Public Comment

Five members of the People’s Park Community Advisory Board resigned in January, disgusted with the University of California. In that respect, for a moment, this unrepresentative, chancellor-selected group represented the community well. 

They were impatient, they explained in a public letter. Without public discussion, the group seemed to have simultaneously arrived at identical conclusions: that the university’s unwillingness to “implement” a new design for People’s Park before its 40th anniversary “undermines our credibility as board members.” 

Setting aside the issue of whether a chancellor-appointed group could have credibility with the larger community at all, consider that most of them were relative strangers to People’s Park by virtue of their annoyance with it, unlike those who play there, garden there, give classes there, or play music there. This group of five identified their personal constituency as “those who have encouraged us to initiate positive changes,” despite the fact that there exists no community-wide consensus about re-designing the park. 

It is useful, then, that this group has identified itself as the group that wants to change the park, and quickly, so that the constituency of people dissatisfied with the park’s current status can feel as if something has changed. And since this group strongly recommended a design competition, it is fair to suggest that any number of designs would have sufficed, as long as the park changed radically, thoroughly, and soon. 

For those with a long park history, it is rather like walking up to a tomato plant in April and saying, we know you have this tradition about taking months to ripen, and that there is some custom associated with ripening late in the season, but we’re feeling kind of impatient and we want you to ripen now. 

People’s Park is a desire path, taking its time to become what people want, what the neighborhood wants, what the university will allow, and what nature requires. A desire path is a term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is created by the natural use of animals and people, who generally find the shortest distance between two points. 

A desire path takes time to discover. The lines of riot-gear clad police have to leave, the scars of false arrests, beatings, and gratuitous legal snares have to heal. The rains have to come and go, so the course of underground streams’ effect on drainage can be understood. Anyone who thinks a design contest can answer nature’s most honest needs assessment over time is dreaming. 

People’s Park is a garden. Its imperfection is the best tribute to its history, as the university continues to rip out any popular improvements the university did not personally authorize. Still people come, people build, people garden, people play, sing, and dance. People build and create spontaneously together in ways that would be entirely different if they were sitting at a desk or attending a meeting, often with joy, with music, and with a sense of connection to the park’s true history, which can’t be found in a book or a museum.  

Let us thank those who want a solution for the park, and want it right away, for their service at seemingly endless, contentious meetings. Let us thank them for so ably representing the impatient people who can’t bear a park without finality, a park that changes in the natural ways that gardens always change. And let us remind them that, if you can’t take the time, please, stay out of the garden. 

Carol Denney is a Berkeley musician  

and activist.