’s about the size of a swimming pool – and it’s on the fourth floor of a mall.

Nevertheless, the Commons is green, its grass is real. Such places are sorely needed in Bangkok. Public planners in the city have not prioritised parks and historically, private developers have built malls to shelter people from the outdoors, not to embrace it: the temperatures in Bangkok can be stifling, and the weather thunderous. You can easily spend a day moving from one shopping centre to the next, breathing nothing but conditioned air.

Yet in recent years a new breed of smaller, open-air mall has proliferated. Billing themselves as “community malls”, they feature tree-ringed courtyards and green areas, and try to work creatively around Bangkok’s climate to give the city some breathing space amid the concrete.

A typical air-conditioned Bangkok ‘mega mall’. Photograph: Ray Laskowitz/Lonely Planet/Getty Images

K Village, which was one of the pioneers when it opened in 2010, has walking paths lined with plants that twist through the building and a light mist that cools pedestrians. SeenSpace, another early community mall, is more of an entertainment venue – it is filled mostly with bars, which are dispersed around a canvas-covered seating area featuring trees wrapped in fairy lights.

The Commons, with the grassy roof area for children, was built by Vicharee Vichit-Vadakan and her brother after they moved back to Thailand from the US. Having experienced American town squares, libraries and community centres, she felt Bangkok neighbourhoods were missing out on places to mingle.

“More and more people live in condos and sometimes you don’t really know your neighbours,” she said. “In our culture, you don’t know where to go – so you go to a big mall. You go there and walk around, you don’t really talk to other people.”

Rod Fai night market. Bangkok’s markets are increasingly under threat from luxury developments . Photograph: Getty Images/iStockphoto

On the ground floor is a market-style eatery where some of the capital’s most celebrated restaurants have set up stalls selling pizza, lobster and Mexican food. Customers can order from any stall and sit on shared wooden benches in a communal area indoors or listen to live music on the steps outside. A few times a week there are workshops – baking classes, pop art lessons and even a course in tea blending.

“I wanted to create a space that would allow people to spend time outdoors, outside of an air-conditioned room,” Vichit-Vadakan says. “To offer the chance to be a little bit closer to nature, to greenery. The Commons is not a huge project. I wish we had more green – a park, a lawn. But this is what we can do in the space that we have. To create an outdoor area that is useful.”

To combat the intense heat, six-metre fans whirl above. The entire building is wrapped in a metal mesh that allows people to see outside while still providing some shade. This encourages the air to flow, says Amata Luphaiboon, one of the site’s principal architects, who also points to how the large open area in the centre is shielded by the upper third and fourth floor, which act “like an umbrella”.

Real grass at the Commons ‘community mall’. Photograph: W Workspace/Wison Tungthunya

“By doing that, the entire ground space will be safe from rain and direct sun,” he says. Other fans high up suck hot air out of the building.

There are at least two dozen “community malls” in Bangkok, often opened by small businesses, such as that run by the Vichit-Vadakan siblings, rather than the development giants whose outlets attract the likes of Prada, Cartier and Gucci.



They also target a specific demographic, even if they are technically open to all. Rain Hill, for example, which sits on Bangkok’s main Sukhumvit road, bills itself as a “new community culture catered towards middle- and upper-class Thais and foreigners”. It boasts that is is “a true eco-friendly lifestyle rendezvous where one can see and be seen”.

Not everyone is convinced. In an article in the English-language events guide BK Magazine, a lament was raised for the new-style malls’ focus on restaurants and bars. The absence of everyday outlets such as laundromats, food markets and pharmacies means many community malls don’t truly serve everyone in the neighbourhood, just those with spending power. “Community malls serve loose groups of shoppers, a certain demographic perhaps, but not genuine communities,” the author argued.

Pawika Charoenkul, a 26-year-old illustrator, says she sometimes spends all day at the Commons and drinks there in the evening with friends.

Before it opened last year, her neighbourhood life mostly involved hopping from one coffee house to another, sometimes spending hours in each one.

Doesn’t she wish there was also a public park? “I lost hope on that one,” she says. “It’s good that people can do something like this on a smaller scale … a substitution for parks and green space.”

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion, and explore our archive here