Island: The Possibility of the City as an Island

The island is redefined in relation to the nature of its edges, rather than to the condition of physical delimitation and finishedness. Island is conventionally defined from the outside as a delimited field of physical discontinuity. At the same time, the island increments concentrations and density; it more clearly manifests processes of centripetal convergence; it tolerates, or even imposes, proximity and coexistence. The island can be reconsidered as a field subject to incremental saturation, to the point where an endless interiority could be hypothesised. At once space and edge, the island is an unstable figure, with a mobile and constantly redefined edge. The idea of city as island here becomes instrumentally useful to question conditions of spatial delimitation and physical finitude in the city, in relation to its openness and networked remote relations. Following Shakespeare’s The Tempest narrative thread, the text ‘makes archipelago’ of island narratives that, far from closed and isolated, are ‘full of noises’. Starting from political utopia and continental geophilosophy, it encounters a desert island that is far from desert and explores complex urban archipelagos, to reveal the relational nature of the island, be it as convulsing ‘nomotop’, mythical impossibility, or personal or sci-fi construction.