Islands have a long history of appealing to the architectural imagination and have served as sites for architectural expressions of cultural specificity, cultural conquest, and cultural hybridisation over millennia. From offshore financial centres to immigrant detention camps, tourist havens to military bases, the architectures of islands concretise the forces at play in our contemporary, crisis-ridden societies.

Collecting writings by a wide range of established scholars together with exciting new voices in architecture and affiliated disciplines, this book shows the pertinence islands hold for critical spatial thinking and practice today. Covering war and colonialism, detention and tourism, the topics raised in this book range from issues of urban development to close readings of buildings – whether ruined, designed, projected, preserved, or absent. Combing case studies, critical historiography, and pieces of experimental writing, the chapters disclose the variety of ways in which architecture can be used as a lens for analysing, disclosing, and untangling island specificity.

This volume offers a very timely, vibrant, and methodologically varied approach to the subject of architecture and islands. Its global reach, innovative outlook, and rich material will be of interest to scholars and students in architecture, landscape architecture, geography, and urban design and planning, alongside arts and literary studies.

This introduction foregrounds islands in terms of constructed space and sets the ground for a mutually beneficial cross-disciplinary exchange between island studies and architecture. As shown by this collection of essays, islands and insularity are a keen and indeed urgent topic of concern for many architectural thinkers and practitioners today, both as actual objects of inquiry and as metaphors. In focusing on the former, this volume offers a global range of studies that productively illustrate the scope and diversity characterising current architectural research. The opening premise of the volume, which gave it its title, is philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘instituting worlds’ as discussed in his early essay “Desert Islands”. The 17 chapters in the book, summarised in this introduction, each shed a light on this premise, and expand it to stress the importance of architectural thinking when approaching contemporary challenges facing islands across the world.

While the critique against the privatization of public space has been a recurring mantra in debates on urban development over the past 30 years, less attention has been given to how and why urban spaces undergo processes of privatization given the inherent ambiguities of the term. I argue that the privatization of urban space has undergone a significant shift, following the increased domination of private interests and market expansion that are the hallmarks of neoliberal societal restructuration. As informed by critical urban and architecture theory, the article is based on a comparative historical study of two sites in inner-city Stockholm: Stureplan (refurbished 1990) and Brunkebergstorg (refurbished 2019). By situating the spatial design of these places in their local context of decision-making and planning, a difference emerges between a first and second phase; one defined by overt manifestations of private and commercial interests, set in contrast to the present moment where modes of appropriation are cloaked under a new “generous publicness”. I argue that the emphasis on the social, rather than commercial, element in the design of contemporary urban space partakes in the construction of the new flexible and creative neoliberal subject in late-capitalist societies.