Other periods of festivity can transform a space for a temporary period of time. For example, a Christmas market will change an outdoor space into a place with stalls, bars with seating areas, and even a Santa’s grotto. This is a temporary space, however, and once the season is done, it will revert back to an ordinary pedestrian space.
Fifth principle
Heterotopias require “a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (Foucault, 2008). Heterotopic sites cannot be accessed freely; entry is either compulsory (such as a prison) or subject to completing ritual acts (such as a Muslim hammam). Entrance into the heterotopia is not always straightforward as there are cases, as Foucault explains, when we think we have entered a space, but its true nature is in fact concealed. An example provided by Foucault is certain types of homes on farms in Brazil. In such farmhouses, the guests would enter into a space separate from the family’s living quarters. The guest may feel they have accessed the house, but in actuality, they have only been shown part of it.
Sixth principle
Heterotopias expose and mirror real spaces; they achieve this by either creating a space of illusion or a space of compensation.
The heterotopia of illusion exists to “[expose] every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory”(Foucault, 2008). For example, the brothel creates a space of illusion due to the degree of artifice and performance needed to cater to clients). M. Christine Boyer writes that the brothel contests all other spaces “by creating an illusory space that dissipates and denounces bourgeois reality by showing it to be the real illusion” (“The many mirrors of Foucault and their architectural reflections” in Heterotopia and the City, 2008). The brothel in the nineteenth century was the antithesis of middle-class sexual propriety. However, the existence of the brothel, and the fact that the wealthy often patronized it, reveals the artificial nature of bourgeois society.
In the heterotopia of compensation, is “a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (2008). Examples of this type of heterotopia include the Jesuit colonies in South America. Foucault writes that in this space, the village was meticulously organized and regimented to control the citizens. Such spaces are designed to compensate for a lack of order within society.
Heterotopia beyond Foucault
Foucault’s work on heterotopias has been criticized mainly on the grounds of its broad scope and lack of concrete definitions. Geographer Edward Soja, for example, describes Foucault’s analysis as “frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent” (Thirdspace, 1996). Some have argued that this is because Foucault never intended for heterotopia to be a fully realized theory.
Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, while not fully formed in his own work, has yielded an enormous body of research into transgressive, “other” spaces. For example, Soja built on the idea of heterotopia in his theory of “thirdspace,” a term used to describe “lived space,” i.e., how we actually experience a place through social interactions and various other factors. Thirdspace combined the work of Foucault along with other scholars such as Homi K. Bhabha.
Heterotopia has also become a concept built upon Marxist geographers such as Henri Lefebvre. Instead of heterotopia, however, Lefebvre uses the term heterotopy. As Christian Schmid explains,
