Dumpster Diving: Aquatic Leisure, DIY Aesthetics, and Performance of Public Space in Macro Sea’s Mobile Pools

In August 2010, as part of Summer Streets, a citywide initiative to celebrate “New York City’s most valuable public space [its streets],” the Department of Transportation installed three mobile pools, made from dumpsters, on Park Avenue between 40th and 41st streets. The choice of dumpster swimming pools as keystone attractions for 2010 Summer Streets is not only testament to the need for a summer cool-down but also participates in the long history that public pools have played in urban planning as markers of a community’s health and well-being. Through tracing the mobile pools’ connections to the Do-It-Yourself (DIY)-aesthetic practice and public swimming pool history, I argue that although the dumpster pools were intended as a popular intervention to reconfigure socio-spatial relationships, the effectiveness of that intervention was varied. The pools recapitulated notions of private leisure and failed to participate in the actual city surroundings—allowing privileged participants to perform an ethical commitment to re-use and public good without promoting change for the actual communities in need.