Water settlements have been victims of romanticization and exclusion from the discourse of urbanization, eclipsed by the colonial canon of the gridded settlement of dry land. The need to trace boundary lines on the landscape was a tool of control to demand cultures be legible to colonialist’s conventions. The notion of settling on water means, and has always meant throughout history, the search for forms of governmentality based on strong local autonomies. Upon examination of three water settlements in Benin, Iraq and Brunei, water was seen as no man’s land challenging the foundational legal tenets of sovereignty. The project decolonizes the act and narrative of settling, challenges ownership by replacing it with the notion of possession and advocates the role of the architect as adviser of systems rather than designer of specifics. The project is a manual for a floating settlement in Kampung Ayer, Brunei that articulates a high degree of community agency vis-a-vis the need for state support. ‘Gotong-Royong’, in Malay is a conception of a social ethos of communal work. The project urges for a paradigm shift in viewing the ecological landscape not as a place that belongs to us but as a place where we belong to.