This collection explores the heterogeneous places we have traditionally been taught to term ‘islands.’ It stages a conversation on the very idea of ‘island-ness’, thus contributing to a new field of research at the crossroads of law, geography, literature, urban planning, politics, arts, and cultural studies. The contributions to this volume discuss the notion of island-ness as a device triggering the imagination, triggering narratives and representations in different creative fields; they explore the interactions between legal, socio-political, and fictional approaches to remoteness and the ‘state of insularity,’ policy responses to both remoteness and boundaries on different scales, and the insular legal framing of geographical remoteness. The product of a cross-disciplinary exchange on islands, this edited volume will be of great interest to those working in the fields of Island Studies, as well as literary studies scholars, geographers, and legal scholars.

This collection explores the heterogeneous places we have traditionally been taught to term ‘islands.’ It stages a conversation on the very idea of ‘island-ness’, thus contributing to a new field of research at the crossroads of law, geography, literature, urban planning, politics, arts, and cultural studies. The contributions to this volume discuss the notion of island-ness as a device triggering the imagination, triggering narratives and representations in different creative fields; they explore the interactions between legal, socio-political, and fictional approaches to remoteness and the ‘state of insularity,’ policy responses to both remoteness and boundaries on different scales, and the insular legal framing of geographical remoteness. The product of a cross-disciplinary exchange on islands, this edited volume will be of great interest to those working in the fields of Island Studies, as well as literary studies scholars, geographers, and legal scholars.

Islandology is a fast-paced, fact-filled comparative essay in critical topography and cultural geography that cuts across different cultures and argues for a world of islands. The book explores the logical consequences of geographic place for the development of philosophy and the study of limits (Greece) and for the establishment of North Sea democracy (England and Iceland), explains the location of military hot-spots and great cities (Hormuz and Manhattan), and sheds new light on dozens of world-historical productions whose motivating islandic aspect has not heretofore been recognized (Shakespeare's Hamlet and Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung). Written by Shell in view of the melting of the world's great ice islands, Islandology shows not only new ways that we think about islands but also why and how we think by means of them.

Land Use and Society is a unique and compelling exploration of interactions among law, geography, history, and culture and their joint influence on the evolution of land use and urban form in the United States. Originally published in 1996, this completely revised, expanded, and updated edition retains the strengths of the earlier version while introducing a host of new topics and insights on the twenty-first century metropolis. This new edition of Land Use and Society devotes greater attention to urban land use and related social issues with two new chapters tracing American city and metropolitan change over the twentieth century. More emphasis is given to social justice and the environmental movement and their respective roles in shaping land use and policy in recent decades. This edition of Land Use and Society by Rutherford H. Platt is updated to reflect the 2000 Census, the most recent Supreme Court decisions, and various topics of current interest such as affordable housing, protecting urban water supplies, urban biodiversity, and "ecological cities." It also includes an updated conclusion that summarizes some positive and negative outcomes of urban land policies to date.

'A must read … a new analytical agenda for the Anthropocene, coherently drawing out the power of thinking with islands.' – Elena Burgos Martinez, Leiden University ‘This is an essential book. [The] analytics they propose … offer both a critical agenda for island studies and compass points through which to navigate the haunting past, troubling present, and precarious future.’ – Craig Santos Perez, University of Hawai’i, Manoa ‘All academic books should be like this: hard to put down. Informative, careful, sometimes devasting, yet absolutely necessary - if you read one book about the Anthropocene let it be this. You will never think of islands in the same way again.’ – Kimberley Peters, University of Oldenburg ‘ … a unique journey into the Anthropocene. Critical, generous and compelling’. — Nigel Clark, Lancaster University The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time, islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity’s capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit. Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as ‘entangled worlds’, which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging with islands has become increasingly important for the generation of some of the core frameworks of contemporary thinking and concludes with a new critical agenda for the Anthropocene.

Australia is the planet's sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this geography has shaped Australian history and culture, including its literature. Further, it shows how the fluctuating definition of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity. The book links the historical and geographical conditions of islands with their potent role in the imaginaries of European colonisation. It prises apart the tangled web of geography, fantasy, desire and writing that has framed the Western understanding of islands, both their real and material conditions and their symbolic power, from antiquity into globalised modernity. The book also traces how this spatial imaginary has shaped the modern 'man' who is imagined as being the island's mirror. The inter-relationship of the island fantasy, colonial expansion, and the literary construction of place and history, created a new 'man': the dislocated and alienated subject of post-colonial modernity. This book looks at the contradictory images of islands, from the allure of the desert island as a paradise where the world can be made anew to their roles as prisons, as these ideas are made concrete at moments of British colonialism. It also considers alternatives to viewing islands as objects of possession in the archipelagic visions of island theorists and writers. It compares the European understandings of the first and last of the new worlds, the Caribbean archipelago and the Australian island continent, to calibrate the different ways these disparate geographies unifed and fractured the concept of the planetary globe. In particular it examines the role of the island in this process, specifically its capacity to figure a 'graspable globe' in the mind. The book draws on the colonial archive and ranges across Australian literature from the first novel written and published in Australia (by a convict on the island of Tasmania) to both the ancient dreaming and the burgeoning literature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the twenty-first century. It discusses Australian literature in an international context, drawing on the long traditions of literary islands across a range of cultures. The book's approach is theoretical and engages with contemporary philosophy, which uses the island and the archipleago as a key metaphor. It is also historicist and includes considerable original historical research.

This book invites readers to critically rethink the interrelations between geography and the law. Traditionally, legal-geographical interrelations have been dominated by scholars with backgrounds in geopolitics, economics, or geography. More recently, a new interdisciplinary approach has been developed with the aim of offering a fresh perspective on how law and geography intersect. There has been a steady growth in cross-disciplinary research in this field; how legal-geographical taxonomies interrelate has attracted attention from scholars and academics with a diverse range of backgrounds – namely, law, anthropology, and human/physical geography –, thus giving rise to several publications. Against this backdrop, the book adopts a legal comparative perspective and assesses ‘normative spatialities’, which are the outcomes of processes of legal-spatial production. In addition, the comparative analysis offers readers new insights on some traditional geographic features which are essential to legal studies (territorial identity, regional demarcation, territorial alternation, and place-name policy). Examples are drawn from several jurisdictions (both from the Global North and the Global South) and partly employ a diachronic perspective. As its subversive character is ideally suited to revealing policies and agendas, comparative law is used to identify the ethnocentric and colonial biases underpinning the use (and misuse) of legal geographic devices by policymakers and academics. In sum, the book presents legal geography as an interdisciplinary undertaking in which geographers and legal scholars can jointly examine common concepts in the historical, cultural, political and social contexts in which law is practised. The book transcends the boundaries between disciplines to engage in a fruitful dialogue on how the law can help to address the current socio-geographic and ecological crises.