READING GROUP V

The fifth reading seminar, chaired by Atle Wehn Hegnes of Oslo Metropolitan University (Consumption Research Norway, SIFO), focused on the concept of heterotopias and explored its potential as a useful analytical lens for understanding and developing solutions proposed within the CONVIVIUM project.

The group engaged with Michel Foucault’s essay Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, originally delivered as a lecture in March 1967 and later published under the title Des Espace Autres in the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité (October 1984). Although the essay was not reviewed for publication by Foucault himself, the manuscript was released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before his death. The version discussed was translated from French by Jay Miskowiec.

Foucault begins by distinguishing between utopias and heterotopias. Utopias are unreal spaces—sites that do not exist in reality but that mirror or invert the real space of society, presenting idealized or critical visions of it. In contrast, heterotopias are real places that exist in every culture — “counter-sites” that simultaneously reflect, contest, and invert other spaces within a given society. Though physically locatable, heterotopias exist outside all conventional places because they embody a space of difference. As Foucault explains:

“Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.” (pp. 4)

To ground the discussion, participants drew on experiences from recent fieldwork conducted in Lofoten Norway, Gdańsk Poland, activist groups initiatives, community gardens and scholarly literature that employs heterotopia as an analytical concept. These examples illustrated how the notion of heterotopias can be relevant to think with in CONVIVIUM. FACEBOOK