A lot of the work around swimmable cities is spent imagining what they could be like. This is a necessary process, because for a lot of cities, their rivers haven’t been safe to swim in for many decades and current residents have forgotten what their city rivers, creeks, streams, harbours, estuaries, and even canals have been and could be like.
Even as we imagine new versions of our cities, we look to the past for evidence that people used to swim there. We scour library and newspaper archives for images of people diving, splashing and swimming the waters we no longer immerse ourselves in. We listen on stories of ancestors and childhoods spent at the water’s edge, feet dangling and wet. We read the laws that were put in place to protect the public from the dangers of boats and barges that took over waterways the way that cars take over land.
It’s all there in black and white – the images and words we need to know what is possible.
While depths and strong currents have always been a danger to city swimmers, the real thing that prevents us from swimming now is the health of the water itself; or the lack of it.
These days urban waters are littered with shopping trolleys, e-bikes, sanitary waste, and plastic bags and bottles. They’re cloudy and foaming with sewage and chemicals, and all the related bacteria that come along with those. We can see why not to swim there, and even if we can’t see it, water quality test results drive the point home.
To swim in that water would be to take the pollution into our bodies. To swim in that water would be a risk to our health and wellbeing. It would be to become the pollution, the bacteria, the chemicals, the sewage, and the oil.
And many people do take the polluted risk.
A recent, and famous, example of this are the triathlon and marathon swim events held in the Seine for the 2024 Paris Olympics. Despite days of unacceptable pollution levels, on the morning of each event, the water was judged to be clean enough to swim in. There was much debate about how blurry the “safe” line was, but the swimmers dove in and ploughed on through the current.
For the Paris 2024 organisers, not to host these swimming events in the Seine would have been to concede failure on a project that had become a much-promoted and hallmark legacy of the Games. Of course, this river cleaning project was not for the Olympic Games. The infrastructural work required to divert stormwater and runoff was proposed and started long before Paris 2024 was announced, and the work will continue long after the Games circus has moved on. Nonetheless, the Games were a point in time to reveal the success of the undertaking to an international audience.
But the focus on whether or not it was safe for athletes highlights something important about people and rivers. It highlights that, even though cleaning up river waters is of great benefit to many beings and critters, we, the people, remain central to measuring water quality.
As we clean urban waterways, we also clean up the ecologies that host life of great biological diversity. Fish and birds, otters and dolphins, insects and crabs and eels and platypi, algae and corals and lichens and reeds. And these critters all find their way to the water and each other much sooner than we do. They swim and thrive in water we’re still advised against immersing ourselves in.
Even our pets swim before we do! I often see dogs chasing balls thrown by owners into water they would never swim in. I’m not criticising that – the owners take great care of their resilient pets and would not throw the ball into waters they weren’t confident their pet was sage in. But they’re still able to swim safely before we judge ourselves able to.
And so, we, the people, remain the final frontier of measuring water health. We are the critters so sensitive to the water quality of the rivers and bays our cities are built around, and which we’ve polluted ourselves out of.
Humans are the ones whose ears become infected, who develop gastro conditions, whose eyes itch after swimming in polluted water. We are the ones who can taste the foulness on our tongues, see it clinging to our skin, who wash it quickly from out of our swimwear and between our legs.
We are the indicator species that defines when water is swimmable, drinkable, healthy or not.
It’s not the elusive splashing of an otter or platypus that will tell us we’ve arrived, which I so commonly and constantly hear folk describe when they imagine what a swimmable river will be like. Those critters already there, living in the water conditions we have made for them. We should ensure they live in ecologies as healthy and biodiverse as possible, but romanticising their presence in the water as the measure of success is naïve.
While remaining a human-centered approach to thinking about healthy ecologies, this is why working towards swimmable, drinkable waterways is so important. It is our presence in the water that reflects the health of the water. Our health after swimming offers evidence of environmental change, and the diversity of entire communities in an ecology. We are the canary in the coalmine, the seahorse in the bay, the kelp forest just offshore. We don’t live in the water, but our willingness to immerse ourselves suggest the water is clean enough for so many more beings than us. Or not. The reverse is true as well.
It’s us, humans, who are the true indicator that urban waterways are really improving. As in Paris, it is our immersion in the rivers and bays that indicates the success of our regenerative efforts.
