ABSTRACT
While heterotopic visions have had an appeal for academics since Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and, arguably, since Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (1899), people still try to secure their own spaces and exclude others. The realization of heterotopia – that ideal place where difference is celebrated rather than being a source of oppression – will, as Merrifield and Swyngedouw (1996, p. 6), argue 'necessarily involve turning the tide of commodity and image fetishism of assorted ruling forces and the theoretical self-indulgence of the academic left'. In such a radical reordering of society, attachments to place which receive spatial expression in class and racial divisions and which are deepened by institutions involved in housing markets and by governments which encourage parents to move their children to 'better' schools, need to be weakened. There is clearly a contradiction between the positive valuation of community, which implies belonging and not belonging, and pluralist and multiracial rhetoric because, as Iris Young (Young, 1990, p. 235) recognized, 'if existing together with others in relations of mutual understanding and reciprocity is the goal, then it is understandable that we exclude and avoid those whom we do not or cannot identify.'
