Talk:Heterotopia (space)

created article

I have created this article after being directed to the Utopia article when clicking on "Heterotopia" in Michel Foucault's page, which is a very gross simplification of the concept in my point of view. The importance of the subject, therefore, relates to the deepening of Foucault's philosophical insights (being redirected from his page) and also contributes to a contemporary debate within human geography and urban sociology concerning multicultural cities.

There is a reference in the article I created, which is the text (only available in French) written by Foucault in the late 60s and published in the 80s in the journal Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité. I only did not have the time to go through the instructions to see where the reference is supposed to appear in the article, maybe someone with more experience could help me out with this part.

Thanks! Felncm (talk) 18:31, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

more concrete!

you didn`t understand the concept well, but blur it by pretentious retorics. f.ex. heterotopias are absolutely materialized, not mental. the mirror, the ship, the prison themselves are the heterotopias. topos itself means space... etc. sorry, but my english is too bad to write the article by my own. you should check the german text to "heterotopie", which is referring to the original published radio lecture. 85.178.208.247 (talk) 03:05, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

other perspectives!

maybe what we should do instead of disagreeing on interpretations (and being arrogant just for its sake - you don't even know whether my understanding was the article you read, other people have edited it since then...) is widen up this article with different perspectives. i have seen other authors (such as lefebvre) use the term heterotopia in the sense i had proposed earlier. i'll try to do that in the next few days. but anyhow, your interpretation is interesting, and opens up room for us to insert time in the analysis, and work with heterotopias in space-time, such as events with a certain temporality with beginning and endings, even historical ones, and that is very rich theoretically (to understand a certain space and its constitution!). thanks for your generosity. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Felncm (talk • contribs) 17:45, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

not concrete!

It’s important to remember that what Foucault was trying to do was to overpass the line between concrete and illusion. That’s the aim of all his work (in a philosophy of interpretation). In this particular case, he is battling the Cartesian view of the space from the architects ( « Des espaces autres » was a conference at the « Cercle d'études architecturales », in 14 mars 1967), that had a definitive version of what is the real space. To say that it’s simply « concrete » is to undo all his work. Is not wrong. Is completely nonsense. As we can see in those direct citation of his work, he is saying that heterotopias are both reality and illusion, real and imagined:

"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)

camilovla (talk) 22:31, 8 june 2009 (UTC)

Hear! Hear! I agree, that it's kind of silly to think we can/should make this article "concrete"... but, then again, I don't think Foucault's heterotopic mirror is simply the dissolution of the concrete... I think he believes things are concrete, just that they are so concrete that they lose the absoluteness we normally associate with "concreteness"... it's a paradox for sure, the same paradox later explored by Baudrillard... that "we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another" ("Of Other Spaces", diacritics, 1986, p. 23). So then, maybe wikipedia is a good medium for such an article because it is permeable, always able to be challenged and changed... Wikipedia is concrete, but in a more metaphysical sense, perhaps..? Haha, this feels silly. I guess the point is, concreteness will be balanced out by an abstract discussion about it. -Pietro24.84.229.90 (talk) 19:14, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Mary Franklin-Brown Discussion

Cicero 1111 removed my sentence and reference about Mary Franklin-Brown's use of heterotopia to analyze Medieval encyclopedias. I have readded it for three reasons:

1. The purpose of an encyclopedia article should be documentation of general breadth. Franklin-Brown's is a significant work in its area that warrants inclusion.
2. It addresses Felncm's suggestion that we introduce more perspectives. This is a very unusual concept. Personally I struggle to understand the notion of heterotopia. Foucault was only very brief in his examples. The more highly developed examples, chosen from wider fields, we make available, the more people are likely to understand.
3. An important activity among historians is demonstrating that things we think of as uniquely modern have, in fact, long histories. Similarly, that ages we think of as alien in their primitiveness were, in fact, more sophisticated and continuous with modern times than grand narratives of discrete periods would lead us to believe. Given Foucault's attack on simple pre-Modern / Modern dichotomies, that heterotopia has a long history is an important point.

Taylordw (talk) 06:48, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

how exactly is a lack of ships a "clear reference to Stalinism?"

what?2601:642:C481:4640:0:0:0:D24D (talk) 07:42, 25 June 2022 (UTC)