2024-12-13
29 分钟Matt Sykes, co-founder and convenor of Swimmable Cities, describes how our urban centres can band together to promote more swimmable urban waterways. Then Sebastien Ricard from Wilkinsoneyre unpacks the transformation of the Battersea Power Station and Mandy Sinclair visits Aaniin – Canada’s first fully indigenous-owned department store. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello and welcome to the Urbanist, Monocle's program all about the built environment.
I'm your host, Andrew Tuck.
Coming up, Paris provided an example and a reference point for other cities that are thinking about this relationship between their communities and their urban waterways and asking fundamental questions about how do we live in cities?
How did the Paris Olympics influence other cities to make their waterways swimmable?
This week's show is all about our relationship with water in our cities.
We'll explore a new initiative looking to get more urban centres on board with allowing their citizens the possibility to take a dip within city limits.
And also we delve into the transformation of London's Battersea Power Station and how it has created a new area on the waterfront of the British capital.
All that and more ahead in the next 30 minutes, right here on the Urbanist, with me, Andrew Tuck.
If there's one thing that the 2024 Paris Olympic Games taught us about improving our cities, it might be that cleaning up urban waterways so that citizens can and will be inclined to take a dip can be a tricky process.
What we know for sure is that the result, an urban oasis built for aquatic activity, is a boon to any public realm.
So how do we encourage more cities to take up the baton and make swimmable spaces for all?
Melbourne based Matt Sykes is an Australian urban thinker and landscape architect and the co founder and convener of of Swimmable Cities, an initiative from his company Regeneration Projects.
They're campaigning to make at least 30 cities swimmable by 2030.
So we invited Matt onto the show to tell me more about their methods and their ambitions.
Swimmable Cities is about empowering activists, actors and decision makers in the international urban swimming movement.
So just before the 2024 Paris Olympics, we helped kickstart a platform and in particular launched a charter which involves 10 principles that starts with the right to swim, that safe, healthy urban waterways should be accessible to all people, and it maps out a series of other dimensions that also integrate the rights of nature.
So now we have signatories from organizations spread out between over 50 cities and over 22 countries around the world.
Now, tell me you said this launched ahead of the Paris Olympics.
We saw in Paris the very complicated attempts to make the Seine swimmable.
What's your role in something like that?