Swimming is a strangely intimate city activity – people stripping off their clothes to play together or swim side-by-side in common waters. Sometimes these spaces emerge by design while in other cases they are spontaneous interactions in public waters, makeshift spaces or even after rains that flood the streets.

This Badeschiff in Berlin was originally a temporary art installation but the locals loved it so much it was converted into a permanent attraction – a swimming pool in the middle of the city, covered for year-round use and complete with its own bar (this is Germany, after all).

Outside of Copenhagen, the Kastrup Sea Bath is more an interactive sea structure than a well-defined swimming space – a way to provide infrastructure for water activities without detracting from the boundless beauty of the surrounding sea.

The Copenhagen Harbor Bath abstractly resembles a sunken ship and is likewise more a framework for fun than a structural necessity, defining space within the clean city harbor and creating places for shallow and deep swimming as well as diving.

Dumpster diving takes on an entirely new meaning in this incredible urban swimming pool project in Brooklyn, New York, in which a few days was all that was needed to transform a set of dumpsters into useful public swimming spaces.