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Vision / Strategy

At The Seasteading Institute, we work to enable seasteading communities – floating cities – which will allow the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for government. The most successful can then inspire change in governments around the world.

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This is an audacious vision that will take decades to fully realize. We strongly believe in incrementalism – breaking this huge vision down into manageable, practical steps. Our current strategy centers around the Floating City Project, through which we are crafting practical plans for the world’s first seastead, designed around the needs of actual potential residents, and located within a “host” nation’s protected, territorial waters.

We believe the first key step is for seasteading to become not just possible, but sustainable – technologically, legally, and financially.
In other words, the cost of living on the ocean must be low enough, and the business opportunities promising enough, such that there is an economic incentive for people to live on seasteads. Currently, the high cost of open ocean engineering serves as a large barrier to entry, and hinders entrepreneurship in international waters. This has led us to look for cost-reducing solutions within the territorial waters of a host nation, while still remaining dedicated to the goal of obtaining political autonomy for governmental experiments. Therefore, our plan entails negotiating with a host nation for maximum autonomy for a seastead in exchange for the economic and social benefits it could provide. This will allow for a proof-of-concept, and will hopefully spawn many more experiments with floating cities around the world, including those further offshore, and under different legal arrangements.

Our Program

Develop marketable plans for a floating city that meets the needs and desires of residents, investors, developers and “host” nation.
The Seasteading Institute has built a program which supports the strategic objective of “sustainable seasteading” (as defined above), primarily focusing on planning and facilitating the first floating city. As a non-profit organization, our role is not to build seasteads ourselves, but to set the stage in order to empower others to do so. Our Floating City Project is the latest form of business development – it explores a model wherein a single company comprising several stakeholders will oversee construction and management of a highly autonomous floating city, leaving residents and entrepreneurs free to operate their own lives and businesses. The project builds on years of engineering and legal research, political and related maritime industry diplomacy, and the building of a community of aspiring seasteaders.
Floating City Project

We are expanding all aspects of our research this year through our Floating City Project. The project is drawing on the expertise of our internal advising team and outside firms, like DeltaSync, a Dutch water architecture firm. Our survey remains open for prospective pioneers to give us their input, so we can tailor the seastead to potential residents preferences. We expect to collaborate with investors and developers to actualize the first seasteading community within the next few years.

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Movement-Building

Bettering the world through seasteading requires the support and actions of a large and diverse community. This is why we put great effort into building our movement. We reach out to the public by cooperating with the media and being featured in numerous news articles; working with a small squad of volunteer ambassadors; speaking at conferences; writing blogs and newsletters; and hosting meet ups, conferences and other events.

The Poseidon Award

Inspiring The World’s First Independent Seastead

The Poseidon Award is our prize for the establishment of the first independent seasteading community – the seed for the world’s first ocean city-state. Our current expectations for the Floating City Project places the completion of the first seasteading community with a few hundred residents before the end of this decade. Although this will be after the original goal to give out the Poseidon Award by 2015, it will be a major milestone for the seasteading movement to represent critical progress and is achievable in a relatively short period of time.The Poseidon Award will include the Poseidon Monument, a physical tribute to the first seasteading pioneers. It will have inscribed on it the names of The Seasteading Institute Argonauts — major donors who have helped make the seasteading movement a reality.

The Poseidon Award will be awarded to the first seastead which:
  • Has at least 50 full-time residents.
  • Is financially self-sufficient.
  • Offers seastead real estate on the open market.
  • Has de-facto political autonomy.
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Learn More
Read our research paper about how seasteading will drive innovation in government.
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