San Francisco to Host Love Parade next October

[Jrin]

San Francisco to Host Love Parade a la Berlin
NCM Online, Paolo Pontoniere, 07/21/2002
The German National Broadcasting Company, Deutsche Welle, was sufficiently impressed with San Francisco event planners to feature them in a full-length online article. The Americans were in Berlin for the city's annual Love Parade in preparation for the San Francisco Love Parade they're planning for October. Typically, the Berlin event brings young people from around the world to the German capital.This year, the Love Parade happened on July 13 with floats and ravers representing 45 different countries, according to Deutsche Welle.

Joshua Smith and his colleague Ron Wong, the deus ex machina behind this October's upcoming San Francisco Love Parade, were in Berlin to learn firsthand about organizing a similar event in the Bay Area.

"This is the great thing about the Love Parade" Smith told DW, "it is something people from all nations can partake in, something which can be exported all over the world. The main message is to have fun. And to party is a pastime, which is universal," declared Smith. This year, in the wake of September 11, the Berlin Love Parade's twin themes were peace and cross-cultural understanding.

Although in its fourteenth year, the most recent Berlin Love Parade saw diminished participation in comparison to past years, when one million would typically attend. This year's event drew just 500,000 youth.

The Love Parade's popularity peaked in 2000 when 1.4 million people partied through the streets of the German capital. That year marked the beginning of the end of public funding of the parade, with city commercial enterprises sponsoring many floats and satellite events. This year's parade, as distinguished from past parades which used public monies, was entirely bankrolled with sponsors' money.

Some things about the Love Parade remained unchanged: the parade produced its usual thousands of pounds of garbage, and caused, as it usually does, a few million dollars' worth of damage to the Tiergarten, Berlin's centrally located, most frequented public park. The Tiergarten is to Berlin what Central Park is to New York, and Golden Gate Park is to San Francisco. In 2001, miffed by the amount of human urine and feces that revelers had left in the Tiergarten, environmentalists obtained a postponement of the parade and had Berlin's city government impose a series of requirements--including hauling the garbage away--on Planetcom, the group responsible for organizing the event.

At that time, it seemed that those opposing the event might have been able to rally public opinion in favor of banning the Love Parade. But a Berlin court ruled that the event had become one of the city's major historical events, as well as a lucrative tourist attraction, so that organizers were able to plow ahead with their event planning.

This year, the scaled-down parade generated fewer problems. But it was also less of a money-maker for the city, prompting a debate about whether the Parade may have reached the end of its useful life, and whether the energy used to plan and execute the event might be better spent in addressing Berlin's current social and economic problems.

As San Francisco gears up for its own Love Parade next October, one would hope that local organizers and public authorities recognize the kind of problems the city will face in hosting an event of this kind and in dealing with its aftermath.