HETEROTOPIAS Student: LEC KAO Sandrine Class : ELEMENTS OF ARCHITECTURAL TYPOLOGY Essay texts : Contextualism : Urban ideals + deformations, Tom Schumacher, Casabella 359-360 / Chapter 4 : Heterotopias in City Modeling and Urban Design, Recombinant Urbanism, Professor Graham Shane
What is a heterotopia? This word meant very little to me, but if it was to be compared to another, there are two main types as Graham Shane explains: the utopia that are sites with no “real space”, with an idea of the perfect society (especially in its social, political and moral aspects) , perfect form and functionality, thus unreality. On the other hand, the heterotopia is real, built. Both have in common the fact that they “mirror” the society around them. If it was to be decomposed, the word in Graham Shane’s terms, the heterotopia is the space of the other. It is a space inside another, which doesn’t follow the general rules. How can we understand this word with such a wide range of meanings?
Foucault first borrowed the term heterotopia from medicine, where it means a cell (or group of cells) living within a distinct host cell or tissue. Foucault presents six main principles to explain his theory. He first talks about the crisis and deviance heterotopias as all cultures create various ones that take different forms. He explains the heterotopias of crisis as the sacred and forbidden places for individuals of crisis in relation to the society in which they live. The heterotopias of deviation are the places where people with deviant behavior to the required norms are places such as psychiatric hospitals or rest homes. As for the second principle, Foucault mentions the link to the functions: following history, a heterotopia that was constructed for one purpose at first can change and function differently as the rule changes. It reflects their surrounding culture. For instance, the cemetery was first placed in the heart of the city and was th then removed far from it by the end of the 18 century because it was judged dangerous (fear of infection and illness). The third principle is the multiplicity of heterotopias: a heterotopia can juxtapose several spaces that are in themselves incompatible into one. The theater and the cinema show screens with different and foreign places. Heterochronies are the fourth, they accumulate time such as places like museums, libraries, recording the human progress. The fifth principle is the systems of opening and closing : the heterotopias are not accessible to public, such as the hammam that undergoes a ritual of cleansing first, or the museum where the entrance is to be paid. Finally, the heterotopias are inside the urban system, for freedom (illusion) or compensation (discipline). Foucault described how these cities are controlled by actors and can take various forms depending on their relationship to their surroundings. David Graham Shane explains how the heterotopias evolve with the city and its rules, following the cultures, civilizations. They are exceptional places, exceptions to the dominant city model, being heterogeneous with historical, virtual and realistic aspects. He, as Foucault, divides the heterotopias in several types. First, the heterotopias of crisis (H1) are the space of the people who are in state of crisis compared to the society they live in, meaning that they become or feel different entering that space. They stood as institutions inside the city’s small-scale fabric. They accommodate change within it often behind facades that hide their true content. This “space of the other” deals with displacement in Heterotopias – LEC KAO Sandrine
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the system of emplacement. According to Foucault, people that are in this category are said weak or temporarily disadvantaged, children, menstruating women, pregnant women, and elderly people. These places are the sacred ones, where people seek for “help” regarding their “state of crisis”, for example the cathedrals, churches… Any space could be converted into crisis heterotopias in time of need. Usually, one authority creates crisis heterotopias to accommodate changes. Second, the heterotopias of deviance (H2) are extremely orderly spaces, have rigid codes enforced by compensatory systems of punishment. They sort people, creating a space to study them in specially created enclaves. The prison is a heterotopia of deviance where discipline takes over illusion (H2=D/I). The railway stations such as the Quai d’Orsay are places of progress: these places are crucial instruments of change making the modernization of society possible. Heterotopias of crisis (H1) and deviance (H2) are both slowly changing and have rigid internal orders. The third type is heterotopia of illusion (H3) and shares the same basic features as the two previous ones, being miniature cities inside of the city and an ambiguous structure, but they are dominated by illusion codes and are rapidly changing, flexible, with fluid internal orders. They are important because they help ordering the society through the promulgation of norms associated with pleasure and leisure. As Foucault said : “Their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned as still more illusory”. From Recombinant Urbanism, we can divide the examples of Shane in two categories. On the one hand, the material and physical, as for the Las Vegas Strip as it is the perfect example that illustrates the illusion with the display of images to create new norms and attractors. The casinos on the strip employ various scenographic urban elements as these attractors and these fake environments mirror a deep felt need for pleasure. On the other hand, the spiritual dimension, for which the cathedrals are the better instance: they create an illusory space with spectacular stained glass windows of heaven and give the sensation of another space thus another world with the height of the ceiling and the need of silence inside. From Contextualism : Urban ideals and deformations, the heterotopias can be understood as the spaces that have been carved out of the solid masses in the traditional city, where spaces are defined by continuous walls of building (as for example the medieval towns, enclosed on themselves by walls). The space is emphasized while the building volumes are de-emphasized. The same process applies to the city-in-the-park, for which the composition of isolated buildings set in a park-like landscape make us think of the heterotopias of deviance in the terms of Foucault and Graham Shane. The building volumes are emphasized while the spaces are not. For understanding better the term of heterotopia the space of the other, and the space into another space, looking out and in Milano helps. In terms of H1 heterotopia of crisis, the politecnico di Milano is a small city in itself, with a large campus that welcomes people from Italy but also all around the world which re-creates small cultural entities inside of the same space. For the H2 heterotopia of deviance, the prison of San Vittore is the best example for a space where “rigid codes enforced by compensatory systems of punishment”. The H3 heterotopia of crisis is best illustrated by the Expo 2015, where was gathered the whole world with the pavilions of countries around a decumano and the tree of life during a small amount of time, acting as a small city.
Heterotopias are then many things: they are heterogenous spaces that contrast with the everyday life scenes where people are either isolated, feeling different, or escaping life for a small amount of time. It is a small world acting as a micro society in the society itself, and obeys to its own rules, as living in a different way too. If we were to remember certain features, it would surely be the three “M’s” presented by Foucault as the mirror-function (mirroring the society, its needs and desires), the multiple pockets (mixtures and changes), and the miniature (as an utopic simulation of perfecting the surrounding world). Heterotopias – LEC KAO Sandrine
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They are the space of the other : then, who are the others? The foreign students in a university, the children, the elderly, it could be anything as everyone has its own culture, traditions, point of view and experience of life. Heterotopias are the exceptional and abnormal places, things, entities in a dominant world. It could be music as it reflects a personal memory, place, feeling or sound, a sensation of atmosphere, visual…It could be a circus, that is a foreign moving space in which people feel like they don’t belong to the society anymore by entering this brand different small society. It could be fashion, as it presents many various types following the world’s different cultures and traditions. But we should probably keep in mind the best example of a heterotopia being the ship: it is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, existing by itself in the infinity of the sea, going where it wants, as far as it wants, obeying to no man’s rules but maybe those of the nature.
Heterotopias – LEC KAO Sandrine
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