ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on luxury and prestige places and addresses some equally important complementary topics such as: the power exerted by shopping places, the pervasiveness of luxury places, the spread of prestige, and subjective preconceptions in the understanding of luxury and prestige. The chapter presents two major methodological approaches, one conceptual and the other pictorial. On the one hand, conceptual arguments deal with clarifying the current context of exceptional places in a globalized world. Pictorial arguments, on the other hand, illustrate the general features that characterize a prestigious place. The chapter discusses heterotopias and considers them as fragmentary realities of urban contemporaneity. It illustrates the current trend of deluxe places around the world in depth falls. The chapter also focuses on the fragments constituted by exceptional places, either in the context of the city as a whole or as generators of prestigious places of urbanity.
