TITLE:
Foucault’s Concept of Heterotopia as an Èpistemé for Reading the Post-Modern City: The Viennese Example
AUTHORS:
Gerhard Hatz
KEYWORDS:
Urban Theory, Èpistemé, Heterotopia, Vienna, Foucault
JOURNAL NAME:
Current Urban Studies,
Vol.6 No.4,
November
13,
2018
ABSTRACT:
“The postmodern city is a myth, a tale, a telling, a poignant narrative that builds
on the past to continually new horizons… The postmodern city is not only an
epitomizing model of contemporary social and economic development, but also
a metaphysical reality, a place where the real and the imagined are persistently
commingled in ways we have only begun to understand…” (Chambers, 1990;
Soja 2000). Normative notions on the city have to be dissected as an intersection
of the near and the far order of urban societies (Lefebvre, 1996) and as fluid
conceptualizations in a heterochronical context. However, cities similarly
have to be read as “thirdspaces” (Soja, 1996)—contestations of mythical and
real urban spaces and places, continuously re-interpreted and endowing urban
spaces and places with even transient meanings. The paper seeks to grasp
Foucault’s notions on heterotopia as a theoretical framework and èpistemé
for approaching these “thirdspaces”—in-between the social relations and
their inscriptions into the material reality of cities.