Seasteading has emerged as a political movement - with nods to climate change and land shortages - to create new water-borne city states. Over 85 pages, a Dutch engineering and urban development company has outlined the feasibility of a floating "village" for 225 permanent residents and 50 hotel guests - a blueprint that the pioneering seasteaders hope will become hundreds of floating petri dishes of social and political experiments.
The design consultants envisage a series of interlocking "hollow box" square and pentagonal platforms, allowing each city to grow organically - or be dismantled and towed away in the event of political dispute or interference. Individual seasteaders would decide on how they would rule or be ruled.
According to the feasibility study by DeltaSync, a specialist in floating structures in the low-lying Netherlands, early residents would live in flats of 70sq m with terraces open to the sea. Solar energy would power general daily living, including electric-only cookers, while water for showers and drinking would be supplied by the rain.
Early residents would include entrepreneurs, social experimenters and people to tend the floating fish farms. A helipad would allow access to land-based hospital facilities or for when self-sustainable living just became too painful.
The vision is funded by a United States non-profit organisation, the Seasteading Institute, established by two darlings of the libertarian movement including the billionaire founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel.
Its stated ambition for the seasteads is to "guarantee political freedom and thus enable experimentation with alternative social systems".
Establishing an independent non-state settlement on the seas is not an entirely new concept. Roy Bates, a retired British army major, occupied a World War II sea fort off the Suffolk coast in 1967 and a decade later he declared Sealand a sovereign principality, with himself as head of state. The British Foreign Office does not recognise Sealand as an independent state, but the Bates family remain unmoved.
Various other attempts at floating cities and tax havens have failed in the face of legal, technical and political hurdles.The first rudimentary seastead project is to be launched soon by a separate group called Blueseed. It is essentially a ship moored far enough off the California coast to sidestep US immigration rules. For safety reasons, the first proper seastead is likely to be anchored in a protected bay inside the territorial limits of a "host" country. The institute claims to be in early talks with up to five Governments to be the first host. It aims to close negotiations in 2014, with the first seastead residents moving in by the end of the decade.
Given that the whole politically driven point is freedom from government interference, the dependence on a host country's "supervision" would appear a fatal blow.
Not so, said the executive director of the institute, Randolph Hencken.
"It's a business negotiation," he told the Independent. The group was asking for "substantial political autonomy, within reason" and in return would supply the host with "some form of compensation".
After a "large-scale selection process for suitable countries", the study focused on the Gulf of Fonseca, which is bordered by El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras. The last appears a particularly strong candidate, as it has already announced plans for free-trade zones with minimal government control. But even if the San Francisco-based Seasteading Institute secures a deal with a host Government, its dream of independence will still be difficult to realise. The US Government has asserted its right to police outside its territory, and for its citizens to pay its taxes.
Hencken suggests the residents of each seastead would set their own rules, but using them for things like a drug marketplace would be "asking for trouble". And what if undesirables tried to buy their way in?
"I'm not going to be in charge, but I wouldn't want to have exiled dictators who had committed atrocities," he said. "I wouldn't want it to be a haven for evil."
The seasteaders see the platforms as long-term communities, with the ability to join and leave a key factor based on political and economic choices. Engineers say they could be built to last. "If you use the right mixture it can last for a long time," said DeltaSync project leader Karina Czapiewska.
The seasteading vision is for innovative and self-governing societies that are seedbeds for radical technologies and forms of government. The founders talk of businesses based on Bitcoins - the virtual currency - such as medical or research centres, free from regulatory authorities.
Hencken said the seastead idea had received an enthusiastic response globally from people wanting to run their own shops, gyms and research centres.
He said he knew a "handful" of multimillionaires interested in the project, the first of which has an estimated cost of US$170 million. But if you require millions to buy or rent a place in the first place, who will clean the toilets? "The guys who are very wealthy don't have personal assistants, many of them clean their own toilets," Hencken insisted. If not, there was capacity to pay people to do the "dirty work in exchange for a wage and a place to stay".
Even ardent supporters recognise the plan may be ambitious and seasteads are not the best places to live.
"Get a group of libertarians on a boat and they won't agree with each other," said Cody Wilson, a libertarian activist. "It's in their nature to be antisocial."
- Independent
