Heterotopia

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Heterotopia

SOURCE Unabridged text - heterotopia as defined by Michel Foucault : Of Other Spaces - Heterotopias , Michael Faucault, ‘Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias’ and ‘Panopticum’, Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture pp350-367

Michel Foucault uses the idea of a mirror as a metaphor for the duality and contradictions, the reality and the unreality of utopian projects. A mirror is metaphor for utopia because the image that you see in it does not exist, but it is also a heterotopia because the mirror is a real object that shapes the way you relate to your own image.

Foucault articulates several possible types of heterotopia or spaces that exhibit dual meanings:

1. A ‘crisis heterotopia’ is a separate space like a boarding school or a motel room where activities like coming of age or a honeymoon take place out of sight.
2. ‘Heterotopias of deviation’ are institutions where we place individuals whose behavior is outside the norm (hospitals, asylums, prisons, rest homes, cemetery).
3. Heterotopia can be a single real place that juxtaposes several spaces. A garden is a heterotopia because it is a real space meant to be a microcosm of different environments with plants from around the world.
4. 'Heterotopias of time' such as museums enclose in one place objects from all times and styles. They exist in time but also exist outside of time because they are built and preserved to be physically insusceptible to time’s ravages.
5. 'Heterotopias of ritual or purification' are spaces that are isolated and penetrable yet not freely accessible like a public place. To get in one must have permission and make certain gestures such as in a sauna or a hammin.
6. 'Heterotopias has a function in relation to all of the remaining spaces. The two functions are: heterotopia of illusion creates a space of illusion that exposes every real space, and the heterotopia of compensation is to create a real space—a space that is other.

Human geographers often connected to the postmodernist school have been using the term (and the author's propositions) to help understand the contemporary emergence of (cultural, social, political, economic) difference and identity as a central issue in larger multicultural cities. The idea of place (more often related to ethnicity and gender and less often to the social class issue) as a heterotopical entity has been gaining attention in the current context of postmodern, post-structuralist theoretical discussion (and political practice) in Geography and other spatial social sciences. There is an extensive debate with theorists, such as David Harvey, that remain focused on the matter of class domination as the central determinant of social heteronomy.

Foucault's elaborations on heterotopias were published in an article entitled Des espaces autres (Of Other Spaces[1]). The philosopher calls for a society with many heterotopias, not only as a space with several places of/for the affirmation of difference, but also as a means of escape from authoritarianism and repression, stating metaphorically that if we take the ship as the utmost heterotopia, a society without ships is inherently a repressive one, in a clear reference to Stalinism.

The geographer Edward Soja has worked with this concept in dialogue with the works of Henri Lefebvre concerning urban space in the book Thirdspace. In this work he tries to create a connection between the real and the imagined space.

In this sense, is important to remember that what Foucault was trying to do with the concept of "heterotopie" was to overpass the line between concreteness and illusion. That is the aim of all his work (in a philosophy of interpretation) and, in this particular case, he is battling the Cartesian view of the space within architecture ( « Des espaces autres » was a conference at the « Cercle d'études architecturales », in 14 mars 1967), that traditionally has a definitive version of what is real space. As we can see in a direct citation of his work, he is saying that heterotopias are both reality and illusion, real and imagined spaces:

"Ou bien elles ont pour rôle de créer un espace d'illusion qui dénonce comme plus illusoire encore tout l'espace réel, tous les emplacements à l'intérieur desquels la vie humaine est cloisonnée. " "ces espaces différents, ces autres lieux, une espèce de contestation à la fois mythique et réelle de l'espace où nous vivons; cette description pourrait s'appeler l'hétérotopologie" (FOUCAULT, M. Des espace autres. 1967)

["They either have a role of creating an illusory space which denounces as even more illusory every real space, all the emplacements in the interior of which human life is trapped" "these different spaces, these other spaces, a sort of confrontation - which is at once mythic and real - of the space where we live; this description could be called 'heterotopology'" (FOUCAULT, M. Des espace autres. 1967)]

To Foucault those spaces are a kind of "contre-emplacements". This is the sense that Henri Lefebvre works, with the idea that the heterotopia has the principles of a space that is different from the space of capitalism.