The Archipelagos
An island is a boundary; an archipelago is a system. Here the subject is not the land but the water between it — which island holds the runway, which the harbour, which is kept empty and by whose decision. Read as systems, not as beaches.
An island and an archipelago are not the same kind of place, and the atlas has been treating them as one.
On an island, everything has to fit inside the boundary. The airport, the hospital, the cemetery and the water supply are all on the same piece of land, and the constraint is total: Malé holds a third of the Maldivian population on two square kilometres because there is nowhere else on that island to put them. An archipelago works the opposite way. Its subject is not the land but the water between, and the interesting question is always the division of labour — which island has the runway, which has the harbour, which is kept empty and why.
That division is remarkably consistent. There is usually a capital island carrying the administration and the population, a set of working islands with fishing or farming, and a periphery that is either protected, sacred or simply too dry to live on. The Yasawas hold the pattern in its oldest form, with village land that cannot be sold. Okinawa's Ryukyu chain ran an independent maritime kingdom on it for four centuries. And where the state intervenes, it does so at the water: La Maddalena was a naval base for a century, which is why sixty granite islands went undeveloped.
Movement is the other constant. In an archipelago the ferry timetable is the infrastructure, and a bridge changes everything — Miyako has been a different place since three of them were built.
Read these as systems, not as beaches.