Foucault’s Heterotopia: The “Other” Spaces Between What is Real and Utopian

Michel Foucault (1984, 1986) writes that the twentieth century was above all else an epoch of space, a space Foucault describes as simultaneously juxtaposed and dispersed in “a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (p. 22). The twentieth century is a time, Foucault insists, defined as much by the spatialization of social power as by the exploration of outer space, a time during which human beings are defined as much by their relation to space as to any human being. In1967, Foucault presented his lecture, titled The Other Spaces (“Des Espace Autres”), to a group of architecture students – clearly a group interested in the conceptual and material qualities of space — thereby introducing the world to his three-fold taxonomy of real, Utopian, and heterotopian space.

Foucault explains that all spaces exists in a certain relation to each other and to the social structures of power, describing heterotopia as every schism between real and ideal social spaces. Although heterotopia exists in relation to social power, Foucault asserts that heterotopia is a kind of neutral zone beyond the dominion of conventional social structures of power and power relations. In other words, between real social and Utopian space lies heterotopia, a collective of material and conceptual social spaces that gerrymander around the jurisdictions of normal social structures of power. The following essay explores Foucault’s conceptualization of heterotopia and subsequent interpretations of it, as it considers heterotopia in relation to a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings of twentieth and twenty-first century space.

Foucault presents critical groundwork for developing heterotology, a discourse of the Other, and his essay on heterotopia has proven to be a touchstone for scholars from a broad range of disciplines and subjects. Scholars from provinces — ranging from cartography to poetry, as well as urban policy and contemporary cinema — have for nearly forty years critiqued Foucault’s views of alternative social spaces and subjected it to wide interpretation, conceptualization, and application. Heterotopia is at once a sketchy topology, a complex abstraction, and a map easily misread. Interestingly, we can only speculate on the finer points and inherent contradictions of heterotopia, as by all accounts Foucault chose not to elaborate on his conceptualization of heterotopia and arranged for it to be published only after his death in 1984.

Foucault is fascinated by social spaces and conceptualizes them in what is likely his more familiar spatial metaphor, the panopticon — the prison guard watch tower, the surveillance camera, and the eye in the sky – found in twentieth century representations of human social spaces, power, and control, if not paranoia. The panopticon is an ubiquitous form of monitoring and disciplining human behavior, a kind of invisible fence that provides simultaneous surveillance and disciplinary power over certain groups of people, notably prisoners and students. It is Big Brother, pervasive and controlling, as an absent presence, all-knowing and -seeing.