Dowell Yingyue Community Park

Developed by Chongqing Xing'an Industrial and landscaped by Shenzhen Yi'an Design, the Dongyuan Yingyue community park, designed in October 2019 on an 8,184-square-metre site on Baosheng Avenue in Yubei District, is revisited here a year or more after it opened in early 2020. The project is an urban-renewal pocket park built around a retained pond and large original banyan trees, repairing an abandoned corner into an open community scene. The review follows three threads. Around the pond and banyans, the repaired ecology has attracted morning tai chi, neighbours chatting on benches, grandparents collecting children from school and children wading deep into the pond without fear; residents say the air is good and they come every morning to walk. The original landscape is deliberately left wild, so children can listen to falling water, watch duckweed and small fish, and explore nature in a city where that experience is otherwise rare. At the 'Dongdong Horse' playground, a creative, energetic centre especially on summer evenings, children invent their own ways of using the equipment, climbing down slides and jumping up steps, while parents and grandparents join in; the shallow White Stream invites children and adults alike to wade, and the interactive water-stepping wheel draws queues of laughing families. The third thread is the street itself: residents walk dogs here, young people stroll with pets, neighbours pause to chat, and the park has quietly become a necessary part of daily urban life. The review argues that what the team actually cared about was the relationship between activity and environment, and the possibility of returning to nature inside the city; years later, residents will remember the pond, the laughter and the feeling of a community grown up together.