As Auckland Council votes on whether to outsource the management of 22 of its pools and leisure centres to the private sector, Salene Schloffel-Armstrong argues for their importance as key sites of social infrastructure in our cities.
Today, Thursday, August 1, Auckland Council is voting on a proposal to outsource management of 22 of its pools and leisure centres to private actors. If you didn’t know about this, it’s no surprise – I only found out about it through a Public Services Association press release sent a few days ago – but the council has already gone through a business case process and is set to make the decision without any consultation with the public. As a geographer who studies public space and the importance of sites of social infrastructure in our cities, this proposal, and its short deadline, has aggravated me.
It was during the summer months earlier this year, trying to finish editing my thesis – and swimming as frequently as possible at Parnell Baths to keep my spirits up – that I started to think more about the role of the swimming pool in the lives of Aucklanders. From there, during semester one I taught a paper at the University of Auckland that included pools as key sites of social infrastructure in our cities.
Currently in Auckland, 19 leisure facilities (including my favourite, Parnell Baths) are already managed by private contractors. The 22 that currently remain under council control will have their futures decided today.
What does this proposed change of management mean? As recorded in a Sport New Zealand report from 2013, across Aotearoa 64% of territorial authorities managed one or more of their leisure facilities in-house. At that time only 21% of TAs contracted out management of services to private providers. This vote would put the management of all 43 pool and leisure centres in Auckland into private hands. As highlighted by the PSA, outsourcing the control of these facilities to private contractors carries with it varied and significant risks, without guaranteeing any “meaningful savings”.
Sport New Zealand also noted in its report that some of the risks possible in a private management structure of a leisure facility included fundamental shifts in the ethos of the site, from a commitment to social outcomes for their local community, to a “profit-motive that may not align with the values” of the area. This report also posited another potential risk, where “a contractor may attempt to cover up an emerging problem for fear of jeopardising the contract or the relationship”.
Negative outcomes such as these have been seen recently in a number of pools and leisure centres that are privately managed. Recently criticism has emerged around management concerns and safety problems at several pools run by Belgravia Leisure in particular, in locations in both New Zealand and Australia.
Although under the terms of this proposal the council would maintain ownership of the centres themselves, I see this outsourcing of management and control as a clear example of the “slippery slope” of privatisation. This can also be cynically understood as a process that – either consciously or unconsciously – manufactures the obsolescence of these facilities.
In simple terms, the less people use these services, the more they degrade, and their reputation as facilities shifts. Then, when there is more pressure to further privatise the facility there is often less resistance from the public, due to the changed quality of the service over that period of time.
From my research, I argue that a successful site of social infrastructure needs to be widely accessible to the public, something that is most achievable when its management is accountable to its community. The importance of a pool as a form of social infrastructure is tied to its presumed accessibility or openness to all, and how it can operate as a space of encounter across difference. Researchers continue to draw attention to the multiple benefits of public spaces where people can spend time with others, recently pointed out as playing a major part in the fight against growing loneliness.
And yet these pools as spaces of leisure also have distinct functions beyond sociality. We have a long history of swimming baths in this country. As spaces of leisure, recreation – and education: to teach people to swim, in part to keep them safe within our broader environment.
Just as this proposal is short-sighted, so are our memories, as the construction of many swimming facilities in the early 20th century was motivated by a particular sociocultural context neglected in this discussion. At this time drowning was so common in our country (for Pākehā predominantly) it was referred to as the “New Zealand way of death”. The construction of swimming infrastructure was part of a movement to educate the masses in water skills, and to create “morally and physically safe” spaces for people to swim. Gretel Boswijk has written about the emergence of these swimscapes of Auckland city, often in connection with the construction of living memorials in the wake of World War ll.
These early motivations for building our leisure infrastructure are not obsolescent, as safe, accessible places to learn to swim are still key for our children, new migrants, and other groups before they interact with the inherent unpredictability of our oceans, rivers and lakes.
Yet new reasons for maintaining our public leisure facilities are also emerging. Planners worldwide have begun to focus on swimming pools as key social infrastructures in our shifting, heating climate. As heat extremes grow, access to safe and affordable places to swim will become increasingly important. Public pools have a key role to play in the sustainability of our cities and communities.
As pools – and other spaces of leisure – become more necessary in the form of climate infrastructure, the increasing inequality in relation to their access has become even more distinct. As Allie Volpe writes for Vox, today in the United States “there are about 309,000 public pools in the country, compared to 10.4 million private ones – a staggering disparity”.
In Aotearoa, we understand swimming as a central part of our cultural identity, an activity we can share together. Yet if we accept these growing disparities of access and permit increased privatisation of these spaces, this experience of swimming as a public, shared joy becomes only a myth.