Heterotopia, literally meaning `other places` that
describes a world off center, with respect to normal or everyday spaces, one
that possesses multiple, fragmented, of even incompatible meanings.
Heterotopia
is a rich concept in urban design and can be investigated throughout our
contemporary world: in museums, theme parks, malls, holiday resorts, gated
communities, wellness hotels, festival markets.
The text “Des espaces autres” was a lecture given
by Michel Foucault on 14 March 1967 to the Circle
of Architectural Studies. The text was however not published for almost 20
years. It was finally published by the French journal Architecture, Mouvment, Continuite in 1984 with title “Des espaces authres”.
Heterotopia: Of Other Spaces (1967)
The great
haunting obsession of the 19th
ct. was, as we know, history: themes of development and stagnation, themes
of crisis and cycle, themes of accumulation of the past, the big surplus of the
dead (1) and the menacing cooling of
the world (2). It is in the second
principle of thermodynamics that the 19th ct. found its essential
mythological resources (3).
(1)
In the formulation `surplus of the dead` we read reference to the
demographic and hygienic fears of the 19th ct.; more particularly,
the fear of a demographic explosion bringing with it the accumulation of dead
bodies. ...().. Where to bury all these surplus dead bodies? Foucault comes
back to this debate later in the text when he speaks about the relocation of
cemeteries to the outskirts of the city.
(2)
The 19th ct was haunted by the fear that the earth was
cooling, in a linear, physically determined way from fire ball to ice ball.
(3) Foucault is referring to the concept of entropy. The second law of
thermodynamics states that closed systems
– while their energy remains constant – evolve to ever higher levels of
disorder.
The present epoch would rather be an epoch of
space. We are in
the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of
the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at the
moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of (refers
to Hegelianism, historicism and most of all Darwinism) than that of network
that connects points and intersects with its own skein (The rise of s new spatial order
based on the network is a leading theme in the first part of the text, lecture).
Medieval space:
space of localization. This space of localization opened up with Galileo, for
the real scandal of Galileo’s work is not so much his discovery, or rediscovery,
that the earth revolves around the sun, but this constitution of an infinite
and infinitely open space... () ... In other words, starting with Galileo, starting
with the 17th ct. extension supplanted localization.
Today the emplacement (4) substitutes extension, which itself had replaced localization...
().. We are in an epoch in which space is given to us in the form of relations
between emplacements.
(4)
The term ‘emplacement’ in French refers to site and location (as in
parking space) or the setting of a city, but also to support (a billboard:
emplacement publicitaire)
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Now, in
spite of all techniques invested in space ...()... contemporary space is perhaps
still not entirely desacralized. ...()... we may still not have reached the
point of a practical desacralization of the space. And perhaps our life is till
ruled by certain number of oppositions that cannot be touched, that institution
and practice have not yet dared to undermine; oppositions that we regard as
simple givens: for example private space and public space, between family space
and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between space of
leisure and that of work. All these are animated by unspoken sacralization. (5)
(5)
In the introduction to The Order
of Things he refers to utopia and heterotopia as literary genres. In this lecture heterotopia refers to places
and institutional arrangements in society.
Utopias are
emplacements with no real place. ...()... utopias essentially are fundamentally
unreal spaces.
Heterotopias
are: ...()... counter-emplacements, a sort of effectively realized utopias in
which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found
within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Since
these places are absolutely other than all the emplacements that they reflect,
and of which they speak, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias: heterotopias.
The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a place
without a place. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does
really exist, and as it exerts on the place I occupy a sort of return effect… the mirror functions as a heterotopia in the
respect that it renders this place that I occupy at the moment when I look
myself in the mirror, at once absolute real and absolute unreal space, since in
order to be perceived, it has to pass through virtual point, which is over
there.
Heterotopias:
how can we describe them? What meaning do they have?
I principle; heterotopias
of crisis: sacred, or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are
...()... in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women,
the elderly etc. ...()... But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing
today and are being replaced by what could be called heterotopias of deviation: rest homes, psychiatric hospitals,
prisons, retirement homes.
II principle; heterotopia
in the course of its history: cemetery (the ‘other city’).
III principle; heterotopia has the power to juxtapose in a single real space several spaces: the
theatre, the cinema, the garden. (Pg.20) The garden is the smallest parcel of
the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been, since
the dawn of antiquity, a sort of blissful and universalizing heterotopia.
Pg. 20
IV principle; heterotopias are heterochronisms; linked with the slices of time. Heterotopia begins
to function fully when people find themselves in a sort of absolute break with
their traditional time: museums, libraries (heterotopias
linked to the accumulation of time) and fairgrounds, vacation villages.
....()... museums and libraries are heterotopias in which time never ceases to
pile up, heaping upon top of its own summit...
V principle; heterotopias
always presuppose a system of opening and closing, that both isolates them and
makes them penetrable: pubs, hammams.
VI principle; the last trait of heterotopias is that they have
...()... a function. ...()... Either their role is to create a space of
illusion... (brothels)...()... Or else, on the contrary creating another space,
as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorderly, ill
construed and sketchy (colonies), Jesuit colonies.
The ship is
the heterotopia par excellence (6).
(6)
This poetical artifice of the ship obscures the fact that the text ends in limbo, that the text required a final
part. After the historical outline, the ‘short history of space’ from the
introduction and after the main part, the trans-historical/ahistorical outline
of heterotopology, the third part should have treated the role of heterotopia
in the third phase of space, the spacial
order of emplacement. In any case Foucault has not responded to the question
that the construction of the text calls for.
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