The Swimmable Birrarung is a vast and ambitious project to regenerate our city’s iconic river so it’s not only swimmable, but healthy, clean and teeming with biodiversity. Regen Melbourne CEO, Kaj Lofgren, explains what’s currently standing in the way of this epic vision.

Regen Melbourne is an ecosystem of actors. We’re composed of over 200 organisations across all sectors, stripes and sizes, from the nonprofit to the for-profit and everything in between.

Our job as an ecosystem is to collectively find and make sense of the emerging opportunities for regeneration across the city. The Birrarung, and the act of regenerating the Birrarung, was already a raging pocket of potential. Various actors have been working on this for years – we didn’t come up with the idea. But once we identified the potential, our role was to help amplify and accelerate the work, expand the community, and build the capacity of all of those actors involved.

So what’s the plan, and what’s standing in our way? 

As Charity pointed out in her reflection last week, the first step of the process is one of sensemaking and gathering insights: diving into existing research, conducting new research, hosting design forums, and connecting with community groups and individuals across a range of sectors, industries and disciplines, so we can begin to map the existing systems surrounding the river. 

Through this work, we’re looking to identify and define what we know, and where the possibilities lie. You end up with two systems maps: one that shows how the system is currently operating; the other looking at reorganising the system, and orienting it specifically towards solving the challenges we face, which is where we end up with our six fields of actions for the river: 

• Reconnection and storytelling
  Changing Melbourne’s narrative around and connection to its most iconic and important river. 

• River Health
  How and where we can work to improve the physical health of the river.

• Business and Economy
  How we can mobilise business and the local economy to support and benefit from the regeneration of the river.

• Campaigns: Building a Movement
  Activities and communications that aim to rally and include community around the project.

• Legal, Policy, Political & Governance Systems
  Working within our current systems in order to change them. 

• Swimming Activations
  The act of literally activating Melbournians around the river – providing a glimpse of what a swimmable Birrarung could look and feel like. 

The flip side of these fields of actions are the challenges they’re responding to – the barriers impeding the vision. Namely, the river is in a poor state of health (though not as bad as it has been at other times during settlement); local business and economy are not organised, incentivised or motivated around a regenerated river; the public is not yet aware of the potential for a regenerated river; our current climate and biodiversity story is one of fear and anxiety – not hope and restoration; our government and economic systems are not oriented towards regeneration; and our day-to-day lives are not currently aligned with the river in any way. 

Of course, there are several boring challenges under the legal stream. For example, it's illegal to swim in the lower reaches of the river because it's a designated boating channel. Clearly, there's a commercialisation aspect that needs to be solved. There’s also the issue of public drunkenness: if we were to have a swimmable river, what would we need to do to ensure people didn’t end up in there after a night out? There are a lot of these types of questions, but they’re eminently solvable. Boring things tend to have technical solutions.  

The more interesting barriers we face are the barriers of imagination: Do people actually believe transformational change is possible? Do people think it’s a priority, given the myriad of other things they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis? Do people think we’re naive and immature to be striving for something like this? 

“You can't fight climate change or our intersecting crises with fear and survival as the only goal. You have to fight it with joy and hope. I think a Swimmable Birrarung is the ultimate beacon of what’s possible when you organise with joy and hope.”

And then there’s the barrier of the assumptions in our economic system, which are so focused on short-term cycles. Even among non-profits, engaging in work like this is hard because it’s so audacious and long-term that it’s difficult to unlock funding for – you can’t prove the impact in the same way that you can prove how many people you’re helping with a soup kitchen, for example. 

At a fundamental level, the economic system we’re living in makes it challenging to see a project like this through from start to finish, so that’s exactly what we are trying to change by virtue of our existence and our approach. By engaging over 200 organisations in this work, we’re aiming to tilt the system in our favour. The only way through it is as a collective.

It’s complex, no question. But it is solvable. There are examples of cities achieving what we’re striving for all over the world. Paris has just announced plans to make sections of the Seine – a river comparable to our Birrarung – swimmable by 2025. They’re doing it with a huge number of clever people, a lot of investment, and because they recognise the positive difference it’ll make to their community. The story has changed, and everyone is on board. 

The opportunities here are exponential. Think of all the large corporations that are currently scrambling to initiate projects that can help them meet their ESG targets or hope to become a leading ‘green’ or sustainable organisation. Think of the capital that could be unlocked once we’re able to convince these organisations that they should proudly be involved. And think of how we’ll be able to deploy that capital to accelerate activations and regeneration projects up and down the river, and build capacity among our network. 

The Yarra Riverkeepers’ inaugural Birrarung Riverfest in 2023, and the next event in 2024, is a fundamental piece of work that’s far more than just a festival. It answers a whole bunch of questions, and it enables us to bring all of our networks and capital, and pour it into this activation that’ll become way more powerful than if it was just one actor trying to run it on their own. Over the next year, we’ll be powering up to 10 more initiatives like this: real projects with specific goals. 

It’s worth mentioning, too, that this work isn’t linear. We don’t go from A to B, or necessarily solve problems one by one. It’s like a spiral that loops back on itself – there are many things happening all at once, and it’s our job to hold them, to connect the dots at the right times, to intervene in the right places, and to deploy the right solutions at the right times.

Again, it’s complex. But you can't fight climate change or our intersecting crises with fear and survival as the only goal. You have to fight it with joy and hope. A Swimmable Birrarung is the ultimate beacon of what’s possible when you organise with joy and hope.

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