Swimming Outside the Box: The Municipal Pool as Social Infrastructure

This paper argues for and demonstrates how outdoor municipal pools in Australia provide unique and vital contributions to social infrastructure and sometimes, anti-social infrastructure. Most of these outdoor pools are more than 50 years old and require some degree of physical infrastructure renewal. There are frequent closures and threats of closure with media discussion of ‘budget blow-outs’ and funding sustainability. The lens of social infrastructure allows us to see what is at stake if these pools are written off as unaffordable and ‘replaced’ by indoor pools in multi-purpose leisure centres. This argument will take us away from what a pool is and what it costs, to what a pool does and what it affords. Outdoor municipal pools become social infrastructure through the novel experiences of moving, dwelling, and relating they afford. They work as ‘gathering places’ vivified by the bodies that move, rest, and work there, entwined with other bodies and more-than-human elements that include the physical infrastructure, water, other animals, the natural environment, and the weather as lived. Elaboration of these interactions reveals the need for, and qualities of, a more expansive definition of sociality than is typically used in discussions of social infrastructure.