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Mobs at Luxun Park show city’s woeful lack of open space for public enjoyment
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IT isn’t always as easy as a walk in the park. After a year of renovation, Luxun Park reopened to the public last Thursday. But it was pandemonium when the park in northern Shanghai’s Hongkou District, built in 1896 and named after the great left-wing writer Lu Xun, opened its gate and let in visitors.
Hundreds of people, mostly senior citizens doing their morning exercises, scrambled to get in and occupy a coveted spot to the exclusion of others. According to TV news reports, it was still dark when old people began to gather in front of the park’s main entrance. A few were caught when trying to climb over the wall into the park. The frenzy resulted in bitter quarrels and scuffles.
In a news photo published by the Shanghai Morning Post, a gray-haired old man was tussling with another two men, their arms entangled, eyes bulging. In the foreground of another photo, a few stone-faced SWAT officers were observing the angry crowd at a distance, ready to intervene at the first sign of trouble.
A look at the dramatic pictures would convey the perception that there ws chaos and the police officers were sent to restore order. Outsiders would naturally wonder, why would a visit to the park turn that nasty?
It is nasty, but not unexpected. Luxun Park is where the 4,000 members of 50 registered civil groups frequently go for fun and sports.
Regular visitors do morning exercises, practice tai chi, dance in what has become their “stamping ground,” one they have to share with others.
With so many people vying to lay claims to limited space, clashes over “turf” are inevitable. Although the park’s space designated for sports and recreational activities has expanded by 5 percent after the renovation, the increased space provides only a very small relief.
Expecting the huge crowd, the park’s management was prepared.
To avoid disorder, park officials even summoned leaders of the 50 civil groups, asking them to negotiate a peaceful end to their competition for turf. During the negotiation, Zhang Xinhua, the park’s Party chief, said she hoped that every group could show some civility and stagger the time of their activities, so as to quell the clamor.
Easier said than done. In this struggle for space, few are willing to step back and make compromises.
The messy situation at Luxun Park is very emblematic of the problems facing many public parks in Shanghai. It reveales the heightened tensions between huge demand for and inadequacy of Shanghai’s public goods.
As the city fast becomes an aging society, many retirees choose to spend their entire day dancing or socializing in public squares. This is essentially a healthy pastime, but is sometimes annoying, as the noisy dance music played on loudspeakers often triggers complaints from nearby residents. Confrontations are myriad.
Not a playground
Public parks, to which admission is free, deliver old people from a sedentary and solitary lifestyle. But their sheer numbers have turned usually serene parks into rowdy places.
Besides, as long as parks remain public, rendering them to be used exclusively by a few would be unfair to others. Luxun Park is not a playground. It is too steeped in cultural heritage to be treated as one.
I visited the park once before it was closed for its facelift. It was 4pm, yet the place was still teeming with hordes of people, some dancing, some performing swordplay, some singing old Soviet-style songs, with noticeable joyfulness.
It’s hard to imagine where else they can go for such collective fun in this big city. For all its trappings of modernity, the city seems slow in creating more recreational venues suited to its changing demographics.
In other words, fewer skyscrapers, more public squares and parks.
Of course, this will be hard in a city where land is enormously expensive and always reserved for the highest-bidding developers.
As things stand, this means the park management have to be resourceful in crowd control. Selfishness is human nature, so a code of conduct is needed to suppress selfishness and encourage civility at Luxun Park, which is now more or less described as a jungle, governed by the law that the fittest survives.
Some commentators are suggesting innovative ways to regulate the flow of visitors, such as charging for extended stay, or holding dancing or martial arts competitions, of which the winners get to stay longer. These measures are worth trying. The overwhelming crowd at Luxun Park has presented a new challenge to urban management.
Success in overcoming that challenge will provide a template for addressing similar issues in not just Shanghai, but the whole country as well.
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