Swimming to work? How cities around the world are making their rivers swimmable again

I squint past my toes to the inky blue water below, suck in a final lungful of cold air, then pindrop with as much confidence as a baby penguin being nudged from its nest. The impact is more intense than I’d anticipated. “Maybe 40 year-old bodies shouldn’t fling themselves off five-meter diving boards?” I wonder as the icy water engulfs me. I feel like I’ve just slung back five espressos. My nervous system’s been jacked straight into fifth gear. I come up for air, grinning wildly, and wave to my friend: “That really hurt my bum!”

I’ve spent a lot of time floating in rivers. My work leading the Swimmable Birrarung project in Melbourne, Australia, is dedicated to this very thing: Connecting people with their urban waterways. The Birrarung (or Yarra river) runs through the heart of Melbourne’s CBD, but like so many other ‘city rivers’ in the world, over the last 200 years it has become a murky dumping ground for E. coli, trash, pollution and sewage. My work, alongside my colleagues at Regen Melbourne, focuses on changing this, with the view to build an interconnected corridor of swimming places for Melbournians to enjoy, and to embed inner-city swimming into the fabric of the city.

Making this happen takes long-term commitment and a lot of grit. Not only does it require cleaning up the river, it also involves overcoming myriad government and policy barriers, a multitude of significant legal hurdles, organizing and collaborating with a city’s worth of stakeholders, and drumming up support from business and industry. And that’s before you figure out who’s going to pay for it all.

It’s while bobbing around Copenhagen’s pristine Islands Brygge harbor bath after hurling myself in, I return to the question that has brought me all the way to Europe: How do we create a truly swimmable city?

From Paris to Basel, Melbourne to Rotterdam (and even Chicago), rivers are having a moment. Years of hard work to undo the damage industrialization and urbanization has inflicted on our waterways is finally coming to fruition—ushering in a new era of urban swimming, and recalibrating our relationship with these mighty bodies of water. But when it comes to nailing the ‘swimmable rivers’ brief, a few countries are way ahead of the pack.

My journey to experience Europe from its waterways begins at the world’s first Swimmable Cities summit in Rotterdam. The collaborative forum was born out of a movement that has its roots in many cities, including my hometown of Melbourne. Its purpose is to bring together this global community of people dedicated to rewilding city waterways; to share insights, swap stories and investigate what it really means for us to reclaim our rivers.

Being able to leap off a platform into clean water is about more than just the act of swimming. If we can swim in urban waterways, we are healthier, happier and safer.

The summit is a true meeting of minds. It draws everyone from British Olympian Toby Robinson and American Ultramarathon swimmer Katie Pumphrey, to a representative of the EU Council and Holland’s Global Water Ambassador to the UN, Henk Ovink. There’s also government officials, grassroots organizations and business leaders from across the globe.

The Swimmable Cities summit is hosted on the banks of Rijnhaven beach, a harbor basin on the south bank of Nieuwe Maas. “Rotterdam is a city shaped by water––and increasingly reclaimed by it in the best possible way,” the city’s vice-mayor, Pascal Lansink-Bastemeijer proudly tells us in his opening address.

Kicking (or splashing?) off with 200 delegates leaping into the Rijnhaven river, the three-day program features presentations, workshops and (of course) swimming breaks––all in service to promoting bold international action for waterway health, climate resilience, community wellbeing and urban waterfront regeneration. But why all the fuss?

Being able to leap off a platform into clean water is about more than just the act of swimming. If we can swim in urban waterways, we are healthier, happier and safer. ‘Swimmability’ in this context is a trojan horse: In order to make a river swimmable, we must first ensure it’s healthy, clean and thriving. In doing so, we increase biodiversity, tackle the effects of climate change and provide solutions to urban heating.

As Henk Ovnik highlights during the panel discussion, ‘Swimming as a City Superpower’,  “A swimmable city is a powerful tool to push for the rights of water for all people, biodiversity targets and sustainable development goals.” Healing our rivers might be a local ambition, but the potential positive impacts are global.

That we are gathering on the banks of the Nieuwe Maas—a tributary of the mighty Rhine, which flows through Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany, France and the Netherlands—is not by chance. The Dutch love to swim. And alongside cities like Basel, Copenhagen and Paris, Rotterdam is a poster child for urban river transformation.

Every day, I watch locals plunge off platforms into this beautiful swimming spot in the heart of Rotterdam. The ‘floating park’ includes vegetation cradled by timber boardwalks and Dutch-style seating. Next to it sits a modular floating office, beautifully designed to push the boundaries of sustainable and circular innovation. In keeping with the ethos of Rijnhaven, it’s been constructed to ensure a seamless continuum from river to building. And, yes, workers can leap directly into the water whenever they please.

All of this is just the beginning of an ambitious project to transform a dilapidated and unused industrial area of Rotterdam into a continuous waterfront landscape, with dozens more swimming spaces, a stretch of golden beach, gardens and bike trails.

Rotterdam is one of Europe’s busiest ports, but most of the shipping activity has now been moved further out of the city, making room for this water reclamation. The city has worked hard on increasing biodiversity, while investing in innovative and sustainable water management systems like green roofs and ‘Watersquares’—public spaces that convert to flood water storage in times of heavy rain. The work is constant, ongoing and always adapting.

The key to Switzerland’s swimmable river success boils down to one thing: Water quality. By far the least ‘sexy’ aspect of the swimmable cities conversation, clean water is the most important.

Cleaning up the Rijnhaven hasn’t been easy. Not all that long ago, this space was jammed with giant container ships. But the Dutch know a thing or two about water construction—after all, The Netherlands is a ‘delta country’ mostly built on reclaimed land. This makes the country especially vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels, and provides strong motivation to invest in improving biodiversity.

Follow the Rhine north and you’ll eventually end up in Switzerland, a country that evokes images of towering snowy peaks and lush green valleys. But it’s their pristine urban rivers that really deserve to be slapped on a postcard. The Swiss have spent decades cleaning up their waterways—buoyed by a mass environmental movement that kicked off in the 1960s, a time when Switzerland had some of the dirtiest water in all of Europe. As I learn, nowhere is this transformation more perfectly captured than in Basel.

The section of the Rhine that runs through Basel is a scene of picture-perfect swimming spots, swim-up bars, and blissed-out bathers attached to Wicklefisch swimbags, Basel’s iconic waterproof duffle. Swimming is now so deeply ingrained in the city’s culture that many locals stuff their business suits in a Wicklefisch and swim to work every day.

The road to get here has been long, and included a confluence of factors: Attracting investment for various sectors; strategically designing ways for swimmers to coexist with ships and rowers; and fostering a genuine cultural shift. But at the end of the day, the key to Switzerland’s swimmable river success boils down to one thing: Water quality. By far the least ‘sexy’ aspect of the swimmable cities conversation (it’s much easier to get people buzzing about floating saunas than E. coli measurements), clean water is the most important. 

Just like many European countries in the 1960s, Switzerland’s raw sewerage and stormwater used to flow directly into its rivers. Now, they enjoy some of the cleanest waterways in the world thanks to a huge investment in connecting 97 percent of the population to a central sewerage treatment plant.

And in 2016, the Swiss also legislated to clean up micropollutants, like drugs and household chemicals, from their waterways. The result? Switzerland now has some of the most swimmable and (judging by the hushed summit chatter) enviable cities in the world.

I arrive in Paris during an oppressive heatwave in early July, just missing the opening of the Insta-worthy ‘Eifelle tower’ pool, but in time to dip into one of the other two recently opened public bathing spaces, Joinville-le-Pont and Maisons-Alfort. I’m immediately struck by how passionately Parisians have embraced the Seine as a place to swim. It’s not lost on me that this was a very different story only 12 months earlier.

It’s unlikely while planning a romantic trip to Paris you’ve ever thought about sewerage. But the French sure have. Over the last decade, they’ve invested heavily in cleaning up their waterways, spending roughly EUR€1.4bn (USD$1.6bn) to ensure swimmers could back-stroke along the Seine at the 2024 Olympic games. A large part of the project involved the construction of an underground storage tank for sewage runoff, plus a large upgrade of their treatment plants. It might not be as eye-catching as the Arc De Triomphe, but it’s an equally impressive feat of engineering––testament to the hard work the French have put into returning the joie de vivre to their beloved river.

In one generation, Paris, Copenhagen, Basel and Rotterdam have transformed the culture and identity of their cities, reconfiguring people’s relationships with the natural world.

While it’s been illegal to swim in the Seine’s once-murky waters since 1923, the iconic waterway has long drawn Parisians to its banks. At the height of their famously sweltering summers, you’ll find office workers gathered at its edges eating baguettes,  friends sharing an evening wine, feet dipped tentatively in the water. Like most great bodies of water that cut through industrialized cities, the river is a magnet for residents.

When I slide into the modest floating lap pool at Joinville-le-Pont, observed by suave eagle-eye lifeguards, I experience a whole new Paris. I’m surrounded almost exclusively by locals: Effortlessly stylish women soaking up the sun’s rays, children giddily cooling off after a long day at school, office workers grinding out some serious-looking laps. It’s a Paris I’ve never seen or heard. Such is the transformative power of a swimmable river.

It’s the same feeling I have in Copenhagen where, toweling off after my icy plummet, I watch with both an inspired and envious heart, as locals arrive in waves to enjoy bathing in the center of their city—not thinking for even a moment that it could be some other way, that this water that laps about their famous harbor should exist exclusively for marine traffic and wastewater. It’s clear that the river is an extension of the people that live here. An extraordinary cyclical force teeming with life of all kinds.

Copenhagen’s harbor—twice the size of New York’s Central Park—has been clean enough to swim in for about 25 years. As such, the three main harbor baths, which are strictly delineated to allow the space to be shared with boats, electric public harbor ‘buses’, kayakers and stand-up paddleboarders, are teeming with activity. There are biohuts (artificial fish nurseries) to help protect young fish that co-exist alongside urban farming and fisheries, six separate stone reefs, a salt-water-powered floating jacuzzi (of course!) and even compact floating apartments built to accommodate students. It really is a full vision of a swimmable city.

In one generation, Paris, Copenhagen, Basel and Rotterdam have transformed the culture and identity of their cities, reconfiguring people’s relationships with the natural world. I know that the same thing is possible for Melbourne, and so many other urban centers around the world, because it’s happened in my lifetime.

Though regenerating one river might seem like a drop in the ocean when compared to the magnitude of the climate crisis, it allows us to move beyond the existential dread, reconnect with nature, joy and each other. Change comes fast when it’s needed. And returning our rivers to their swimmable origins has the potential to help solve the greatest challenge of our time.

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