Energy Islands

This project investigates the emergence of new forms of smart urbanism and wealth generation within offshore territories, with a particular focus on smart energy islands. These islands are examined within the broader context of the climate crisis, expanded urbanization, and the proliferation of exceptional offshore spaces such as tax havens, free trade zones, and special economic areas.

Since the 1970s, the rise of special economic and legislative zones, offshore oil drilling, and tax shelter territories has become pivotal to the global management of wealth, industrial manufacturing, and energy production. Today, a diverse array of actors—tech moguls like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, states such as Singapore, China, Denmark, and Japan, corporations like Shell and BP, and investment entities such as Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners—are deeply invested in developing new infrastructures, settlements, and installations at sea. This project seeks to map and analyze this emerging geography of energy, economy, geopolitics, and wealth production, illuminating the material politics, future imaginaries, and historical contingencies that shape and are shaped by these sites.

The urbanization of offshore spaces has a deep and complex prehistory. Islands have long been central to European and Western imaginaries of colonialism, political theorization, urbanism, and visions of the future. Thomas More’s Utopia, for instance, famously cast the island as a space for reimagining European politics and society, presenting it as both a critique of the present and a vision of radical difference. Metaphorically and literally, islands are often framed as transitional spaces where boundaries between land and sea, isolation and connectivity, and refuge and exile blur. Islands also function as gateways or intermediaries, positioned at the crossroads of maritime routes, trade networks, and geopolitical ambitions. Since World War II, islands have become testbeds for new technologies and infrastructures, including nuclear weapons, biochemical research, and advanced military logistics. By the 1970s, offshore and zonal territories evolved into hubs for wealth accumulation, tax avoidance, and the reorganization of global supply chains and manufacturing. The island has thus been continually imagined as a microcosm for societal experimentation, a heterotopia or “mirror world” that reflects and refracts socio-economic and political anxieties and aspirations. Much like More’s Utopia, these islands embody new political visions tied to economy and wealth. In the Euro-American context, such zones are often framed through discourses of free markets, deregulation, and freedom from democratic governance. They are deeply entwined with processes of financialization, marketed as hubs of sustainability, greenness, and improved lifestyle. From offshore drilling to tax havens, these territories serve as sites where the future of both wealth and energy is being imagined and actively experimented with. By analyzing the interplay between infrastructure, climate crisis imperatives, and the shifting dynamics of global power, this project seeks to uncover how these spaces operate as laboratories for novel socio-economic orders.