Heterotopias

Heterotopias! The term 'heterotopia' originated from Michel Foucault; a French philosopher and historian. Foucault taught at many French universities before becoming Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious Collège de France. Whilst giving a lecture to Architectural students in 1967 Foucault first introduced the word heterotopia to the world, having created the word, he gave little explanation on its meaning at the time.

Heterotopia is based on the concept of ‘Utopia’. Utopia meaning an imagined good place, or a place of perfection; a world free of unhappiness. The word utopia is derived from the Greek ‘ou’ meaning not and ‘topos’ meaning place. Sir Thomas More wrote of the first ‘Utopia’ in 1516, he created the word utopia as a pun. The similar Greek work eu-tropostranslates as ‘good place’, with More asking whether a perfect world can really exist or is it just not possible.

'Heterotopias differ from these ‘good’ utopias because they allow for the inherently unpredictable nature of human contexts to disrupt this space.'

A heterotopia differs from a utopia in many aspects, with a key point being that heterotopias can exist in the real world. They aren’t an impossible idea of a place such as a utopia is. Utopias have no real place. Heterotopias are places caught between the real and mythical. They are ‘other places’, other spaces in our world, a world within a world. Foucault uses the example of a ship in his text ‘Des Espace Autres (Of Other Spaces)’-

The boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development… but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. (Foucault, 1967)

A heterotopic space is separate from the real world. The space mirrors our own world, society and order yet is misaligned and distinctly separate. It is not perfect beyond comprehension such as the utopian space. It is or could be real. This separation, be it abstract or actual, this dividing line between real and heterotopic makes the space both private yet public. The domain is at once open and closed to real life, but isolated. Entry to this space is prohibited by some requirements. Foucault states that entry to a heterotopic space is either granted through gaining permission or through completing certain gestures or that either the ‘entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications’ (Foucault, 1967).

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(Stanford Encyclopaedia, 2003) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

(Stace, 2017).

Other Reading sources:

https://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en/