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"Island Habitation: Building a Pink Plastic Utopia"
Lunch:8, eds. Danielle Alexander, Nicholas Knodt and Clayton Williams, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 2013
From Japan’s 1960s Metabolist “Marine City” fantasies to today’s libertarian seasteads and Dubai’s archipelagos, this essay charts the shifting politics of artificial islands. It shows how floating megastructures once promised post-war Japan a nomadic, reef-to-reef urbanism before morphing into developer utopias, migrant-detention barges, and pirate “micronations.” Drawing on projects from Kiyonori Kikutake’s Aquapolis to the DIY libertarian “seasteads,” I probe what really happens when cities leave land: who gains freedom, who is quarantined, and why fixed platforms so often become perfect machines for surveillance, inequality, and control.
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Criticism & Academic Writing