nd the realisation of the king’s dream to develop the rest of the land continues apace, with its latest retail/entertainment endeavour: Siam Square Walking Street, which is a redeveloped and rebranded Soi (meaning ‘alley’) 7 in the heart of town. It offers shopping, education, and live performances. Soi 7 is closed to traffic and becomes a pedestrian mall on the weekend – hence the appellation Walking Street. Retail strips have always been more important shopping destinations – judging by share of physical floorspace – in Western countries than in developing Asia. A study I undertook for the Shopping Centre Council of Australia a few years ago found that (sub)urban strips still account for slightly more than half of total retail floorspace in countries like Australia, the US and Canada, and closer to 75 per cent in the UK and continental Europe. That’s due to a combination of historical urban growth patterns and deliberate planning policies that have set out to preserve the traditional urban fabric by making it hard to build shopping centres.  A single hand on the tiller In Asia though, shopping centres have always dominated modern retail, for some good reasons. First, you can air-condition them, it’s hot outside. Second, land is so expensive in Asian cities that building up has been the only way to make retail economically feasible. And third, the quality of sidewalks is often so substandard that street retail can become unattractive for pedestrians. Each of these problems has been solved in different ways by the manager of Siam Square Walking Street. Yes, responsibility for developing and managing the walking street and adjacent mixed-use projects in the downtown area falls to a single landlord: Property Management of Chulalongkorn University (PMCU). Overall, the PMCU administers almost 62 hectares of land that are external to the university campus itself.  It is this simple fact that Siam Square Walking Street has just one manager that distinguishes it from other Main Streets everywhere in the world. The whole strip can be managed as a unified entity in a totally strategic manner, which is to say, like a shopping centre. This gets around the problem of fragmented ownership that plagues Main Streets, with their patchwork of tenancies, variable maintenance standards and, often, chronic vacancy.  What’s in Chula’s mix? One hopes that King Chulalongkorn, under whose reign the Ministry of Commerce was created in 1892, would be pleased with what grew out of his vision for the Siam Square area. Certainly, having lived in the age of small market vendors, the king would find the lineup of retail flagships on both sides of the mall eye-opening, to say the least.  Some are standouts for their flashy exterior design. On a corner lot is one of the two stores for O2O beauty and lifestyle retailer Firster, whose brand slogan is about as charming as it gets: “Others may be first, but we’re firster”. The store is on four levels: on the first is a click-and-collect pickup and unboxing area, and departments for perfume, skincare and cosmetics. On the second level are more third-party and exclusive skincare and personal care brands. On Level 3 is a lifestyle zone and a place to test out tech devices. The fourth floor is for apparel, footwear, and outdoorsy merchandise.   Nearby is multi-brand clothing and accessories retailer Matchbox, which styles itself as a “Girl lifestyle destination”, beauty clinic The Klinique (laser hair removal, botox, body shaping, plastic surgery), and unisex fashion retailers SOS (Sense of Style) and SHU. These are all on the south side of the mall. On the north side are yet more flagships: there’s Beautrium, a four-level, 1500sqm cosmetics superstore, and Top Charoen, Thailand’s most dominant eyewear chain. But it isn’t all about flagships, by any means. Near Beautrium, on the north side of the soi, is a seven-level vertical mall called Siam Square One that features a huge number of international and local Thai brands across all categories. Running up one side of the building is a popular street market. The east end of the soi is anchored by the obligatory super-sized Starbucks, but at the west end the architecture is more eye-catching. Here, one finds a massive red-brick building, with a cathedral arch motif, called Siamscape. It opened in 2021. The edifice turns out not to be a religious building, but a self-contained mix of office, retail, food and beverage, services, and educational experiences.  The various shopping formats on Siam Square Walking Street offer a unique opportunity to provide space for retailers and other enterprises in different stages of development, with different space requirements and rent thresholds. The PMCU is not in the business of catering only to the most high-profile retailers it can lay its hands on, which has been an affliction of many shopping centre operators down the years. Rather, management wants to incubate small brands that in other cities would not have the opportunity to launch so centrally. What’s in the works? Moreover, it wants to provide the whole range of merchandise categories. As a PMCU spokesperson told the Bangkok Post: “The charm of Siam Square is unique in terms of diversity. And in terms of brands, there are shops that meet the needs of all customers, proving that Siam Square is a space for everyone. There’s also an event space that has the variety to support all target groups, as well as a large new area to accommodate growing demand.” That’s about tenant mix, but what about the shopability difficulties from the condition of sidewalks and other infrastructure issues? No problem: the street’s footpaths have been upgraded, and overhead electrical cables that are an eyesore in other parts of Bangkok have been buried underground. The street is also fully pedestrianised on weekends. Access is good because of the nearby skyrail station at Siam Square and parking spaces on the periphery of the street, including 700 in the Siamscape building and another 270 in Siam Square One.  There is still work to do. PMCU sees its job as developmental, not just managing what exists already. More retail space in the form of shop houses is on the drawing board, and a plan is afoot to get business hours extended closer to midnight, since people probably won’t arrive until late because the hot climate keeps them inside during the day.  Siam Square Walking Street is generating a lot of excitement among Bangkokians. This sliver of a downtown area used to be such a hard slog for pedestrians, who mostly kept to the air-conditioned malls. In fact, the Walking Street reposes in the shadows of some of the most venerable vertical malls in Asia, including Siam Discovery, Siam Center and Central World.  But the revitalised soi offers a dimension the shopping malls lack. On weekend evenings, as the unbearable sticky heat of the daytime turns into a passable, damp, cool night, the sounds and sights of live performances ring out down the traffic-free street. Often, it’s performers from the adjacent Chulalongkorn University campus strutting their stuff. Visitors gather in the street, joining in the dancing and singing. This was possibly not part of King Chulalongkorn’s thinking when he talked about education back in the late 19th century. One can surmise though, that a man who cared so much about his people’s happiness would have been pleased anyway.