Aquapelago
An aquapelago is an assemblage of marine and terrestrial elements in which the aquatic spaces are key to community livelihoods and to communities’ senses of identity and belonging. Aquapelago refers to the socially constructed spaces of island, coastal, lacustrine or riverine locations, where humans have developed particularly concentrated engagements with the marine environment for their livelihoods or leisure. A neologism, aquapelago denotes the manner in which environmental psychology has been key to various maritime communities and causes in recent years. For example, the famous Mabo decision on indigenous Australian native title in 1992, successfully argued that areas of the seabed, and the aquatic resources above them, were part of traditional Torres Strait Islander community territories and related senses of communal homelands.
Concept and etymology
The term aquapelago was introduced in 2012 in Shima online journal of research into island and maritime cultures. The term subsequently gained momentum in geography, anthropology, and cultural studies, since it addresses a conceptual and lexical gap in topical discourse on the human relationship to nature. More recently, the concept has extended in reach to creative fields such as theatre, science fiction, and music.In its initial coinage, etymologically, the term replaces the initial two syllables of the well-known term archipelago with aqua in order to reassert the role of marine elements in aggregations of islands that has been largely lost from contemporary usage of archipelago. The concept has been further elaborated, linking it to livelihood activities and to the Japanese concept of shima. This concept is striking in that it conceives of combined terrestrial and aquatic spaces as, effectively, neighborhoods.
The concept of aquapelago has been envisaged as a reflection on the Anthropocene and as:
Subsequent developments of the concept have analysed its applicability to topics such as ocean spaces and national rights of access to these, cultural practices in Melanesian coastal societies and career making in island communities. The original analyses of the aquapelago have been further expanded by addressing metropolitan locales and providing a characterisation of Manhattan as an aquapelagic city that was subsequently critiqued and modified. While there have been critics of the concept, some who regard the term as unnecessary in that archipelagic analyses can be extended to address aquatic elements, writers from various disciplines have engaged with the concept in a positive manner, such as an exploration of the concept with regard to water ecology themed performance works in the journal Women’s Studies Quarterly and a discussion of a geopolitical aesthetic of the subterranean in the journal Geopolitics. Further, the lens of the aquapelago can act as a bridge between the fields of island studies and studies examining seasteading.