Aquapelago

Aquapelago refers to an assemblage of marine and terrestrial elements in which the aquatic spaces are key to community livelihoods and to communities’ senses of identity and belonging.
Concept and Etymology.
The term "aquapelago" was introduced to the field of Island Studies in 2012 by contributors to "Shima", an online, open-access journal of research into island and maritime cultures. In its initial coinage, by Philip Hayward, Etymologically, the term replaces the initial two syllables of the well-known term “archipelago” with “aqua” in order to reassert the role of marine elements in aggregations of islands that has been largely lost from contemporary usage of the term archipelago. Elaborating the concept, Suwa linked it to livelihood activities and to the Japanese concept of "shima" (referring to islands and related distinct cultural landscapes). Suwa’s concept is striking in that it conceives of combined terrestrial and aquatic spaces as, effectively, neighborhoods. 
In a reflection on and expansion of his initial article on the topic, Hayward identified that he envisaged the concept as a reflection on the Anthropocene and as:
 
Subsequent developments of the concept have analysed its applicability to topics such as ocean spaces and national rights of access to these (Fleury), cultural practices in Melanesian coastal societies (Dick) and career making in island communities (Alexander). Writing in the (now defunct) journal "Urban Island Studies", Hayward expanded on his original analyses by addressing metropolitan locales and providing a characterisation of Manhattan as an aquapelagic city that was subsequently critiqued and modified by Ayasha Guerin. While there have been critics of the concept, such as Baldacchino, who regard the term as unnecessary in that archipelagic analyses can be extended to address aquatic elements, writers from various disciplines have engaged with the concept in a positive manner, such as May Joseph and Sofia Varino’s exploration of the concept with regard to water ecology themed performance works in the journal "Women’s Studies Quarterly" and Barbara Hawkins in her discussion of a geopolitical aesthetic of the subterranean in the journal "Geopolitics".
Associated Concepts.
One significant development of the concept of the aquapelago has concerned the notion of there being an “aquapelagic imaginary.” This idea was originally floated by Hayward in 2017, and was subsequently elaborated in a theme issue of the journal "Shima" on mermaids, mer-cultures and the aquapelagic imaginary to refer to the manner in which communities’ “engagements with their aquapelagic locales” in folk-/media-loric contexts can be understood to reflect upon and transcend “perceptions of the limits of human presence in and experience of aquatic spaces.” In an article analysing the creation of a modern mythic entity, the Ningen, a creature rumoured to inhabit the southern Pacific Ocean, Greenland and Hayward discuss the aquapelagic imaginary as a “subset" of the "social imaginary”, which can be regarded as a historically determined “enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents”.
Further reading.
A variety of articles on the concept of aquapelago published in the journal "Shima" and elsewhere are anthologised online at: https://shimajournal.org/anthologies.php