The Schwimmverein Donaukanal (SVDK) exemplifies how social design can transform urban environments through community engagement. The initiative began as a small social design research project at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Its goal was to explore the potential of “urban swimming culture” and to challenge perceptions of Vienna’s Danube Canal, a neglected waterway running through the centre of the city. Five years later, the project has grown into a 300-member association, reviving a long-lost swimming tradition and redefining the canal as a shared public space.
This interview with Ana Mumladze Detering, SVDK co-founder, highlights how social design principles—multidisciplinarity, participatory engagement, and activism—shaped the project. From uncovering the canal’s historical significance, including its ties to Vienna’s Jewish community, to navigating regulatory gray zones where swimming is legal but discouraged, the SVDK reflects how social design bridges policy, public art, and urbanism. We also discuss key turning points, such as organising the first officially registered swim event in nearly a century, and how collaborations with urban gardening associations, local communities, and global initiatives like the Swimmable Cities alliance are inspiring similar projects. The SVDK is not just about swimming – it’s a case study in how social design revitalises public spaces and fosters a deeper connection between people and their urban environments.
How did you start the Schwimmverein Donaukanal, and what was the aim initially?
The Schwimmverein Donaukanal (SVDK), which translates into “Swimming Association of the Danube Canal”, has started as a Social Design research project. Social Design is a master’s program in the The University of Applied Arts Vienna, which encourages multidisciplinarity and, as indicated by the names of both the university and the program, adopts a highly applied approach to addressing social issues, raising awareness of specific challenges, and developing new frameworks for understanding them. So, as we were free to choose, we have chosen “urban swimming culture in the context of Vienna’s Danube Canal” to be our first semester research topic, which also meant that we had only less than half a year to bring it to fruition. And the four of us who have started it as a research project eventually also became the four co founders of the association.
Coming from different academic backgrounds, our multidisciplinary approach shaped the way the project started and what it is now. I’m a sociologist and cultural worker. My colleagues come from diverse backgrounds: Amelie is a fashion designer, Amanda is an architect, and Fabian is both a designer and a curator. We can say our expertise was synthesized and also translated into different outcomes of the research project.
The primary goal of our initial research was to understand why people do not swim in the Donaukanal. Transitioning beyond the university context, the project evolved to focus on revitalizing the Donaukanal as a swimming area.
Why did people not swim in the Donaukanal, and what makes you passionate about swimming in the urban environment?
Swimming is generally a privilege, requiring both the skills to swim and the feeling of safety to practice it in public spaces. For those in Vienna with these privileges, the main barrier to swimming in Donaukanal has been a total lack of fact-checked information. Our association, therefore, works to bridge this gap by providing reliable details, clarifying that swimming in the Danube Canal is legal, and educating people on how to do so safely & responsibly. Ultimately, the goal is to enable and equip swimmers to be independent & self-reliant. We’ve debunked many myths about the risks of swimming in the canal, but there’s still work to be done to make our movement mainstream.
Another reason why people avoid swimming is fear of doing it alone without examples to follow. To address this, we — the four co-founders — started swimming ourselves and later formed a members-based association to connect swimmers, ensuring no one has to swim alone and everyone can benefit from shared experiences.
What other urban swimming initiatives (historical or current) have inspired SVDK?
During our research phase, we explored various historical sources to determine whether it had ever been possible for a “critical mass” to swim in the canal. We soon discovered references to communal swimming, which unfortunately only occurred until the late 1930s and the onset of the Second World War. The reason for the disappearance of this tradition is that it was mainly practiced by the Jewish community that lived in Vienna, specifically in Leopoldstadt, which is one of the seven districts bordering the Donaukanal. It is also one of the districts that is somehow naturally divided from the other parts of central Vienna by the canal. There is a saying that Vienna is not built at the Danube, but rather at the canal, because the canal is actually what you see in the center, unlike the Danube river, which is quite far away from the center.
The population of Leopoldstadt was very prominent in the way they actually practiced swimming. So much so that they had very successful Olympian swimmers, many of them who were female. They all had this personal connection to the canal. This inspired us also to talk with a sports association that still exists in Vienna, S.C.Hakoah, whose president, Dr. Haber, had personal memories of his parents and grandparents swimming in the canal and was very happy that we were reviving the tradition.
Another source of inspiration came from other historical initiatives coming from around 100 years ago from many different European cities. The more we talked with people from other cities, the more we became convinced that this was a habit which, perhaps due to rapid industrialisation and the two world wars, gradually disappeared in most cities during the second half of the 20th century.
We have had the privilege of connecting to a community of like-minded professionals. For example, Chris Romer-Lee from Thames Bath in the UK or Tim Edler from Flussbad Berlin. It was truly an honor to engage with these pioneers in the field and eventually collaborate on projects. These connections played a crucial role in shaping how we situated our project.
Lastly, we see ourselves in relation to other social design initiatives. Over the past five years, the Donaukanal project has grown and changed a lot, but at its core, it’s still a prime example of social design. It focuses on public space, participatory and community arts, and serves as a bridge between urbanism, public art, and activism. Moreover, it acts as a mediator, balancing top-down and bottom-up processes within the urban fabric. This is where we position ourselves.
What was the state of urban swimming in Vienna before the SVDK started their project, and what is it now?
This year we closed the fifth swimming season and I have already noticed and seen people who are not connected to our association enjoying their swim in the canal. Although the idea of swimming in the canal was in the head of many people, I think that seeing our activities and seeing us swimming made a lot of other people courageous to also try it out. Therefore, the swimming culture has definitely shifted.
One key point I want to emphasise is that, while we operate as an association, we function within a bit of a regulatory gray area. Essentially, we are promoting swimming in waters where it is not officially recommended to, though it remains legally permissible. We base our judgment, and recommend that others swim here as well, on the fact that the City of Vienna has effectively managed its wastewater infrastructure for many years. Significant improvements were made in 2003 with the introduction of the EU Water Framework (Directive 2000/60/EC, 2000). As a result, we believe the water quality has been safe for nearly two decades. Finally, thanks to the Austrian Water Rights Act 1959 (as amended by BGBl. I Nr. 73/2018), we have the privilege in this country to swim or to be legally allowed to swim anywhere where there is a public natural water body, unless it’s otherwise specified.
The City of Vienna does not recommend swimming in the canal and, therefore, has little interest in sharing such knowledge with the public. However, we believe that the city needs as many swimming areas as possible. A similar argument applies to bike lanes. While the number of bike lanes has increased, there is still a need for more.
When it comes to swimming, the City of Vienna takes pride in its public beaches. It offers around 17 certified bathing spots including built swimming pools along the Danube of excellent quality, which are accessible at low prices and sometimes even free of charge. It can seem that we are actually in conflict with such structures. But actually we are basing our judgment on the fact that the City of Vienna has very good infrastructure and very friendly policy when it comes to wild swimming which enables us to legally practice swimming.
Is questioning norms to explore innovative and unconventional solutions a common approach in other Social Design master’s program projects?
I have been reflecting on this because I’m also part of another project which is the 1m2market: a tool and a space of opportunity that takes advantage of the 3-day exception rule of the Viennese markets, where private individuals without a business license are allowed to operate a temporary market stall. This is another project that also explored what is legally possible but not so obvious for people to do. Perhaps it’s a preference of mine and my colleagues. We’ve one way or another always gone this way: finding loopholes in the policies and then somehow exploiting them, instrumentalising them. I think it is one of the approaches of Social Design and generally of the way to practice social design here in Vienna. I think it’s a lot about innovation, and the full title of the master’ program is also “Arts as Urban Innovation”. The program is really looking at innovative policies or perhaps even communities that have had triggered innovations, to understand what are the factors to the success of this phenomena, what makes this work, why it is a good innovation and why would someone want to replicate it and apply it to another country.
We have worked on many, many different, really interesting topics. For example, in my hometown in Tbilisi, Georgia, there has been a revival of the night clubbing scene. I remember that Social Design Studio was there on a visit trying to find out what makes it the success that it is. There is always this kind of very observant, deep listening role that a social designer takes from the way we are trained. Trying to find those secret ingredients and replicate them or make them more accessible without ruining some critical aspects of the place we are intervening.
In the case of swimming in the Danube Canal, we saw rich potential in the idea because the practices and communities associated with swimming culture there had been eradicated from the city, but not for a very long time. The collective memory has a very short span, I think. Since the City of Vienna has a very rapidly changing population with a lot of students, and a lot of young people, I think people have just forgotten about it. This was a great opportunity to apply some social design strategies to bring urban swimming culture back to the public. The way the public responded, I think, is proof that this was a needed innovation in the city.
How do you collaborate with other local organizations, institutions, and stakeholders to achieve your mission?
Working on a topic related to the Danube Canal is complicated because 7 out of Vienna’s 23 districts border the canal. These districts hold some degree of ownership over the spaces within their boundaries along the canal but lack the authority to enact changes. Additionally, Vienna has a dual status as both a city and a region, which adds complexity. Finally, the national legislation must also align with EU directives.
Change takes a lot of time. We have realised this already from the very beginning and tried to find people that are like-minded, who are connected to the canal. And we tried to bring a very diverse pool of practitioners, from gastronomy owners that are situated at the banks of the canal, to urban planners and architects who worked on the Donaukanal partitur (basically a toolkit for zoning and using the canal as a public space that has been commissioned by the City of Vienna) and beyond connecting with water scientists from the University of Natural Sciences in Vienna (BOKU) and so on. So we tried to find as many collaborators as possible.
As an example of our collaborations, I can mention the “Swim Line”. The idea behind this project is to have different swim stops along the canal that together create a swim line, resembling a metro line. For a few years now, we have had two swim stops available and functioning. These are places where we host public events and provide our members with access to changing cabins and lockers. These stops are visible to all the users of the canal so people can actually know about the existence of this swimming infrastructure in the canal. The stops are located in two different urban gardening associations, practically public spaces areas along the canal. For us this is a symbiosis: urban gardening and urban swimming, as communal practices, have a lot in common. Besides, we are enriching their events program and their spaces with our infrastructure and with our community. It made a lot of sense to collaborate with them and we’re also open to find other collaborators who have similar practices along the canal in order to go to other districts. But at the moment we’re in the third and the ninth districts.
To what extent do you relate your project to the concept of placemaking?
I have the feeling that social design and placemaking go quite hand in hand. Especially after I joined the Placemaking Week Europe in Rotterdam, I felt much more close to that area of work. Even if in broad terms social designers do not relate to placemaking, in our case I see social design as placemaking. When we talk about the Danube Canal, we call it “liquid public space”. We see our practice as a way of activating a public space, a public good for common use, a thing that would not be possible without community engagement. What began as a small experiment with just four people has, over five years, grown into an association with over 300 members. I think that the image of us swimming in groups at least twice a week during the swimming season is the biggest asset we have. Being present in the canal helps us to engage more people who want to try urban swimming, with a snowballing effect.
We are activating the place by swimming. It can be a very privileged approach because in many parts of the city people want to swim but they can not. Since we understand the legislation and have the necessary infrastructure for swimming, we saw no reason to question whether we should start swimming in the canal.
We started it because this is the biggest, single most important technique we have for activating space: using it and being visible in the city. Swimming unites so many people. Basically, if you know how to swim and feel confident in your swimming skills, you can swim in the canal. However, we’ve recently started thinking about those who may not feel welcome or drawn to our initiative, as well as people who cannot swim.
At the moment we are operating only on crowdfunding resources which means we have quite a minimal budget that only takes care of the mini infrastructure that we have and some community events a year. But in the future we would also like to explore the opportunity of applying for funding that would allow us to engage with non-swimmers, understand why some do not swim in the canal, and what would enable them to do that.
We are already working on an initiative to address this issue within the Inclusive City project. Last summer, we aimed to engage young children – especially, those who cannot swim or are too young to swim in fast-flowing open waters – by creating alternative opportunities for interaction. Since the canal is a fast-flowing waterway, we developed other engagement techniques, such as using the water of the Danube Canal in various temporary playground installations along its banks. These installations offer children a safe and playful way to make their first contact with the water. Our goal is to broaden our approach and see ourselves as facilitators who provide opportunities for a wide range of people to connect with the Danube Canal – not just highly motivated swimmers who would naturally engage more easy.
What role do you think community engagement plays in the success of urban placemaking projects like yours? How do you involve local residents in your activities?
We take part in a lot of academic discourse, we attend events and seminars and conferences related to our theme. As we have started as a research initiative, we are still very connected to this world in terms of public engagement. We have had a very successful collaboration in 2020 with our first public appearance, an outdoor exhibition within the Kunst Haus Wien, an arts museum situated at the Hundertwasserhaus, an historical building next to the canal. From there, we had a very positive experience working with the press and media, which has been important for reaching and engaging with a wide range of age groups. In addition, public television and radio appearances have been the most successful ways to reach the general public. Following our appearance at Kunst Haus Wien we have been cited in many different publications and many different reports on television which helped us to break away from this bubble of the age group and the academic network that we had initially.
Breaking the academic and youth bubble had an impact in the composition of our organisation. Our members now range in age from 11 to 85. On the other hand, at times, it has also been quite challenging to engage with the press because the public opinion sometimes is very divided: there are a lot of negative comments around health risks of swimming in the Danube Canal, often fueled by urban legends and misinformation but we try to turn these critics into positive energy for us and see it as publicity. Our experience with the Kunst Haus has shown us how the public institutions can be a kind of platform to promote our initiative.
Could you discuss any unexpected outcomes and pivotal moments of your work that have impacted on the local community and the urban environment?
We started out with four people and now we have a very engaged community of 300 plus people and there’s so much knowledge and so many different skills involved. Basically every non co-founding team member has voluntarily engaged bringing their skills, their knowledge, and their network to bring the issue of swimming in the canal to the forefront. An unexpected outcome has been the accumulation of a significant amount of knowledge and skills.
One of the co-founders, Amelie, who is a fashion designer and a social designer, went on to found another association, Hybrid Dessous, that mostly deals with swimwear focusing on the relation between the body and the city. We are in a very symbiotic relationship because we are users of the space and our needs often inform how their collection will look like. We also have performances where we use their pieces. So it’s a very reciprocal, symbiotic relationship indeed.
There have been numerous initiatives involving the canal, but a major turning point came with the organization of an officially registered swimming event. Initially, we were quite pessimistic, as we faced a lot of negative feedback. However, last year we realized that our association had gained enough expertise to successfully host such an event. As a result, last summer marked the first officially registered swim in the canal in nearly a century: The Swim Parade.
This milestone was the product of a dedicated working group formed by new members of our association. It demonstrated that we don’t always need to operate in the shadows; instead, we can engage openly and be recognized as legitimate users and stakeholders of the canal. Although this year’s event had only 50 registered swimmers, we hope to grow our capacity in the future to include 300 to 500 participants.
I believe this could evolve into a new tradition while also reviving an old one. The Swim Parade has been one of our association’s greatest achievements, and I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished.
What is the structure and organisation of the association? What does membership entail?
The board of the association is composed of ten persons: the four co-founders, together with other actively engaged members. We meet on a monthly basis and we take the matters in hand, such as the official requests for collaboration from press to any event appearances, strategic decisions to be made, and the program of the association. What started as a summer season activity program has now also expanded to include winter swimming and basically work all year round together. Besides the board, there are many different working groups so if one does not want to be very actively engaged can still take part in a specific initiative. For example, the people that were in the working group of the Swim Parade formed a specific working group.
We have different formats developed over the years for wider community gatherings. Twice a year we try to gather all the members of the association. For example, every spring before the swimming season starts, we have a community retreat where we envision the upcoming swimming season. Similarly, in the fall season we have the members assembly where we look back and try to reflect on the swimming season.
Having been active for five years, we have recently started thinking about how to develop a more comprehensive strategy for what we hope to achieve by 2030, 2040, and beyond. If we manage to have enough resources, we might also create a participatory strategy process to envision, together with our members and other stakeholders, the future of the Donaukanal.
I think it’s very clear what our goal is: to bring swimming back to the canal, encourage others to join in, and revitalize this space as a vibrant swimming area. On a technical level, we aim to work toward officially designating the Danube Canal as an EU-certified bathing site. At the same time, we are promoting safe swimming by navigating the existing regulatory loopholes while growing our community. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive and can seamlessly coexist.
How does urban swimming impact community relationships, and relationships with nature and the urban environment?
This year, for the first time, we conducted a qualitative research project guided by one of our members. It was also her initiative, as an urban anthropologist, to develop this research with and for us. The findings will soon be published in a research article in an academic journal. What I can share for now is that Vera Penz has mapped out various dimensions of what we consider to be our impact areas through focus group interviews and participant observation, and the results have been very positive.
There is already a wealth of research demonstrating the positive effects of blue spaces—public water bodies—on the well-being of people living in urban areas. Drawing on insights from fields like well-being and public health, we sought to build on these findings by asking our members to self-assess the impact of blue spaces on their lives.
The results have been highly encouraging. Members report a heightened sense of belonging to their immediate surroundings and to the community of our association. Additionally, they develop a greater concern for nature through the simple act of swimming. For instance, we have a members-only group chat on one of the platforms, and whenever events like flooding occur (as recently happened in Vienna) or changes take place along the canal, members show keen interest. They actively discuss these topics and demonstrate genuine care for ecological issues. They view these natural spaces as extensions of their living environments—something they feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for. I hope we see more research like this in the future to validate these remarkable findings on the positive impact of blue spaces within our local context.
How is the SVDK involved in the Swimmable Cities alliance? How does being a member contribute to your work?
Since we have launched ourselves into the real world, we have been in exchange with many different cities. At first we started by getting in touch with other big cities along the Danube to have this kind of trans-Danubian solidarity and to acknowledge that we are part of a greater river family and that the river doesn’t stop at our doorsteps. What we do upstream affects cities downstream and so on. We have been involved in initiatives in Romania and in Budapest, and we also have friends in Belgrade in Serbia and so on.
We were also invited to visit cities in Western Europe. One of the most notable turning points was a colloquium – an academic conference – in Paris in the fall of 2023, which focused on rethinking swimming rights in France in light of the upcoming Summer Olympic Games. During this event, we engaged in discussions with sociologists and other academic professionals about the situation in France and shared our strategies from Vienna to inspire a similar approach there.
The discussions were particularly challenging because, unlike Austria and some other European countries where swimming is generally permitted unless explicitly restricted, France follows the opposite approach—swimming is prohibited unless explicitly allowed. This fundamentally contrasts with the principles of Austria’s Water Rights Act. Notably, this restriction applies to inland rivers and lakes, excluding coastal areas near the sea and ocean. Therefore, I believe it was an excellent initiative by the academics involved to bring attention to this critical issue. Perhaps this could trigger a more radical conversation around enabling swimming in as many places as possible and taking care of all the rivers and so on. We were called to share our expertise but we also wanted to promote the idea of a community of practice for European urban swimming initiatives.
I think our voice was received quite well. And a month after this meeting, we launched the community of practice digitally with initiatives from Berlin, Paris, Belgrade, Budapest, Călărași in Romania, London, other nationwide Initiatives in the UK, in Belgium and so on. So we started meeting bimonthly to exchange knowledge, to collaborate and to create this sense of belonging because many of us are kind of lonely fighters.
This initial group helped us to be positive about the future. We were constantly in exchange with what’s happening globally until we got in contact with Matt Sykes, who is the author behind Swimmable Cities Handbook. He’s also the co-founder of the Regeneration Projects from Australia, an organisation dealing with ecological revitalization and community practices around it. So this is how the initial group was formed: Matt Sykes from Melbourne, together with Tim Adler from Flussbad Berlin, Chriss-Romer Lee from Thames Baths in London, Sibylle van der Walt from Metz Ville d’eau, the convener of the already mentioned colloquium in Paris, Jerome Castex from Libres Nageurs in Marseille, and finally, me, representing the SVDK Vienna. We are the founders and formed the steering committee of Swimmable Cities alliance.
The alliance brought together people who somehow believe in urban swimming on a global scale. The Swimmable Cities alliance is actually a global movement with a multi-level collaboration in mind. We want to involve municipalities, international organizations like the UN, the EU and also industry pioneers to make it possible that urban swimming goes global. As an initiative it has a lot of potential.
I can leave you with a cliffhanger: there will be the first ever summit of Swimmable Cities next year bringing together placemakers, activists like us, but also industry and pioneer cities that believe in urban swimming. It will take place sometime between May and July in Paris – the city that has been the epicenter of this global movement in the last years.
Have you reflected on how to make urban swimming attractive to cities by the sea?
I think swimability should be looked at as a spectrum, an ideal to strive towards. If combined with the 15-minute city idea we could claim that it is a right to access a swimmable spot within 15 minutes from where you live or where you work. It is about accessibility. From where I live in Vienna, for example, only the Danube Canal would be accessible and not the Danube which is far and requires me to use more transport. These are just some of the things we consider.
It’s also been interesting to actually look at cities by the sea like in the case of Marseille. Very interestingly Marseille is a port city, it’s a city which is unimaginable without its connection to the sea. However, from our partners there, we know that it’s basically impossible to swim in the immediate surroundings of the City of Marseille, unless you go out of the city and find a cleaner beach on the outskirts.
What they’re trying to revive is actually this history of swimming in the very central area of Marseille, where they would like to have a sea pool installed which is fed by the sea water, salty water, and perhaps also filtered out. They’ve been sharing with us that people in Marseille are forgetting how to swim. There’s not much public infrastructure for learning how to swim. And it’s just really a sad reality to live next to the sea and not even have access within 15 minutes or to one hour to a clean area for swimming.
I think we will encounter more and more similar scenarios as we reach more new cities. Coastal cities have been blessed with more access and hopefully people also know how to swim there but consider the city New York City for example. It’s in the ocean, but its rivers, its water bodies have been so polluted that it’s unimaginable to swim there. So there’s this new initiative now backed up by the city and the state of New York with US $16 Million to install the first ever sea pool in New York City, which will be fed by filtered seawater and that’s going to open next year. The organisation behind this initiative, +Pool, is also part of the Swimmable Cities alliance. To conclude, I think that simply being close to water or the coast doesn’t necessarily mean the area is swimmable. What truly matters is the willingness of decision-makers to commit to change, which can happen quickly when the right motivated people are involved.
Interview by Jorge Mosquera
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