Swimmable Cities: The Final Frontier of Public Space?

We just passed October 31st, which is World Cities Day. It is a global observance that aims to highlight urbanisation trends, challenges and visions for sustainable urban development.

We often talk about the role of sport in creating more sustainable and livable cities. From active transit, to healthy citizens, to reducing carbon emissions, sport interacts with the city in so many ways. This is something that I have personally become very interested and passionate about over the past few years. How I interact with my city, and any city I visit, is often through recreation. 

We’ve talked about the intersection of sport and play with our cities before. Whether through placemaking, our streets, active transit, or our parks and green spaces: sport is everywhere. One thing that we haven’t really discussed in depth, until now, is urban swimming. 

Cities grew up around lakes, rivers, harbours, oceans. Water is integral to the history of nearly every city. And I believe that it is also integral to the future of our cities. Integral for the future because, in many cases, it is the final untapped public space left in our cities. I think really since the pandemic we have seen a huge increase in efforts to reclaim city streets and roads, making them places to play, enhancing our parks and green spaces, and incorporating active transit into our daily commutes, and recently I have seen a huge increase in interest in our blue spaces. The lakes, the rivers, and the oceans that are on the doorsteps, or run through the cities themselves.

As many people will know, I was a competitive swimmer, I mostly swam inside (as you do in our cold Canadian climate), but I did do a few open water events during the summer months (although winter swimming is also on the rise). But swimmable cities go beyond this. The concept of a swimmable city, doesn’t just mean that competitions can take place in lakes and rivers that run through our cities, but that these lakes and rivers become an essential public space that serves and is accessible to everyone in the community.

Urban swimming is a really important way for people to connect with the places they live, or to the places they travel. When I was in Copenhagen, I loved exploring their urban swimming infrastructure. It was so much fun. When I was travelling in Switzerland, it was an evening routine to walk down to the lake in the city and go for an evening swim. So many cities have already been incorporating swimming into the fabric of their cities and their citizen’s lives. More and more people are asking “why not in my own city?” 

In some cities, the cost to clean up our waterways is high. But so worth it. Perhaps most famously, the River Seine that goes through Paris was opened in 2025 to people after a century-long ban. This was a key legacy of the 2024 Paris Olympics and was widely reported on that it cost over one billion euros to clean. In the first few months since opening to the general public in July 2025 to the end of September 2025, there were some 100,000 swimmers. Chicago also opened its river for the first time in 2025 after over 100 years being closed. In some cities, like Bern, Switzerland, people actually commute to work by swimming on the river. I saw this for myself when I visited, and it was incredible to see.

Even in Scandinavian cities like Stockholm, Copenhagen and Helsinki, all cities that are not known for their warmth, have spaces for swimming in their waters (winter swimming is popular here). Copenhagen has many, and I was able to experience one for myself when I was visiting. Urban swimming truly is a culture and it can be adopted and fostered in many places.

The concept of swimmable cities has been slower, I think, to take hold in Canada. But we have seen some progress and lots happening. L’Oasis du Port de Quebec is the first harbour bath in North America.The National Capital Commission (NCC) has recently opened the River House, a space for the public to access the Ottawa River. The NCC also opened a swimming spot in Dow’s Lake, part of the Rideau Canal. Even in Calgary, located in the landlocked province of Alberta, the river is an essential part of the city. Many people go swimming in and float down the Elbow and Bow Rivers and a river wave park has even been proposed to create a space for surfing on the Bow River.

This global sentiment has been tapped into by a global alliance called Swimmable Cities. It was launched at the start of the 2024 Olympics to champion the right to Swim and Nature Rights. This alliance believes that “Urban swimming culture is a unique expression of life in cities and communities, reflecting the distinct interplay of sports, recreation and tourism in each given place, as well as natural and cultural heritage.”

Access to our waterways is absolutely a huge part of how we interact with our cities. Part of the problem is that after many decades of industrialisation and inadequate plumbing infrastructure and garbage ending up in our water, our waterways have been polluted. 

But these efforts have not only been beneficial to humans, but also to wildlife. The River Seine was once considered to be biologically dead, but it is not alive with fish and other marine life. In the 1970s, apparently there were only three fish species left in the river. Today, after the extensive restoration, there are now nearly 40 that have been registered.

Restoring our blue spaces with nature based solutions may also help our cities adapt to a changing climate through flood mitigation planning. By restoring our water fronts to natural ecosystems, we can reduce the risk of flooding in our cities. Not to mention the benefits to humans who live in cities, as water can offer a reprieve from urban heat islands created by copious amounts of concrete used to build our cities.

It is interesting that we have all accepted that blue spaces in our cities are essentially off limits. I think there is a very large consensus that our green spaces are absolutely vital to the health of a city and the liveability of the city. We just went through a municipal election campaign in the city that I live in, and everyone talked about our parks and making sure they were clean, safe and accessible to everyone. But no one talked about the two rivers that go through our city. It seems that our blue spaces are off limits to everyone. They are untouchable for some reason.

This type of thinking is very difficult to change and requires a lot of work to change because it is engrained into our culture. But I think, because of the work that has been done in the past few years about reclaiming our streets and reprioritizing green spaces in our cities, I think more people are starting to look at our blue spaces and are starting to think about them in the same way as we typically think about our green spaces: as an integral part of the city.

One of the best ways to experience a city is through sport and recreation. By investing in these spaces, we can make our cities more livable for not only people, but wildlife. We can and should do this. There are tangible social, economic, health and environmental benefits to making our cities swimmable. Are blue spaces the final frontier for public space? I think so.