Making Place with the Sea: Re-Imagining Seasteading in a Time of Environmental Change

Amidst an ever more watery world of climate-induced sea-level rise, how the sea is lived with requires further attention. Seasteading provides a timely point of reflection here. Widely understood as an elite practice, within framings of libertarianism, as an opportunity to escape from the state and its economic ties, seasteading is simultaneously (and increasingly) framed within environmental discourse as a chance (for some) to escape submerged futures amidst global heating, ice melt, sea-level rise and extreme events. Whilst existing seasteading literature offers vital analysis, the term arguably has wider relevance. This article draws inspiration from examples of seasteading that move beyond specific political and economic ideals of elite escapism. It does so by returning to the origins of the word ‘stead’, which derives from the German Statt’, meaning place . In returning to the core geographical concept of place, the article examines how seasteading might be liberated from and re-imagined in view of its existing framings to think of it as a diverse set of oceanic placemaking practices, experiments, struggles and sensibilities that help make sense of a world that is both continually – and increasingly – oceanic in nature and in the wake of the felt impacts of climate change.