Some places belong to no town at all, from Danish islands to Dutch polders
Almost all of Denmark is divided into municipalities, except a tiny cluster of islands in the Baltic that has been run by the military since 1685. Places like that are unincorporated areas, land with no local council of its own, and they turn up in surprising corners of the world.
An unincorporated area is land not governed by a general-purpose municipal government. A larger unit such as a county, or another arm of the state such as the military, handles it instead. The idea is common in the United States and Canada, but many countries barely use it. In Canada such settlements can be big: if they were incorporated, the urban areas of Fort McMurray and Sherwood Park would rank as the fifth- and sixth-largest cities in Alberta.
Denmark's exception is Ertholmene, a small archipelago 20 kilometres northeast of Bornholm. Denmark made one of its islands a naval base in 1685, responding to a Swedish naval base built shortly before, and military jurisdiction has lasted ever since. The islands became protected cultural heritage in 1926 and had 90 residents in 2024. In the Czech Republic, similarly, the only land outside municipalities is military training ground, run by offices answering to the defence ministry.
Germany had 295 municipality-free areas in 2000, covering about 1.4 per cent of the country, mostly forests, lakes and training grounds. By the end of 2007, 248 were uninhabited, 214 of them in Bavaria, and only three inhabited ones remained, all former military training areas.
The Netherlands has a unique reason for unincorporated land: it keeps making new ground. When a dyke closed around Southern Flevoland in 1967, the reclaimed soil was like quicksand for years. As homes rose from 1975, a government-appointed official called a landdrost ran the area, and in 1984 that official became the first mayor of Almere. Since then the country has had no unincorporated land.
Source: Unincorporated area
