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Islands charm and fascinate, and still continue to feature on the front page of magazines and in documentaries that tirelessly present them as imaginary places of dreams and desires. Yet they are above all living places inhabited by men and women who build their future there every day, experimenting with new ways of functioning, imagining new forms of fluid and adaptive living together, also for inventing new solutions to everyday problems. This includes fixing up home-made devices that make it possible to overcome such or such deficiencies or constraints, whether on the economic, social, environmental or energy levels, and so on. From this point of view, many islands are creative spaces in the full sense of the term, whether through the deployment of alternative projects, innovative social practices or even artistic creations. It is therefore the theme of islands as places where people experiment, create, innovate and test that this Special issue intends to explore, questioning the singularity of these territories where new societal models are invented and/or re-invented.