ABSTRACT
One is tempted to conclude, after reading all the contributions to this book, that heterotopia is too slippery a term to be of any fundamental significance in the discourse on space and culture. Indeed the range of different interpretations of the term is astonishing. Some authors – James Faubion, Heidi Sohn and Christine Boyer specifically – aim at a genuinely ‘Foucauldian’ reading of the term, by positioning the concept of heterotopia within Foucault’s own discourse and that of his contemporaries. Some others – Marco Cenzatti, Yael Allweil, Peter Lang, Robert Cowherd, Lee Stickells, Filip De Boeck – reread the term through the work of subsequent theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu or Edward Soja and use it as a tool to understand newly developing spatial-cultural constellations. The editors themselves – Lieven De Cauter and Michiel Dehaene – mount a more ambitious systematization of the concept of heterotopia by relating it to a reflection on the categorizations of space in the ancient Greek city, following a similar inspiration to the one that led Hannah Arendt to the formulation of her theory of political action. Still others – D. Grahame Shane, Alessandro Petti, Xavier Guillot – adopt the term heterotopia to qualify a special category of space, namely a kind of enclave, with its own system of openings and closings, inclusions and exclusions. And lastly there are those who use the term heterotopia somewhat loosely as they pursue a direct connection with the topic of their study – be it malls (Douglas and Jessica Muzzio), newly built urban centres (Clément Orillard), themed or gated communities (Hugh Bartling, Setha Low), theme park streets (Kathleen Kern), or zones of marginality (Gil Doron).
