Reimaginning Urban Swimming - with Sander Belmans, Barbara Enckels and An Schepers

Nice.

And if you look back, now you've worked together for a couple of years already, what were the hardest nuts to crack to make this happen? What was the most difficult? Because you mentioned there was no policy context to have swimming in open water.

No, but

we had a lot of legal framework to figure out.

So that was really challenging to get a permit and all the exceptions on the legal framework that was existing at that moment.

So to get the permit and create the swimming zone, that was challenging in the beginning.

and then when we started yeah it's a pilot project so you're facing a lot of things that you don't think of it in advance and then it's step by step improving it every year a little bit better

to me a main thing was the moment the minister said just make a pilot project that gave us the opportunity everybody accepted there is no legislation fits well yeah just try and find something and that's that's an important thing that gave us the safety okay we're allowed to to give the city some opportunities and the city knew at that moment already we have to take we have to take into account that the Flemish waterway also have some concerns on safety on shipping and things like that so that was a main thing for us to get a big step forward

yeah amazing and how what was the most difficult for you in the Flemish waterways why do you do you think like oh this was really difficult to to address or to consider or to bring it

yeah again there is no no strict legislation so you have to find ways Okay, you have to take into account shipping, but how much shipping and how much do you take into account? How much space do you give to the swimming pool? Things like that.

And the permanent swimming pool is a technical thing.

How are you going to build it? Temporary swimming pool is quite easy to build.

It's just putting pontoons on the water.

But the next one will be bigger, more beautiful, permanent.

How are you going? Do you want to make it cheap, but quality, or you want some good quality? So that's interesting how to deal with it.

Nice.

For you, Baba, Anne?

Yeah, I was really always looking to the permanent infrastructure.

For me, the legislation is quite difficult to get to a permit because there they can't make exceptions.

So that's the difficult one for me.

And then you see that we are not used to have these structures and the legislation isn't

So it's not designed for this kind of tryouts.

There is no

checkbox swimming pool in a building permit.

So you have to discuss what are we building and does this fit what on legislation, what do you do with the rainwater falling on the swimming pool.