The Pazhou area has been transformed over 20 years with clusters of dense urban villages surrounded by farmland and interspersed with factories and warehouses now almost completely replaced by dense highrises, a huge convention centre and a range of other urban activities. Of the urban villages the historic Huangpu Village has been preserved and upgraded, and the Xinzhou Village remains for now. The normal pattern is for for gated highrises to move in, often car-dependent and presenting deadening walls to what used to be a lively streetfront. Pazhou has at least in some places skipped the car-oriented design and is in many ways a model of urban development. Rather than turning their backs on the waterfront or privatizing it, many new developments highlight the river views and access and incorporate high quality public spaces into their design.
The skate park here perfectly embodies Pazhou's excellent approach to the urban design of there area, focusing on active uses - there are jogging tracks and cycling tracks in addition to the riverfront pedestrian promenade - and providing a facility sorely lacking in most Chinese cities. The best cities in the world like Copenhagen and Rotterdam have multiple skateparks of varying sizes spread around the city, freely open to the public. Guangzhou is joining the ranks of great cities by providing these kinds of quality public spaces. By accident or design it's located under the bridge which provides welcome relief from the summer sun.
The skate park was built in 2020 and opened in 2021 and is still not very well known so tends not to be too crowded. As in skate parks around the world there is a distinct cadence in usage: few users early in the morning, smaller children mostly on scooters from around 10AM, a mix of skateboards, scooters and age groups in the early afternoon, and then mostly skateboarding teenagers and young adults in the later afternoon and into the evening.