Open the gates

Imagining public parks with no walls

Imagine a park that has no barrier from the surrounding neighborhood, nothing to prevent you stepping right off the sidewalk into the park from any direction.

This is hardly a revolutionary concept in urban design.

In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking it is, in fact, the dictionary definition of a public park.

 

The announcement of a plan by a land developer in Shanghai's Xuhui district to make an open-access, fenceless green space on land donated by the local government in the new central business district was enthusiastically received by local media, which promoted it as a centerpiece of modernized city planning and Xuhui's own version of Central Park.

Back in 2009, the Guangzhou government's "give the park back to the people" movement had the same bright idea, proposing the removal of the walls around three of its biggest urban parks. In this case, however, the plans were temporarily halted due to an outcry from local residents.

One elderly Guangzhou resident said: "Tear down the walls, and you can no longer call it a park."

His argument was a linguistic one - the character 園 (yuán), for garden, is the Chinese word for "public park"

(公園, gōng yuán, public garden) uses the radical, which comes from the ancient ideographic representation for enclosure.

Other citizens translated his concern into more practical terms: without walls, what was to prevent the park from becoming a "free hotel" for the homeless, or a wretched hive of criminals who could enter and escape at will?

Encouraged by official directives to add recreational areas and green spaces to the urban landscape, cities in China are increasingly building so-called "open-style parks" (開放式公園, kāifàng shì gōngyuán ). But the history of truly open-plan, public-access parks in China is short, and the learning curve they present is steep.

Until the early 2000s, most "public" parks in China - defined simply as parks not reserved for use by any danwei (單位, dān wèi), or work unit - not only had walls and fences but charged admission to enter. In 2002, Shanghai and the city of Zhuhai, Guangdong province, began to offer free admission to a limited number of their parks. Beijing followed in 2006.

However, the terminology of "open-style parks" is misleading; in most cases, even without a ticket office, the parks have retained guarded entrances, opening and closing hours, and enclosures all around the perimeter.

Beijing's Ming Dynasty City Wall Relics Park is a special case. By the standards common to Chinese landscaping, they've gone and put walls on the wrong side. Completed in 2006, the park consists of grassy knolls, winding paths, and flowering shrubs buttressed against one of the last remaining sections of Beijing's ancient fortifications; on the other side, the grass runs straight up against the sidewalk.

"Strictly speaking, that makes us an open-style green space, not an open-style park," says the manager of the park office, surnamed Shi.

Last October, when Shanghai's Xiangyang Park was reopened after renovations, which included the removal of the park's outer walls, the response from the community was lukewarm. "They don't understand that the wall itself is a part of landscaping, it's architecture," a long-time park visitor was reported as telling local news blog Shanghai Guangcha.

Chinese landscaping scholar Yang Han has published papers that have been generally approving of the opening up of China's urban parks, referring to the trend as the natural accompaniment for modern, urban society's recreational needs. However, he has also argued that walls should not be "blindly removed" because their long cultural and symbolic history, as well as architectural details, make them an invaluable "Chinese characteristic" in landscape architecture.

Walls have played an indispensable role in the two ancient styles that influenced traditional Chinese landscaping, the "imperial garden

(御花園, yù huā yuán)" and "literati garden (文人園林, wénrén yuánlín)". Imperial gardens originated from early imperial hunting grounds, which were walled off to all users except for the emperor. These later evolved into private retreats in which the emperor could relax and enjoy his diverse, often exotic collection of plants. As with City Wall Park's corner tower, there is a sense the garden being a place to preserve and showcase objects of historical interest.

The "literati garden", of which the private gardens of China's Jiangnan region are the most famous example, favored a simpler aesthetic consisting of native plants and more naturalistic arrangements. Built with a philosophy of "high walls and deep courtyards

(高墻大院, gāoqiáng dàyuàn)", they were meant to be secluded spaces for the scholar's literary and spiritual contemplation, influenced by the so-called "hermit culture in the tumultuous Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589) period. Under this culture, educated men were encouraged to retreat from political life and cultivate their moral qualities in nature.

Stepping into a Chinese park still feels like discovering a private sanctuary: Residents walk slower and without fear of being run over by bikes, while the sounds of the city are muted behind the old melodies playing on the radio as seniors dance. But Zhang Jie, a landscape engineer attached to the Parks and Greening Management Bureau of Changsha, Hunan province, is not sure that such a place ought to qualify as a public park. To him, they fail to incorporate the first character of 公園, which is 公 (public).

Screened behind walls and fences, recreation takes place out of the sight of passersby, instead of being integrated into each resident's sensory experience of the city. This is a mode of life that Zhang calls "participatory". It was with the intention of increasing the participatory character of their communities that the Changsha government, earlier last year, gave the order to remove the walls around their public parks.

"Our country has always advocated ‘getting close to people's hearts', and there's no better way than to welcome them to our spaces," Zhang says.

These days, while many universities and military units are still set up like this, most urban residents of China find themselves living in their own apartments and crossing paths with strangers at every turn. In essence, this forces Chinese urban residents to adjust to a concept of "public space" where they must coexist with and respect the individual needs of others, rather than the socialist "communal space" in which they shared with others a similar, state-mandated style of living.

To Zhang, this is a positive development in helping residents "get to know their neighbors, their city, their government". However, it's also the source of much of the controversy in response to open parks in cities like Guangzhou and Shanghai, as residents' unease toward public spaces spills into the last remaining institutions that symbolized the old style of governance and security.

Zhang says he has not received any feedback from residents anxious about their safety or the suzhi (素質(zhì)), or "quality" of their fellow park visitors after the removal of the walls, though he admits that open parks are potentially more challenging to make safe and orderly for users.

The views from the ground are mixed. On a weekday morning, a knot of local residents exercising at the City Wall Park share their impressions of the park's good points and bad. They unanimously say that ease of access is the main reason that they come to the park, some of them every day.

Shi believes that her park has been more or less free from controversy due to the security investments taken by Beijing as a whole.

"Each city has its own concept of safety, a different threshold for accepting these open public spaces," she says. Residents of Guangzhou, would probably have different concerns about its safety compared to the capital. Fang agrees that the impression of public safety is not purely due to the presence of guards but the quality of Beijing residents. "This is a nice neighborhood," she stresses.

Courtesy of The World of Chinese, www.theworldofchinese.com

The World of Chinese