ABSTRACT
For many years, only tourists regarded the Tel Aviv shoreline as the most attractive place in the city. Tel Avivians considered it indecent because of improper body exposure and unhealthy due to the seaside humidity. The shore – neglected and detached from the fabric of the city – attracted marginal groups whose behaviour was considered unsuitable or even deviant (Azaryahu 2001). It was only in the 1980s that the municipality and the broader public discovered the beach as an asset and that massive development took off. With these changes the marginal ecology of the shoreline and the patchwork of other worlds suddenly found itself within the fabric of the city. The shoreline’s status as ‘pockets of deviant behaviour’ resonates with Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, which we will use to investigate the extent to which these spaces hold the potential to enact a strategy of resistance.
