“This essay proposes a novel approach in the attempt to find one or more versions of utopia: A distributed matrix of hundreds or thousands of cities that float on the oceans, holding physical life-support technologies and high standards of living constant across all cities, and making slight variations in the social fabric from city to city, based on local resident preference. This is not so much a blueprint for any one utopia, but rather, a plan for a testing laboratory to allow individual people and whole societies to find their own versions of utopia using the scientific method on a grand scale. ”
http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/Articles/distributed.cities.book-copy
and a few more…
“The following is a proposal for the founding of a new country on planet earth. Tentative completion of Phase I (initial construction and formation of basic self-support systems for 5000 people) is set for the year 2025.” http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/Oceana/Oceana.html
… and in history
localised offshoreing.
“Blueseed aims to provide an alternative solution to the US work visa problem for Silicon Valley and allow professionals lacking a visa to legally work in close proximity to companies and investors from the Valley. Blueseed plans to do this by providing living and office accommodations on a vessel anchored 12 nautical miles offshore from California (half an hour by ferry), in international waters outside the jurisdiction of the United States.”
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/the-real-pirates-of-silicon-valley/
“The petty squabble between urban shore dweller and visiting seafarer is really just a recasting of the bitter, millennia-old conflict between settler and nomad, a social, economic and spiritual rift that in other parts of the world seesaws between bloody skirmish and nervous stand-off.” http://www.griffithreview.com/edition-20/50-essay/52.html?showall=1