This article was originally published on Fast Company , written by Sarah Amandolare
In 2019, several years before Olympic athletes dove into the Seine, a group of friends sought a place to swim in Metz, three hours east of Paris. Summers were getting hotter, and most municipal pools were either closed or at capacity. The group wanted to create a swimming area in the Moselle River, which originates 125 miles from Metz in the Vosges Mountains, and flows through the French city of roughly 117,000 people.
“It’s swimmable most of the time,” said Sibylle van der Walt, who spearheaded the group. “It’s much better than the Seine.”
They established Metz Ville d’Eau, a grassroots environmental organization, and partnered with university researchers to begin testing water quality at different sites along the river. So far, bacteria levels have generally been safe except after heavy rain, including in the Canal de Jouy area, which had a river pool from 1934 until 1982. Full results are expected in May 2025, according to Van der Walt.
Metz Ville d’Eau is part of the swimmable cities alliance, representing organizations from 31 cities in 16 countries that are pushing for cleaner and more accessible urban waterways. Last month, the alliance published a charter that lays out its principles and goals—including establishing 30 swimmable cities by 2030.
The group wants “a new status quo” of public access to urban waterways for swimming. Depending on the city and the waterway, that could be as simple as allowing swimming in a formerly polluted river where conditions have improved. Or it could require rewriting laws to allow filtered floating pools in rivers or periodically close waterways to shipping, for instance.
By creating a global umbrella for urban swimming initiatives, the organizers say, they hope to foster an exchange of ideas and prototypes. What works in New York or Paris or Metz could help guide efforts in other places.
“Instead of people trying to create the same solutions independently, can we work with those that have already been developed?” said Matt Sykes, founder of Regeneration Projects, a Melbourne-based sustainability consultancy that [helped start the alliance and is also an Actor in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration].