Leshan Pocket Park, Shanghai

Leshang Greenland Pocket Park is the renewal of a roughly 5,600-square-metre 1980s neighbourhood green in the heart of Leshan community, Xuhui District, Shanghai, the only concentrated public open space in the surrounding area. Before renewal, its interior was dim, its facilities outdated, and its programme unable to meet contemporary recreational needs; yet it is embraced not only by housing but also by office parks, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, primary and kindergartens, and lies only 800 metres from Xujiahui. The client is the Xuhui District Greening Management Centre, the contractor Shanghai Xuhui Landscape Development, the lead designer Sun Yijia of VIA Landscape, with structural engineering by Hezuo Structure and facade consultancy by Shanghai Shiqin Curtain Wall. The renewal is organised around the character of 'joy' under the title 'Source of Shared Joy', weaving together spaces suitable for elders and children, strolling and viewing, resting and playing, reading and sharing, into an integrated public-good landscape for all ages and all hours. An 80-metre Corridor of Shared Joy is the main spatial thread; its long-span lightweight structure keeps sightlines and movement open inside and out and becomes the carrier of a genius loci half-hidden in the greenery. Under the corridor, planted scenes offer shaded rainy-day leisure, while shared reading rooms and park management rooms are integrated, responding to recreation, community governance and public management. Outside, the corridor steps back twenty metres from Leshan Road to form a fully street-facing green edge, improving the pavement and using gently folded, warm-coloured tree pits to simulate 'low gentle slopes', blending joy into the hill. Inside, the mood is natural, bright and stable, organised around the Source of Joy community stage with its musical dry fountain, encircled by custom fitness equipment and children's play, and outdoor seats placed by sun-path analysis; a roughly 400-metre loop jogging track ties exterior, underside and interior together. The project proposes a spatial logic of 'mountains modelled by water, mountains and water inheriting each other', drawing on Wang Shizhen's notes on Yishan Garden to translate traditional Chinese garden concepts of gathering and dispersal, movement and stillness, curved and straight, high and low, open and enclosed, into a contemporary design language that answers local residents' love of mountains, water and joy. White art-concrete seats fuse with planting to invite unscripted play, gravity-sensitive glowing benches surprise children, a five-millimetre sunken field extends the dry-fountain moment so that its post-show mirror becomes a child's next natural toy, and a step-by-scene unfolding lets every user find their own corner. As a representative pocket park of 1,000 to 10,000 square metres in dense Shanghai, Leshan Greenland opens eagerly to the street, couples paths and play spaces to raise capacity, and through whole-process public participation becomes a truly belonging community heart.