Differences in the City: Postmetropolitan Heterotopias As Liberal Utopian Dreams 1536184969, 9781536184969

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POLITICAL SCIENCE AND HISTORY

DIFFERENCES IN THE CITY POSTMETROPOLITAN HETEROTOPIAS AS LIBERAL UTOPIAN DREAMS

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POLITICAL SCIENCE AND HISTORY

DIFFERENCES IN THE CITY POSTMETROPOLITAN HETEROTOPIAS AS LIBERAL UTOPIAN DREAMS

JORGE LEÓN CASERO AND

JULIA URABAYEN EDITORS

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: León Casero, Jorge, 1982- editor. | Urabayen, Julia, editor. Title: Differences in the city: : postmetropolitan heterotopias as liberal utopian dreams / Jorge León Casero (editor), Julia Urabayen (editor). Description: New York : Nova Science Publishers, [2020] | Series: Political science and history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020035206 (print) | LCCN 2020035207 (ebook) | ISBN 9781536184969 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781536185324 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Urbanization--Philosophy. | Sociology, Urban--Philosophy. | Space--Social aspects. | Utopias--Social aspects. Classification: LCC HT153 .D54 2020 (print) | LCC HT153 (ebook) | DDC 307.7601--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035206 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035207

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. † New York

CONTENTS Preface

The Falling Decadence of the Heterotopian Social Empowerment Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

Section 1: Heterotopia and Postmetropolis

ix 1

Chapter 1

Heterotopia Unbound: Undisciplined Approaches to ‘Space Otherwise’ Heidi Sohn

Chapter 2

Humanizig the City: The 4 C Strategy against Fragmented Cities Miguel A. Alonso del Val

17

Chapter 3

Foucault and the Roots of the Smart City Joaquin Fortanet

33

Chapter 4

The Internet and the Heterotopia of the Postmetropolis Juan Diego Parra Valencia

45

Chapter 5

Surface Heterotopias, Platform Urbanism Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

57

3

Section 2: Heterotopia and Public Space

71

Chapter 6

Other Spaces and Peripheral Urbanities Paula Cristina Pereira and Irandina Afonso

73

Chapter 7

Heterotopıa as a Manıfest of Multiple Publıcs Meriç Demir Kahraman and Tayfun Kahraman

87

Chapter 8

Heterotopia and the Ordering of Contested Urban Public Space: A Case Study of the Sarpi Neighbourhood (Chinatown) in Milan Jingyi Zhu

99

vi Chapter 9

Contents Separation and Open Heterotopias in New York and Tokyo José Mª Castejón Esteban

115

Section 3: Heterotopia and the Right to the City

131

Chapter 10

Delusions of Heterotopia Ibán Díaz-Parra

133

Chapter 11

Palestinian Urbanity: Utopia or Heterotopia? Rachel Kallus, Ronnen Ben-Arie and Haya Zaatry

143

Chapter 12

Heterotopias and the Right to the City: The Struggles for the Creation and Collective Use of the Urban Commons Orlando Alves dos Santos Junior

Chapter 13

The Devil’s Mansion of Surabaya: A Heterotopia Robbie Peters

Section 4: Heterotopia and Gender Space

163 179 191

Chapter 14

From Parisian Prostitutes to Robot Sex Workers: The Mutations of the Heterotopian Brothel Peter Johnson

193

Chapter 15

The Decline of the Emancipatory Power of Utopias and Heterotopias: An Analysis of Libertarianism and Queer Theory Felipe Schwember

207

Chapter 16

From the Processes of Subjectivation to the Ways of Dwelling: The Rights of a Becoming Ontotopology Eduardo Álvarez Pedrosian

223

Chapter 17

The ‘Bunny’ Heterotopia. Playboy’s Transformation of Sexuality in Paul B. Preciado Jorge Andreu Jiménez

241

Section 5: Heterotopia and Symbolic Space

255

Chapter 18

Imagining, Building and Inhabiting Nature: Ishigami’s Journey to Humboldt’s Eden Javier Pérez-Herreras

257

Chapter 19

The Strange Birds and Beasts in Oyamada Hiroko’s “The Factory” (Kōjō, 2010) Angela Yiu

275

Contents Chapter 20

Dispelling the Reality with a Lot of Illusion or the Heterotopic Utopia of Living in Medellín Juan Esteban Posada Morales

Chapter 21

Home, Soil, Homeland: A Jerusalem Story Livia Judith Alexander

Chapter 22

Heterotopias of Pessimism. An Approach through the Works of John Hejduk and Daniel Libeskind Jaime Quintana-Elena

vii

289 301

317

About the Authors

331

Index

339

Preface

THE FALLING DECADENCE OF THE HETEROTOPIAN SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT Jorge León Casero* and Julia Urabayen†

Department of Philosophy, University of Zaragoza, Spain Department of Philosophy, University of Navarra, Spain

Although it is one of the most vague and ambiguous concepts proposed by Foucault —Edward Soja described it as “frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent [and] incoherent” (Soja 1996, 162)— the term “heterotopia” has been, and continues to be, one of the most widely used in technical as well as in human and social disciplines. This notion was expounded by Foucault at a conferenc e—Des Espaces Autres1— that the author refused to publish. Despite this, the text was published by several French, British and Italian architecture magazines shortly after the death of its author (Foucault 1984, 1986a, 1986b)2, which led to the rapid appearance of publications that used this concept as an analytical tool with which to describe an incredibly varied range of urban phenomena, which Peter Johnson attempted to systematize by categories several decades later (Johnson 2016a, 2016b).

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected]. Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected]. 1 The lecture was given by Foucault on March 14, 1967 at the Cercle d’études architecturales by invitation of its director, Ionel Schein, after having heard the “Les Hétérotopies” conference Foucault delivered on the radio program France Culture on December 7, 1966. That conference was part of a series of lectures on literature and utopia. 2 In 1978, a few years before his death, the first issue of the Catalan magazine Carrer de la Ciutat published part of that interview. * †

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Coinciding with the rise of postmodernism and the supposed crisis of the great unitary stories of the West (Lyotard 1984)3, the great heterogeneity of urban and spatial phenomena and typologies referred to in the Foucauldian text was further expanded, with the explicit intention of using it as part of the new urban ideology that neoliberal theorists of architecture and urbanism were beginning to implement under the leitmotif of the city by fragments (Defert 1997; Ritter 1998). This is an idea inherited directly from Colin Rowe’s (1978) Collage City, which architects and urban planners of the 1980s identified with Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. This identification became the new ideology of neoliberal urbanism and was used, through a nostalgic return to the myth of the nineteenthcentury metropolis of laissez-faire, to oppose the structuralist planning of the New Towns. In this vein, Rowe states that the city by fragments implies applying “the ‘bricolage’ mentality at its most lavish: an obelisk from here, a column from there, a range of statues from somewhere else […] as an alternative to the disastrous urbanism of social engineering and total design” (Rowe 1978, 106-107). Due to Rowe’s neoliberal ideology, this fragmented city of the bricoleur mentality demanded free trade and the elimination of any type of state regulation of it, since “without free trade the diet becomes restricted and provincialized” (Rowe 1978, 148). Similarly, the terminological recovery of the heterotopias that Marco de Michelis and German Johannes Gachnang carried out in the organization of the IBA (Internationale Bauausstellung) exhibition in 1984 was explicitly due to —in the words of IBA director Josef Paul Kleishues— the ability the term had to “put into practice the idea of a city by fragments” (Defert 2009, p. 59)4. In this way, neoliberal urban ideology appropriated the concept of heterotopia, making it pass for libertarian and endowing it with the ability to exert political resistance to economic and urban planning by public administrations previously criticized by Jane Jacobs (1961), Françoise Choay (1965) or Henri Lefebvre (1968). Regarding this point, it is worth remembering that, leaving aside the empty defenses of public space made in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) so readily appropriated by architects and urban planners obsessed with presenting themselves as part of the new social and political movements, the liberal-mercantile ideology of the American journalist led her to strongly criticize the “tremendously expensive programs of urban renewal” for having (mis)used a “capital that should have been available to young entrepreneurs” (Jacobs 1969, 219). Furthermore, she openly stated that “we cannot expect Lyotard’s thesis of the disappearance of the great Western emancipatory tales typical of the Enlightenment was quickly criticized and denied by post-colonialist philosophy in general, and by Edward Said in particular, who stated that “the emphasis behind much of the work done by the first generation of post-colonial artists and scholars is exactly the opposite: the grand narratives remain, even though their implementation and realization are at present in abeyance, deferred, or circumve/nted” (Said 2003, 351). 4 Among the architects who participated in the Berlin IBA were Peter Cook, Peter Eisenman, Giorgio Grassi, Zaha Hadid, John Hedjuk, Han Hollein, Rem Koolhaas, Rob Krier, Aldo Rossi, Álvaro Siza, Oswald Mathias Ungers or James Stirling. For a systematic exhibition of their projects see the monographic number of the A+U magazine from, IBA. International Building Exhibition Berlin. 3

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that economic development be for the benefit of all” (Jacobs 1969, 269) and that the only “help that a highly developed and prosperous country can provide to another underdeveloped one is to buy its products” (Jacobs 1969, 241). This is a position that directly collided with Henri Lefebvre’s explicitly Marxist defense of the right to the city as an actualization of democratic struggles (kratos = power), since according to the French sociologist “democracy is never a ‘condition’ but a struggle […] This perpetual struggle for autogestion is the class struggle” (Lefebvre 2009, 135). Selling it, then, as a right to the city, Jacobs and Rowe’s neoliberal economic ideology projected onto the concept of heterotopias emphasizing their emancipatory potential and the self-management of new junkspaces (Koolhaas 2002) generated by the explosive growth of current postmetropolises —and their correlative slums (Davis 2007)— throughout the world. The paradigmatic example of this process of unconditional acceptance of the emancipatory and empowering character of urban space’s fragmentation is Los Angeles. Initially praised by Rayner Banham (1971) as an ideal model of urban fragmentation, technological-infrastructural neoliberalism and freedom of movement — whose supposed beauty, a “conventional planning wisdom certainly would destroy” (Banham 1971, 139)— would be consecrated as the epitome of liberal multiculturalism and a privileged setting for the development of dialogue between cultures due to the later interpretation made by Soja (2001). Both Banham and Soja highlighted the fully “democratic” character of the Los Angeles city-region. The first, by virtue of a surprisingly narrow approach that reduces the ideal to the freedom of movement provided by freeways: “the private car and the public freeway together provide an ideal, not to say idealized, version of democratic urban transportation” (Banham 1971, 217), which allows him to state that “the famous four-level intersection which now looks down on the old Figueroa Street grade separation [is] a work of art” (Banham 1971, 89)5. The second maintained the same due to the administrative fragmentation of the Great Los Angeles area, which in 2004 amounted to a total of 163 administrative units (cities) and 6 counties. However, this characteristic, instead of a true political and socio-economic empowerment of the population, was simply the main reason that the urban developments promoted during the 1980s with the aim of providing the city with the necessary infrastructure for the 1984 Olympic games produced a speculative process of land prices. This process, due to the competition that arose between the different administrative units, culminated, in the absence of a regional plan that limited the declaration of developable land, with the inclusion of many of the eastern cities such as

5

Banham considered Los Angeles as a mixture of the “automobile way of life” and the “country-house” typical of the Jeffersonian ideal, to the point of arguing that “Los Angeles cradles and embodies the most potent current version of the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside [only comparable to] the villegiatura of Palladio’s patrons, or the Medici’s Poggio a Caiano” (Banham 1971, 238). This is a position directly related to the identification, from the 90s onwards, of shopping malls (Kern, 2008; Muzzio and Muzzio-Rentas, 2008; Orillard, 2008) and gated comumnities (Low 2008, Guillot, 2008; Bartling, 2008; Hook and Vrdoljak 2002) as privileged paradigms of the heterotopic spaces typical of the new global urbanism (Saasen 2001).

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Cudahy, Belle Gardens or Huntington Park, among the poorest in the United States (García Vázquez, 2004). Accordingly, through the ideological appropriation of the antagonistic potential and the emancipatory character that Michel Foucault had granted to the concept of heterotopia, and its subsequent projection on the products of a neoliberal urbanism interpreted from the politically correct prism of multiculturalism (Taylor 1992; Walzer 1997; Kymlicka 2000), the “heterotopologies” proposed by Soja (1995) as a paradigm of a postmodern urban space that is attentive and respectful with the cultural differences of its inhabitant —although not so much with the differences in income and/or class— began to be accepted, and defined “as sites of political and social relevance for the empowerment of minority groups and marginal subgroups through the use of space “(Heynen 2008, 317). This is why the concept of heterotopia has been used simultaneously and repeatedly for the past 25 years as a tool to praise the beatitudes of neoliberal urbanism (Farmaki, Stergiou and Christou 2020; Tzanoudaki 2014) as well as to defend its emancipatory character by social movements and activists (Pan 2020; Kokalov 2018; Ismail, Wan Yahya and Barani 2017; Helten 2015). These two opposing uses are explained because the inherent antagonistic and emancipatory virtues of the term, which refers to the realization of the right to the city by Henri Lefebvre or David Harvey (2012), have been interpreted according to a neoliberal ideology that has attached a gentrifying process to that right to the city, as seen in Jane Jacobs (Sacco, Ghirardi, Tartari and Trimarchi 2019; Sennett 2018; Bay 2016). Consequently, it also follows that the original mystification of heterotopic space as a simple city by fragments continues to have a presence in the work of those completely formalist architects and urban planners who faithfully believe in the mantra of design as research, and that they do not hesitate to stubbornly maintain the reduction of the concept of heterotopia to a simple “[urban] morphology based on the autonomy of the fragments” (Çalışkan, Cihanger Ribeiro and Tümtürk 2020, 30), or even to a simple spatio-temporal juxtaposition of projective logics (Spanu 2020). In this sense, the emancipatory potential that heterotopias could have had in the disciplinary arrangement of space has ended up transforming into a magic formula with which to transform the impositions of the neoliberal (de)arrangement of the territory into a hymn to freedom of movement, to a sociocultural diversity without class conflict, and even to the “Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God [seen as a] heterotopic place outside of place, and communal solidarity within the urban context of the Roman Empire” (Maier 2013, p. 76). In other words, what began as the ideological discourse of neoliberal urbanism progressively became part of the discourse typical of a Western-centric Left in crisis, unable to respond to the criticisms made by decolonial philosophies that targeted and continue to target, with good reason, both the modern discourse of the great stories and the postmodern one of fragmentation and liberal multiculturalism (Dussel 1995; Grosfoguel

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and Castro-Gómez 2007; Mignolo 2012; Sousa Santos 2014; Grosfoguel, Maldonado Torres and Saldívar 2015)6. A good example of this heterotopic Western-centrism that remains oblivious to decolonial criticism is one of the last collective works dedicated to heterotopias, Heterotopia and Globalisation in the Twenty-First Century (2020), for the notion of the heterotopic that their editors maintain reduces Foucault’s concept to a simple “multiplicity of discursive spaces, which overlap and clash with one another” vis-à-vis the supposed “undifferentiation of cultures and spaces” typical of globalization (Ferdinand, Souch and Wesselman 2020). This reduction does not problematize the hierarchical asymmetries that articulate this multiplicity of discursive spaces and does not raise the possibility that the notion of the heterotopic has become one of the main Western-centric epistemological categories with which the new neoliberal coloniality is imposed. Similarly, some of the authors who participate in the book intend to directly relate this multiple-neutral character of heterotopic spaces to a notion of “common” completely alien to its materialistic and antagonistic logic in relation to the public-private legal regime (Ostrom 1990, Laval and Dardot 2019), just as a few years ago the shameful Common Ground Biennale di Venezia in 2012 (Chipperfield 2012) tried to reduce “the common” to the simply shared. The discourse of shared economies is characteristic of the most imperialist globalized ultra-neoliberalism, typical of Silicon Valley (Sadin 2016) and does not at any time address the problems posed by the profound asymmetries of the worldsystem (Wallerstein, Lemert and Aguirre Rojas 2016) that condition and pre-determine the power relations present in heterotopic or heterarchic spaces (Kontopoulos 1993; Grosfoguel 2014). These are spaces that cannot be considered a priori as directly emancipatory but apart from an effective political and decolonial project. For this reason, the thematic expansions carried out by this new publication with the aim of including age differences (Gearey 2020) and mobility between tourists and refugees (Kluwick and Richter 2020), the specificities of the Latin American rural world (Pierpauli and Turzi 2020) or the singularities of new technologies (Bahmanteymouri and Haghighi 2020) fall prey to a “point zero hybris” (Castro Gómez 2005) incapable of questioning the emancipatory potential of the Western construction of the heterotopic as a tool for analysis. Because of this, it is still important to remember that, just as the imperialist colonialism of the nineteenth century justified its structures of domination with a discourse of the liberation of the oppressed and the (evangelizing) education of “barbarians” and “savages”, the current colonial paradigm uses the concept of heterotopia as an ideology with which to

6

Unlike decolonial theory, post-colonialism —except for honorable exceptions such as Spivak (1999) or Mohanty (1984)—d eveloped a greater affinity with Western-centric discourses that conceived of multiplicity and difference from the epistemological neutrality of the organizing framework (Žižek, 1997), and therefore without paying enough attention to the existence of epistemological asymmetries that prevent considering any type of contact or cultural exchange as emancipatories in themselves. In the field of urban studies in general, and of heterotopic spaces in particular, there continue to be broad parallels with the position developed by post-colonial studies, as shown well by the works of Beswick, Parma and Sil (2015), Olga (2013) or Mehta (2013).

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justify and legitimize a package of neoliberal measures disguised under the façade of “difference” and “multiculturalism”. But these measures always work in favor of destroying the empowerment and resistance capacity of the communities in which it is applied (Zibechi 2007). While the previous collective reference work dedicated to heterotopias —Heterotopia and the City (Dehaene and De Cauter, 2008)— served to consecrate the discourse of neoliberal urbanism of shopping malls and gated communities understood as socially emancipatory, the current one —Heterotopia and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century— repeats neoliberal mystification that understands the heterotopic as an essentially empowering and libertarian structure and projects it on a global scale over a broader spectrum of social relations, which continue to be seen under the (epistemological) eye of the West. Faced with this type of discourses which turn the heterotopic into the new great story of the multiculturalist West, it is important to provide visibility to those other positions — much smaller in number— that deny heterotopias any characteristic of resistance, inversion or subversion (Hetherington 1997) and they even consider it an “inadequate concept for analysing spatial difference, [which] has pervaded some recent anglophone adoptions of Foucault” (Saldanha 2008, 2081). Likewise, it is necessary to pay special attention to all those researchers who, leaving behind the majority liberal discourse, link heterotopias with completely dystopian and alienating realities that lack the possibility of empowerment (Klein 2019; Sheldon 2018), or who highlight their material subsumption and its obligatory operation within “policies of exclusion, organisation and control [typical of] precarious spaces [and] inequality” (Agier 2019). Therefore, from this other point of view, the inescapable conclusion that must be clearly stated is that, as we previously mentioned elsewhere, “the supposed emancipatory potential (counter-site, empowerment) assigned to certain places and/or architectural [and urban planning] typologies characterized as heterotopias has come to function only as ideological propaganda of the liberal discourse” (León and Urabayen 2017, 3). Given that, even with this divergence of positions regarding their ability to function as agents of social empowerment, nearly all of the research carried out agrees that most of the current urban developments can be described as heterotopias, a new interdisciplinary reflection becomes necessary. Are these post-metropolitan heterotopias capable of shaping themselves as the new nerve centers of anti-capitalist resistance or are they only capable of subverting the disciplinary power of public administrations already brought to crisis-point decades ago by neoliberal capitalism? Can they function as the spatial tools of an antagonistic politics for the common or, on the contrary, is their operation intrinsically neoliberal? Although new technology developments and the consequences generated by the 2008 financial crisis have begun to shift academic debates towards the automation of urban infrastructures, Smart Cities, gentrification processes and the self-management of urban

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commons not dependent on public administrations, the problem of heterotopia is still present in all of them in one way or another. For this reason, this book brings together various analyses and investigations that maintain conflicting positions on the emancipatory or ideological-alienating character of heterotopias with the dual objective of avoiding their Western-centric bias and preserving any possible trait of emancipatory potential that may be rearticulated from an epistemological diversity viewpoint. With these objectives in mind, we have organized the twenty-two articles that make up this book into five major thematic sections, coinciding with some of the main topics around which socio-spatial debates dedicated to heterotopias have taken place in the last twentyfive years: the postmetropolis, public space, the right to the city, gender relations and their symbolic condition. Although these five categories should not be understood as unrelated compartments —but quite the opposite— we have chosen to use this classification as an analytical tool to illuminate some of the focal points around which to exercise effective critique of one of the most frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent [and] incoherent concepts of socio-spatial theory. The first section, “Heterotopia and Postmetropolis”, opens with a text in which Heidi Sohn explicitly questions the liberating character —which she describes as utopian— attributed to heterotopias by postmodern understandings, contrasting it with all those understandings that are limited to using Foucault’s term as a simple classifying category that, due to its extreme laxity, has already lost all epistemological capacity to establish critically relevant differences. Faced with both uses of the term “heterotopia”, Sohn tries to regain its epistemological potential as a way of thinking and theorizing spatial difference otherwise, namely, heterotopologically. Miguel A. Alonso del Val carries out an analysis of the material consequences entailed for post-metropolitan urban reality what postmodern and neoliberal discourses have conceived as a hymn to difference and multiplicity, paying special attention to the limitations of mobility and social connection produced by transport and communication infrastructures so praised by Rayner Banham. Faced with this multiplicity, he proposes a fourfold strategy with which to defragment the city based on compacity, complexity, connectivity and circularity typical of pre-metropolitan Western urbanism. This is, therefore, a project of interconnection of cultural and socioeconomic differences, and no longer of simple juxtaposition (Tschumi 1996; Koolhaas 1998). Joaquín Fortanet recalls that Foucault’s heterotopias cannot be decontextualized from the historical role they play in the transition from the conceptualization of the punitive city in Discipline and Punish to the security or smart city that emerges from the Collège courses of ‘77 –’79 (2001). Thus, on the one hand, it enables and updates the heterotopic as a possible tool for understanding some of the effects of smart cities. On the other hand, he considers both realities —heterotopia and smart cities— as practical exercises of the utopia of a new power, concluding that an automatic resistance or dissent cannot be inferred from the concept of heterotopia in Foucault.

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Juan Diego Parra delves into the current heterotopic singularities of digital spaces. Linking the concept of heterotopia with that of hypermattter, he points out that what is properly heterotopic —not necessarily emancipatory— is not taking place at the level of physical or material reality, but in the realm of the virtual. In this sense, the ascertainment in the physical reality typical of the post-metropolitan technological infrastructure does not invalidate but rather exacerbates its hypermaterial and hetetopical condition. Lastly, the two editors of this book —Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen— take sides in the current debate on post-metropolitan heterotopias, trying to identify their specificity in the platform and non-trivial nature that the medium from which they operate has acquired. While disciplinary heterotopias were capable of generating, at least in theory, counter-hegemonic spaces that allowed the empowerment of the excluded thanks to their simple juxtaposition, platform heterotopias cannot guarantee a direct empowerment of citizens due to their “participatory” interconnection, as well as requiring the establishment of cybernetic control mechanisms that transform platform infrastructures into an asset organized strictly according to the principles of common goods. The second section, “Heterotopia and Public Space”, begins with a chapter by Paula Cristina Pereira and Irandina Alfonso in which they analyze the capacity that the impact of migratory flows on urban space has to generate the other spaces, or spaces of transgression of heterotopias. Based on the analyses of Negri and Harvey, the authors identify those specific aspects of heterotopic spaces that could still be salvaged as a form of access to a right to the city understood as a right to effective participation, to the appropriation of space and to the inclusion of difference. Meriç Demir Kahraman and Tayfun Kahraman approach public space understood as open mediators for social decision-making and participation in political life. The authors assert that this emancipatory character is continuously undermined by the effect of effective powers, public and private, so that this idealized definition of public space is only valid in times of revolts or riots. As a consequence, the authentically heterotopic character of democratic pluralism is identified with crisis processes characterized by the instability and malleability of the ephemeral, which questions both the structural and synchronic character of heterotopias, as well as their potential to develop a programmable long-term emancipatory project. Jingyi Zhu delves analytically into the increasingly complex situations of conflict and co-existence of heterotopic public spaces by analyzing the Sarpi neighborhood of Milan, the so-called Chinatown of this city. Granting space an in-the-making character rather than a pre-made container, the conclusions drawn lead the author to highlight that any apparently emancipatory feature of the urban heterotopias characteristic of public space is nothing more than the result of ordering and adaptation. Lastly, José María Castejón links the concept of heterotopia with the critique of separation made by Debord and the situationists, and exposes that critique to the thread of the analysis of two cities with radically different space production systems and notions of

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the public and the private: New York and Tokyo. While New York develops within a rigid urban plan, Tokyo does so according to a constant state of change and adaptation to the environment. The study shows that while the heterotopias described by Foucault were places, the heterotopias that arise today refer rather to processes and infrastructural logics. The third section, “Heterotopia and the Right to the City”, begins with a text in which Ibán Díaz Parra openly disagrees with the supposed potential of heterotopias to promote an effective right to the city and, unlike Paula Cristina Pereira and Irandina Alfonso, considers that the postmodern urbanism discourse related to diversity, creativity and participation hides a homogenization and a structural injustice entirely incompatible with the right to the city conceived by Henri Lefebvre. According to this analysis, the concept of heterotopia would be part of the neoliberal ethos of the end of History. In this sense, the diversity, participation and horizontality of heterotopias would only be surface effects whose operation hides its opposites, which are produced at a structural level. Rachel Kallus, Ronnen Ben Arie and Haya Zaatry analyze the case of the new Palestinian cultural venues opening up in Haifa over the past decades. Using some emblematic examples, the authors delve into the way in which heterotopic differences in urban space are over-determined by the contradictions inherent in the entanglement of ethno-nationalism and neoliberalism in the development and production of urban space in Israel. Thus, although it is recognized that these independent Palestinian cultural venues are produced through the appropriation of urban space and the claim for a right to the city, it is concluded that “they do so while relying on that same order they critique”. Orlando Alves dos Santos Junior raises the problem of the emancipatory character of heterotopias as a socio-political project to carry out. To do so, he focuses on the relationship between its universal dimension as broader societal projects and :its particular dimension as people experience concrete trritories in daily life from a triple point of view: 1. As a relationship based on a dialectical conception of space, territory and place. 2. As a project that conceives the city as a common, and 3. As a right to the city that must be built as an antagonistic political project, and not as a right granted by formal legal institutions. Lastly, Robbie Peters analyzes the case study of the Surabaya’s Devil’s Mansion in Indonesia. A 200-year old haunted building and former morgue that housed nearly 1000 ethnic Chinese refugees who fled persecution in the countrysde during the Indonesian revolution and whose descendents remain there to this day as the city’s “internal others”. In tune with Joaquín Fortanet’s theoretical analysis, his examination of Devil’s Mansion concludes that, indeed, everything seems to indicate that the spatialized heterotopic city will be displaced by a despatialized biopolitical city that governs abstract populations rather than actual spaces, even though he considers that heterotopic spaces can also survive in the smart city. The fourth section, “Heterotopia and Gender Space”, begins with a reflection by Peter Johnson about the absorption process in daily life that one of the quintessential heterotopic spaces —the brothel— has undergone due to the influence of new information and

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communication technologies. After analyzing the case of Hugh Hefner (Preciado 2019) as a landmark in this process of domestication and technologization of sexuality, he highlights the dark, dangerous and abusive places of certain heterotopias that function as disciplinary institutions, and which are currently being dispersed and absorbed in the communicational flows that do not distinguish the public from the private, nor the internal from the external. Felipe Schwember investigates the possibility of redefining the meaning of utopia and, consequently, of heterotopia based on a review of the emancipatory role of libertarianism and queer theory. In his chapter, he tries to establish a dialogue between two divergent philosophical traditions (Nozick and Butler) to show how their utopian emancipatory potential can converge if some of their principles are redefined. In proposing that the heterotopic discourse has great affinity with liberal utopia, he problematizes the counterhegemonic trait of heterotopia and shows the liberal character that it has acquired in recent decades. Eduardo Álvarez Pedrosian studies heterotopic spaces, understanding them as ontologically decisive elements in the subjective processes of the contemporary city, and complements his theoretical argument with an ethnographic case that analyzes the Plaza de las Pioneras (Pioneering Women Square) inaugurated in Montevideo (Uruguay) on March 8, 2020 as an example of feminist urbanism. Álvarez Pedrosian, recognizing the strong disruptive character that the appropriation of public space carried out on the basis of gender still retains, argues that the new visibility gained by feminist initiatives is the creation of a new subjectivation. Lastly, Jorge Andreu systematically analyzes the influence that spatial notions have on the work of Paul B. Preciado. In his work he pays special attention to the use of space as yet another technology for the production of subjectivity, which is key to the functioning of the pharmaceutical-pornographic regime of corporality and post-capitalist sexuality. Unlike the conclusions reached by Peter Johnson, Andreu considers that post-capitalist post-sexuality pornotopias enable a radical alteration capable of empowering individuals for the production of divergent sexual subjectivities. Finally, the fifth section, “Heterotopia and Symbolic Space”, tries to pay due attention to all those manifestations of heterotopias most related to the socio-symbolic effects of the human sciences and their sometimes forgotten aesthetic-artistic-literary dimension. From this point of view, Javier Pérez Herreras recalls the importance of travel as one of the fundamental common places of the heterotopic tradition, already commented on by Foucault himself. Specifically, he studies the work of the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami, who is one of the main representatives of an architecture that, despite being hyper-technological, functions as built nature that houses the wild heterotopias of the new urban forests. Thus, faced with the rational and measured discipline (nomos) typical of the disciplinary city analyzed by Foucault, the new architectural heterotopias of the Japanese postmetropolises are presented as places of a return to the excessive and de-lirious (from

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the latin lira = the city boundaries; be delirious =leave the city) of a supposedly nonurbanized territory. Angela Yiu analyzes the novel The Factory (2019) by the Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada. The work is a new heterotopia that crosses over the binarisms of the natural and the artificial. Through the explicit assimilation of the underclass of underpaid menial workers trapped in estranged labor in contemporary Japanese society with nonhuman living creatures, the author creates a metaphor for the less-than-human character generated by virtue of the mode of employment. In this sense, the heterotopic character that Angela Yiu attributes to the Hiroko Oyamada factory reveals a set of socio-productive relationships that deny the consideration of human (rights) to those involved in these heterotopic relationships. Juan Esteban Posada Morales focuses on the study of contemporary capitalism in Medellín (Colombia) seen through the prism of an administration of emotional and cultural forms carried out as a network of power games that constitute neoliberal civilians as “freedom” generating machines. With this point of view in mind, Posada Morales considers the figure of the entrepreneur as one which embodies the heterotopic utopia of all those elements that arise in the fantasy of investing in ourselves, which implies shifting the responsibility —ethical and legal— to individuals who have been deprived of their quality of sovereign subject and have been reduced to a constructed object. Livia Alexander departs from the installation entitled “Zero. Home. Earth.” that Israeli artist Tami Zori made on the rooftop of an abandoned shopping mall in central Jerusalem in October 2018. The author reflects on the relationship between power, dwelling, soil and home and suggests a review of the utopian/dystopian principles of Zionism and neoliberalism in order to propose a heterotopia that makes thinking about the relationship between bodies, power, consumption (of food and otherwise) and climate change possible. However, Alexander concludes that artists seldom have the resources to create societal change on a grand scale. And last but not least, Jaime Quintana delves into the emotional baggage of a particular type of heterotopia located at the furthest point from any feature of social emancipation or common political project, by studying some of the most representative works of the architects Daniel Libeskind and John Hejduk. The author calls them “heterotopias of pessimism”. This is a reflection that completely avoids any type of optimistic approach in the construction of a city and focuses on the aspects of loss, absence, nostalgia and melancholia of spaces whose heterotopic character can only be understood as what remains after the most emphatic devastation of all hope. It is, therefore, a symbolic manifesto against those positions that still believe in the emancipatory character of dreams that have long since turned into nightmares.

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SECTION 1: HETEROTOPIA AND POSTMETROPOLIS

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 1

HETEROTOPIA UNBOUND: UNDISCIPLINED APPROACHES TO ‘SPACE OTHERWISE’ Heidi Sohn* Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT Michel Foucault’s problematic concept of heterotopia has traveled extensively across discursive domains over the past five decades, influencing how we think about spatial difference. In postmodern discourse, however, it tends to be extrapolated to encompass socio-cultural difference, where it is read as an expression of empancipatory, deviant or contestatory potential. This infuses the concept with a sort of liberatory or utopian character, which it does not have. On the other hand, many accounts analyze specific spatial arrangements or places that stand out for their heterogeneity as ‘case studies’ of heterotopia, which are then described quite literally according to the six principles of the ‘heterotopian toolbox’. The results are often disappointingly vacuous, flat descriptions that fail to elucidate the processes and relations through which difference emerges in the first place. In this chapter I argue that what these interpretations miss is the opportunity of thinking and theorizing spatial difference otherwise, namely, heterotopologically. Like theory itself, heterotopia is unstable, ‘undisciplined.’ It shuns classification and categories; its inherent ambivalence and plasticity allow it to resist and escape capture. When freed from rigid or conventional readings, the concept transgresses discursive and disciplinary boundaries, forcing us to problematize, to question, to experiment, and especially to think differently about space. In this chapter I join the emerging voices of scholars who are calling for the formulation of heterotopian alliances and collaborations among a host of *

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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Heidi Sohn disciplinary fields, activism, and the arts around the problematics of spatial difference: the call for a heterotopia unbound.

Keywords: heterotopology, un/disciplinarity, spatial difference, thinking otherwise

ON THE PERILOUS ACT OF THINKING OTHERWISE “Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action —a perilous act.” (Foucault 1970, 328)

Over the past several decades, much —perhaps too much— has been said and written about Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia. Contrary to its homonym in the medical sciences, and evolutionary biology, where it remains rather circumscribed within its specific disciplinary boundaries (Sohn 2008), Foucault’s heterotopia has spread across a broad spectrum of knowledge fields, ranging from the spatial disciplines, human geography, urban studies and architecture, to the humanities, the social sciences and cultural analysis. It animates a rich variety of interpretations and readings of spatial, sociocultural and other phenomena for which, it is often argued, no other explanatory frame or descriptive tool is more appropriate than the one provided by Foucault’s heterotopology: a pseudo-scientific, systematic description of absolutely different spatial arrangements (Foucault 2008a). Very generally, the notion of heterotopia and its respective toolbox respond to a quintessentially postmodern preoccupation with the questions of difference, as well as those of (spatial) otherness, and as such, they have been used in a large variety of ways to discuss issues of (ortho)normalcy and the many variants and degrees taken by its opposite, the so-called hetero-normal. Often, the hetero-normal, understood as the hallmark of heterogeneity and otherness, takes spatial forms and arrangements that infuse social and cultural figures conventionally associated to deviancy, transgression, abnormality, marginality, and so on, with a sort of emancipatory agency. At first sight, and faithful to its postmodern lineage, heterotopia seems to require us to cultivate, admire and even take sides with respect to social, cultural or spatial otherness constructing them as somehow counter alternatives to a totality of homogeneous, mainstream society. It construes (spatial) otherness as essentially different from whatever happens to surround it, and this usually means other social constructions and spaces. But as we know, what exactly constitutes difference, ultimately depends on the experience and perspective, or positionality, of the observer. In this line of reasoning, as Benjamin Gennochio claims, anything —or in fact, everything— could be considered a heterotopia (Gennochio 1995, 43), depending on whether the observer is wearing “heterotopian spectacles” (De Cauter and Dahaene 2008, 6), or not.

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On closer inspection, however, the investment in otherness, nonetheless reveals a certain double logic, an inherent ambivalence of heterotopia through which it sustains and undermines normalcy. This not only contributes to the contradictory and somewhat confusing sense which accompanies many interpretations of heterotopia as spaces that are different in degree —yet not in kind— from other spaces, but it also extends the structural, inner, and external problems of the notion of heterotopia beyond structuralist, and even postmodern readings. In this regard, Peter Johnson, an accomplished scholar of contemporary heterotopian studies, writes that, as “a modest, in some respects, underwhelming notion,” heterotopia does not even exist as such (Johnson 2016, 4). It exists only in relation to what surrounds it, that is, heterotopias take meaning only in a differential relationship to other spaces. The relational quality of heterotopia is among its most important traits because it forces us to not only observe, describe and analyze what there is as some flat bottom-line in space, and to somehow compare it to what surrounds it, but it compels us to explore how it comes to life; how it functions internally and externally; which forces and flows are at play at its thresholds; which agents and practices help produce and maintain it, and how all these interact among themselves and with the outside. But perhaps more importantly, the relational aspect of heterotopia lifts the concept from its material grounding in space and extends it —as problematization— to the spheres of thought and abstraction. James Faubion, on his part, however, claims that, “heterotopias are not figments of our imagination. Nor is their constitution, unlike that of a triangle or a cube, purely formal or ideal. Heterotopias are concrete technologies. They are rhetorical machines” (Faubion 2008, 33). This evidences how the notion of heterotopia is capable of functioning on two different levels: as a rhetorical devise prone to narrative and discourseformation, hermeneutics and interpretation on the one hand, and on the other, and perhaps more importantly, as a non-discursive creative concept (Deleuze and Guattari 2003, 22). For the purposes of this chapter, I will not provide an in-depth chronological or contextual account of the origin of heterotopia, its dissemination, its reception or its utilization in postmodern discourse, nor will I engage in a lengthy analysis of its many theoretical problems, as countless others before me have already taken up these endeavors in great detail (Johnson 2016). Suffice it to say here that, if there is one certainty about Foucault’s heterotopia, as a technology, as a rhetorical machine, and as a concept, it is that it surely has not run out of steam. In spite of its enduring popularity, and the diversity and varying levels of rigor of interpretations that it has provoked however, it remains as ambivalent, elusive, and inconclusive in its definition and in its potentiality as it was when Foucault first introduced it in the late 1960s. In fact, it is the lack of consensus of what precisely constitutes the notion of heterotopia, its inherent ambivalence, that lends it its status as an unruly and thus useful theoretical concept. Its apparent versatility includes its enduring resistance to succumb to easy answers of the ‘what is’-type. As an unruly concept, it produces more than confusion or controversy; it generates tensions, it offers possibilities, it occludes or evidences dangers; it cuts through and randomly entangles “elements of

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freedom, resistance, energy, regulation, normalization, control, order” (Johnson 2016). Although Arun Saldanha would disagree (Saldanha 2008, 2098), in a strict sense, heterotopia does what a concept is supposed to do: it is always more than a metaphor, or simple idea to contemplate, reflect on, or communicate. Concepts must be creative, or active, rather than merely representative, descriptive or simplifying (Stagoll 2010, 53). Gilles Deleuze writes that engaging with creative concepts is to engage in new lines of thinking and new connections between particular ideas, arguments and fields of specialization (Stagoll 2010, 54). Following Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz maintains that a concept exists independently from its origin and creator. It is capable of detaching itself from its original formulation, and of working elsewhere: it embodies “the production of something that has a quasi-autonomous existence, a life of its own, that performs its own work” (Grosz 2003, 78). In demanding questions to be raised around it, the concept of heterotopia systematically engenders new problems. In a way, it works like an arrow that is thrown without knowing where it will land, who will pick it up, or when, nor how it will be relayed further (Stengers, n/d). In all its banality (Harvey 2000, 236), and despite its flaws (Saldanha 2008, 2083), heterotopia forces us to problematize, to displace, to experiment, to distance, to question, to transform; but especially, it compels us to think. To think, Keith Robinson reminds us, is a form of problematizing, of practicing distance and detachment that opens up “a ‘nonspace,’ a heterotopic space, a theater of multiplicities; ‘any space whatever’ that can be used and inhabited to produce a genealogy of thought and new forms of subjectivation, a thinking otherwise...” (Robinson 1995, 243; this author’s emphasis). This is precisely what many commentators lose sight of —that heterotopia as a discrete thing or phenomenon, as an architectural configuration, space, or (em)place(ment)— is not what is interesting in and for itself. What is truly interesting is how the idea of heterotopia is a relay that unleashes powerful relational processes through which thinking and difference are engendered and become possible. If instead of identifying heterotopia merely in relation to particular space, and approaching it using heterotopology as a descriptive devise, we understood it as the conceptual driver of a specifically topological method of inquiry, in other words, if we rethought heterotopia through the implicit topological dimension that Foucault implied, we would be approaching an intensive, rather than a purely extensive logic. Amidst the whirlwind that has been the afterlife of Foucault’s heterotopia, it seems a daunting task to attempt yet another fresh reading or original approach to it without adding to a long litany of interpretations; or worse, to further contributing to its disfiguration into a postmodern discursive travesty. Hence, the intention of this chapter is first and foremost to think of ways in which it may be released from the constraints and limitations to which it has been subjected, especially in accounts that either elevate the concept to levels it certainly cannot achieve, or which use it as a simple flat descriptive tool through which to designate virtually everything as other or different. To this end, I would like to return to Foucault, and point out that regardless of his self-acknowledged quasi-obsession with

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space and spatiality, his most important philosophical contributions emphasize the need for the development of a truly critical process of thought, one which “far from legitimizing what is already known, consists in attempting to know how and to what extent it would possible to think otherwise” (Fall 2007, 124). This is, arguably, what Foucault referred to as the perilous act of thought cited in the opening quote of this chapter: an inherent danger hides in thinking outside or beyond the established systems or modes of thought that reduce and simplify reality into taxonomic frameworks and categories, and the danger lies precisely in questioning our knowledge and our thinking, because thought always presupposes the creation of problems, and not solutions. By problematizing trusted modes of thinking the element of threat is introduced, as well as the risk of their collapse. In fact, and as Foucault claims, the collapse of our structures and modes of thinking is a necessary condition through which thought shocks itself into something new so that we can think otherwise. In short, thinking otherwise is a form of problematization that lubricates the emergence not only of difference as such, but of the new. In that line, thinking otherwise implies a form of “moving sideways,” or lateral thinking (Foucault 2008b, 78) through which to advance the complex sets of problems thought itself engenders, to establish or facilitate productive interconnections between and among concepts, and especially, to foster the conditions of possibility for new forms of knowledge and practice to emerge. It is in this line that a number of publications have appeared in recent years from the emerging field of heterotopology, which, in thinking otherwise about space, are advocating the move away from discipline-specific readings (as in geography, urbanism, architecture, cultural analysis or the social sciences, for instance) and towards topological, intensive and transversal/diagrammatic methodologies that hone a creative exchange and collaboration among several knowledge communities outside of their trusted connections. Together, they are giving shape to what, for the lack of a better term, could be referred to as heterotopological thinking. Through this form of thinking it may be possible to not only dissolve and renegotiate disciplinary boundaries, as Doreen Massey recommended more than two decades ago (Massey 1999), but also to advance so-called undisciplined approaches that engage spatial arrangements not as other, but otherwise.

HETEROTOPOLOGICAL THINKING … What would heterotopological thinking entail? If the conventional focus on heterotopia as other spaces or spaces of otherness were to be shifted to an understanding of spaces otherwise, as Robert Harvey attempts in his recently published monograph Sharing Common Ground (Harvey 2017), the first step would lead us to reconsider spaces not in terms of separation or exclusion, as “spaces apart from” (Harvey 2017, vii-viii), that is, as topographically different, but from the point of view that allows to think about them as

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ontologically distinct as well (Etelaine 2017). This means that thinking and inhabiting spaces otherwise fosters changing habits and experiences that necessarily transform our relations to ourselves and others. This resounds with Foucault’s call to explore “the space of the outside,” the space “by which we are drawn outside ourselves” (Foucault, 2008a, 16). In the ontological sense, then, Harvey’s formulation is an invitation to add to the condition of apartness some sense of belonging “by which that which is apart is also part of this, here” (Harvey 2017, 107). The property of the simultaneous here and there points towards a move beyond homogeneous extension and toward a folding of spaces that connects their heterogeneous and qualitative relations in spatial and existential terms. For Harvey, this folding capacity is what produces zones of encounter, communication, and sharing; spaces that are connected through “inclusive disjunction” (Harvey 2017, 106). In other words, through inclusive disjunction it is possible for two terms (or spaces) to remain apart from each other, but only to the extent that they are co-constitutive of each other. An inclusive disjunction produces the possibility for a common ground to emerge; the commonality of a space of sharing in spite, and perhaps even because of their difference (Harvey 2017, 289). The shared common ground, a differential ground, is what Harvey imagines as the locus of spaces with ethical potentiality, a notion that resonates with so-called spaces of possibility as theorized by supporters of contemporary sustainability studies, and bears some similarities with heterotopia. We will briefly return to this further on, but for now, what seems to be missing —or at least appears to be less developed— in Harvey’s account, as well as in several other specifically geographical investigations of spaces otherwise (White, Faramelli and Hancock 2018) are importantly the questions of temporality, understood in terms of duration, change and process, without which thinking otherwise, albeit speculative, in a strict sense would remain only partially topological. In other words, it is not only a matter of folding the here and there, but to extend this to the now and then as well. The questions of progress and the future become paramount because what matters is not to fathom the yet-to-come as part of some desired, idealized utopian horizon, or as a teleological destination, but rather to understand it as the (provisional) outcome, or actualization, of a particular ongoing relational and differential process, an open-ended process of becoming: a process that follows vectorial trajectories and lines; an arrow. In this sense, a process of becoming is not intentional, it is directional; and the trajectory can be as productive and creative, as it can be dysfunctional. Thinking spaces otherwise as spaces of possibility, becomes significant if it is seen as infused with some (yet) unfulfilled potential, as the sites from where difference and the new can erupt. Stated differently, when focusing on potentiality, rather than on possibility, the possible becomes nested in the potentials of the virtual as the yet to come, of a plane of immanence where temporality is the folding of past, present and future, of the now and then, as well as of the spatiality of the here and there. The temporalities implicit in the act of thinking otherwise about space, for which Foucault’s heterotopia offered only slight

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hints —understood in his short essay as either an absolute break with traditional time; operating via slices in time; or as heterochronies capable of either accumulating temporalities perpetually in one site, or allowing the passage of fleeting temporalities, or both (Foucault 2008a, 20), address much more than the capacity of certain spaces to juxtapose, accumulate or disrupt conventional historical continuities or linear chronology. As slight as these hints are, however, they aid in the recognition of a new category of spacetime relations that consider the questions of duration and the event through which thinking differently about space becomes possible. If we associate this to the reading of heterotopia, we may see that what constitutes heterotopia is initially an event, and only in a second instance a place, an edifice, a space. Heterotopia understood in this way, Lieven De Cauter argues, is a space-time, a sphere (De Cauter 2020, 24). Space and time are born together, they are inseparable, as Massey explains, where “space is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity: multiple realities, multiple temporalities and their construction through interaction” (Massey 1999, 11). While there is no space to develop the notion of multiplicity in any detail here, it is nevertheless worthwhile to mention in this regard because it helps to explain the issues of difference and temporalities as exposed earlier. Deleuze, when discussing Foucault’s work, refers specifically to the multiple (Deleuze 2006). In Foucault, Deleuze writes, “multiplicity is not axiomatic, not typological, but topological” (Deleuze 2006, 13). When we refer to something as being topological, we are first and foremost referring to space, and this extends to multiplicity in Massey’s understanding. Yet, space is never static or fixed. It is subject to the irruption of events, and duration, and thus to transformation and change. Space in this understanding is topologically continuous, and as such “it is defined by spaces and trajectories, by the ‘continuity of line’ ... rather than in point-like events, discontinuities, interruptions and so forth” (Plotnisky 2016, 208). The idea of topologically continuous multiplicity arguably also opens up to new spatio-temporal dimensions, or rather dynamic domains, that hold not only the potential of real difference, but also rest on the openness of a future that “is there not just to be predicted, but also to be made” (Massey 1999, 12). How precisely an “indeterminable future” (Grosz 2000, 1017), still “to be made” that is, a future not devoted to wishful thinking, dreaming or futurology, would not qualify as a utopian projection, but on the contrary, as the image of thought of a heterotopian yet to come, remains unclear, unless we tie it to the heterochronism implied by heterotopian thinking. Heterochronism critiques conventionally utopian temporalities and the projects these sustain on the base that the latter hinge on predetermined telos (Frichot 2017, 81). A heterochronic account is non-teleological; it effects a sort of anti-utopian analysis that engages with multiple real places and times as a method of disrupting modes of social and temporal ordering that rely on the unreality of utopian thinking (Elliott 2020, 44). When seen from a heterochronic angle, the concept of heterotopia does more than simply challenge the linearities of utopian time and the myth of progress; it also aids in the articulation of multiple realities, temporalities and trajectories in space-time, and thus

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assists in the birthing of the new. As the editors of Heterotopia and Globalisation affirm in their introduction, “in their difference, heterotopias signal that another order, condition, or discourse can be realised, at least in part. At their most expansive, they are signs that a new social structure, a new way of life, is in the offing” (Wesselman, Ferdinand and Souch 2020, 2). These anticipated new structures and ways of life seem all the more urgent in the face of present-day global problems. Yet, how these will manifest and materialize remains to be seen, as they cannot be predicted nor prescribed in advance (Grosz 2000). For the time being, let me turn to Foucault once again. His thinking anchors on the affirmation of both, the difference of thought, as well as of the thought of difference. This he referred to as the thought of/from the outside, thus, it is argued, his thought is primarily topological. As was briefly mentioned earlier, a topological understanding makes possible readings of concepts of space and how they are problematized as they inform the questions of thought as they are raised (Robinson 1995, 3). Problematization thus opens up to a new dimension, a “diagonal dimension” or domain, where the “distribution of points, groups, or figures no longer simply act as an abstract framework, but actually exists in space” (Deleuze 2006, 22). Here we see a connection to the plane of immanence as the “immanent dimension,” which according to Robinson is not only topological, but also heterotopological (Robinson 1995, 1). This entails the juxtaposition and folding not of isomorphic spaces, but of heterogeneous relational arrangements, which in turn lead to the questions of heterogeneity and difference in spatial, but arguably also in temporal terms. The difference between and within real places calls for a more complex topology, which for Deleuze would mean a framework that conveys a dynamic conception of space and time, not only extensive, but also intensive. He writes that, “It is not a matter of a location in real spatial expanse, nor of sites in imaginary extensions, but rather of places and sites in a properly structural space, that is, a topological space. What is structural is space, but an unextended, preextensive space, pure spatium constituted bit by bit as an order of proximity, in which the notion of proximity first of all has precisely an ordinal sense and not a signification in extension.” (Deleuze 2004, 174)

Like Deleuze, Foucault’s topological understanding of concept-problem is not concerned primarily with categories, forms, structures or codes of particular spatial and architectural configurations, as with their differentiating, serializing system of relations and the modes of connectivity with the outside. In Deleuzian parlance, and following Robinson, these would attest to the immanent relations that are formed between points, lines, and surfaces within a shifting and dynamic configurational spatio-temporal network (Robinson 1995, 4), a network of differential topologies which sustain processes of individuation, as well as the emergence of new subjectivities. A dynamic topological system of thoughtspaces in which mobile, changing analytical frameworks are driven by an impulse to mix, connect, reassemble and fold the conditions of thought in an encounter with the chaotic

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outside, escape the territorialities of identity, representation and the same. In the oscillation of the interior and the exterior, spaces are always born from something other than themselves, namely from the outside. In this sense, in Foucault’s topological thought, the extensive and intensive qualities of space and time, “within, and by means of which, objects, subjects, and their relations are structured and positioned, remain irreducible problems, renewed for each location and generation, whose ‘solution’ can never be definitive, but is always in a state of transformation or renegotiation” (Grosz 2003, 80-81). This brings us back to the concept of heterotopia, given not as an extension of relations encroached in geometric space, but rather as the opening of an intensive “different thought to come” (Robinson 1995, 6) by, and through which, the interconnection of dynamic and complex ontological domains becomes possible. Heterotopological thinking, a true thought from/of the outside, releases us from the crippling effect of preconceived ideas, static categories and stale oppositions; it pushes us against the limits of conventional geometric (extensive) thinking of space and time and towards the encounter with a topological world, where it reveals heterotopology as anterior and resistant to its abstractions. It is a multiplicity, and as such, it responds to diagrammatic thinking and cartographic experimentation that is capable of tracing transversal connections among discursive and non-discursive concepts. In its ambivalence and unruliness, it permits us to think otherwise about the production of spatial (and other) forms of difference, including the consideration of new approaches to spaces otherwise from an undisciplined logic.

… AND UNDISCIPLINED ALLIANCES How could we, with the aid of this form of heterotopological thought, envision undisciplined approaches to spatial arrangements? In several of the more recent studies of heterotopia we observe not only an expansion in the scalar scope of interpretations and cases of analysis —reaching beyond discrete places, architectural/urban compositions and configurations, or social processes, and towards planetary dimensions (the nexus between globalization and uneven development, or the Anthropocene and eco-environmental devastation, i.e.,) but also a noticeable complexification of the problematics that respond to the polycrisis of our contemporary world. This in turn has made evident the need for a reorientation of perspectives away from mono-, multi-, and interdisciplinarity, and towards other forms of collaboration, which may be hybrid, multiple, transversal or even unruly, undisciplined. Here, the idea of an “undisciplined theory” as expounded by Gary Genosko (Genosko 1998) might be useful, because it predates the awareness of present-day planetary-scaled problems and the impetus and urgency of finding solutions for them at all costs. It rests mainly on the notions of ambivalence and the in-between that trended during the last decades of the past century, and which importantly impacted the position of theory

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as somehow outside —or rather between— the disciplines in academic environments. An unstable theory is supposed to destabilize, writes Genosko, it is a fault line, an epicenter of sorts through and from which intellectual shock waves roll (Genosko 1998, 1). An undisciplined theory hinges on the ambivalence of being outside the disciplines, while simultaneously taking the guise of interdisciplinary concerns. But as Genosko points out, ambivalence is a dangerous and positive force that can tend to radical anti-disciplinarity as well as to an anxious retreat. In this sense, the “task of theory in the between is to think through the problematic of ambivalence in relation to disciplines and the challenge of becoming undisciplined, as well as the consequences of moving towards indisciplinary pursuits, theoretical and otherwise, perhaps even becoming-extravagant” (Genosko 1998, 5). Although hardly extravagant, in the past decades several fields of studies, or arenas, have emerged that question the adequacy of narrowly defined disciplined and disciplinary approaches to confront present day eco-environmental challenges, among them political ecology and environmental humanities. In this emerging post-disciplinary landscape, a wide range of academic and non-academic expertise, from scholars to practitioners, activists and artists, are finding common grounds to discuss shared problematics. In many of these encounters the concept of heterotopia understood both as inherently ambivalent, and as spaces otherwise is deployed as a vehicle to tackle the shared problematic of spatiotemporal difference through the formulation of questions by which to not only interrogate and dissolve strict boundaries between diverse fields of knowledge —something that would entail the risk of reducing distinctions into a zone of indistinction (Diken and Lausten 2005, 148)— but also and significantly, to aid in their re-connection and expansion by means of unconventional and even unorthodox theories, practices, methods, strategies, and tactics. Mathew Gandy in his thought-provoking article “Queer Ecologies” of 2012, for instance, focuses on Abney Park, a former cemetery in London as the site upon which a series of unrelated practices unfold, from bird-watching to sexual cruising (Gandy 2012). Instead of proceeding with a conventional description and analysis of this cemetery as a heterotopia in accordance to Foucault’s six principles of heterotopology, he argues for a combination of concerns shared by both, queer theory and eco-environmental studies. The core value of his elaboration lies in the plea to develop encounters and mergers between fields and domains which otherwise would remain removed from each other. In associating not only a series of incompatible practices unfolding on a discrete site, but especially by approximating and connecting the different disciplinary fields to which these practices would normally pertain, he advocates for what he refers to as “heterotopian alliances” (Gandy 2012, 730). In this way, he relinquishes the conventional approaches that describe and analyze spaces of difference as a qualification of heterotopias, and embraces instead the conceptual potential of heterotopian thought capable of engendering new combinations of (spatial) knowledge across a host of different disciplines and fields of study. While not undisciplined in its scope, Gandy’s, “queering of approaches to space,” (Gandy 2012, 730),

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as well as that of other scholars, artist and activist working on similar strategies and frameworks aimed at disrupting established thought, practices and subjectivities, explore space heterotopologically, that is, they offer ways of thinking about spatial difference, otherwise. These efforts echo concerns that move away from ego-centric rationalities encroached in binary thinking and the “logics of identity” (Grosz 2001, 112) leading the way towards an ecology of practices, as Isabelle Stengers advocates (Stengers 2005). While I acknowledge that this is a far stretch in need of further substantiation, it may be possible to understand these approaches as forerunners to an undisciplined methodology through which complex socio-spatial-temporal phenomena become unbound from the limitations of disciplinarity. By suturing several different fields of expertise and disciplinary competencies in a diagrammatic or transversal fashion, around a shared field of inquiry or problematic, it may be possible to bridge the knowledge gaps that exist between them. Thought-experiments and transversal mappings that mix and match different perspectives and connect the know-how of a diverse range of disciplines and practices contribute to the formulation of multiple insights and new problems; they allow for the generation of new topologies and new intensive cartographies that reveal the multiplicity of relations within complex environments and heterogeneous networks and assemblages. This is how, I argue, the concept of heterotopia, after more than five decades of sustained circulation in discourse, has proven itself as a sufficiently plastic conceptual vehicle to move across —from one disciplinary and discursive domain, from one scale and one plane of reality, to another— and on occasions, well beyond them.

REFERENCES Dahaene, Michiel and De Cauter, Lieven. 2008. Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Post-Civil Society. London and New York: Routledge. De Cauter, Lieven. 2020. “Other Spaces for the Anthropocene: Heterotopia as Dis-Closure of the (Un)Common.” In Heterotopia and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Simon Ferdinand, Irina Souch, and Daan Wesselman, 19-33. London and New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2003. What is Philosophy? London: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. “How do we recognize structuralism?” In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, edited by David Lapoujade, 170-192. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Foucault. New York: Continuum. Diken, Bülent, and Carsten B. Laustsen. 2005. The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp. London and New York: Routledge. Elliott, Cathy. 2020. “H is for Heterotopia: Temporalities of the ‘British New Nature Writing’.” In Heterotopia and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Daan Wesselman, et al., 34-48. New York: Routledge.

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Etelaine, Jeanne. 2018. “For a Post-Anthropocene Ethics.” Review of Sharing Common Ground, by Robert Harvey. Critical Inquiry February 21, Features. https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/for_a_post_anthropocene_ethics/ Fall, Juliet J. 2007. “Catalysts and Converts: Sparking Interest for Foucault Among Francophone Geographers.” In Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, edited by Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden, 107-129. Hampshire: Ashgate. Faubion, James. 2008. “Heterotopia: An Ecology.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Post-Civil Society, edited by Michiel Dahaene and Lieven de Cauter, 3140. London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 2008a. [1967] “Of Other Spaces.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Post-Civil Society, edited by Michel Dahaene and Lieven de Cauter, 13-30. London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 2008b. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 19781979. New York: Palgrave. Frichot, Hélène. 2017. “Affective Encounters Amidst Feminist Futures in Architecture.” In This Thing Called Theory, edited by Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzzi and George Themistokleus, 79-88. London and New York: Routledge. Gandy, Mathew. 2012. “Queer Ecology: Nature, Sexuality, and Heterotopic Alliances.” Environment and Planning D, Society and Space. 30(4): 727-747. Genocchio, Benjamin. 1995. “Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of Other Spaces.” In Postmodern Cities and Spaces, edited by Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, 35-46. Oxford: Blackwell. Genosko, Gary. 1998. Undisciplined Theory. London: SAGE Publications. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2000. “Histories of a Feminist Future.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25(4): 1017-1021. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2001. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2003. “Deleuze, Theory, and Space.” Log. 1: 77-86. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press. Harvey, David. 2000. “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.” Public Culture 12: 529-564. Harvey, Robert. 2017. Sharing Common Ground: A Space of Ethics. New York: Bloomsbury. Johnson, Peter. 2013. “The Geographies of Heterotopia.” Geography Compass 7(11): 790803.

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Johnson, Peter. 2016. “Interpretations of Heterotopia.” (Revised article.) In Heterotopian Studies. Accessed: April 14, 2020. Massey, Doreen. 1999. “Negotiating Disciplinary Boundaries.” Current Sociology 47(4): 5-12. Plotnisky, Arkady. 2016. “The Folded Unthought and the Irreducible Unthinkable: Singularity, Multiplicity and Materiality, In and Between Foucault and Derrida.” In Between Foucault and Derrida, edited by Yubraj Aryal, Vernon Cisney, Nicola Morar and Christopher Penfield, 207-236. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Robinson, Keith A. 1995. “Michel Foucault: Topologies of Thought: Thinking-Otherwise Between Knowledge, Power and Self.” PhD diss., University of Warwick. Saldanha, Arun. 2008. “Heterotopia and Structuralism.” Environment and Planning A 40: 2080-2098. Sohn, Heidi. 2008. “Heterotopia: Anamnesis of a Medical Term.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Post-Civil Society, edited by Michiel Dahaene and Lieven de Cauter, 41-50. London and New York: Routledge. Stagoll, Cliff. 2010. “Concepts.” In The Deleuze Dictionary Revised Edition, edited by Parr Adrian, 40-63. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stengers, Isabelle. (Date unknown) “Gilles Deleuze’s Last Message.” Accessed April 25, 2020. Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices.” Cultural Studies Review 11(1): 183-96. Wesselman, Daan; Simon Ferdinand and Irina Souch. 2020. “Introduction: Interrupting Globalisation – Heterotopia in the Twenty-first Century.” In Heterotopia and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Daan Wesselman, et al., 1-18. New York: Routledge. White, Robert, Anthony Faramelli and David Hancock (editors). 2018. Spaces of Crisis and Critique. London: Bloomsbury.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 2

HUMANIZIG THE CITY: THE 4 C STRATEGY AGAINST FRAGMENTED CITIES Miguel A. Alonso del Val*

School of Architecture, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain

ABSTRACT In the process of reviewing the paradigms that must underline the construction of the 21st century’s city, this article shows the need to rethink the city from a perspective that fosters its humanization, that structures new ways of living oriented to the integration of its infrastructures and its inhabitants, of their activities and their opportunities. This process asks for a previous effort to defragment the city from a functional viewpoint that is still guiding its management and design in order to integrate the elements that constitute the city as a decisive element of human culture based on four critical aspects: compacity, complexity, connectivity and circularity.

Keywords: urban planning, humanization, defragmentation, open city, design, culture

INTRODUCTION One of the most characteristic elements of the construction of the city in the 20th century has been the zoning theory, which even nowadays is the basis of urban practice in city planning. Rooted in both communist and capitalist models of cities, both in the radical planning of the “Russian Deurbanists” (Blumenfeld 1942) and in the efficient schemes of * Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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the “Charte d’Atènes,” in the mid-thirties of the last century, the procedures of productive or utilitarian separation of functions determined the design of a disintegrated city in its most relevant activities. Those plans, in need of formal references already assumed the emblematic character of office towers and the effective discrimination of work, leisure or rest areas, linked by powerful road arteries and isolated by wide green spaces, which incorporated to the city the so-called “joys of nature.” Even today, in what some theorists of architecture define as “hypermodernity,” the urban pattern inheriting from that planning based on zoning continues to be a world reference, despite being clearly faced with the current operations of urban transformations, both in what refers to the management, which demands speed in the change of uses, and with urban planning legislation, unable of breaking the limits of its own guaranteed order. It was not so in the beginning, when in the New York of the 1920s, Edward Bassett (1940) used the term “zoning” for the first time to solve the problems derived from the exponential growth of that megalopolis that led to tough disputes between individuals. A simple and effective mechanism to regulate land use and order the urban development of the city in conditions of balance between private interests and public health. Those new lines have constituted the incontestable urban doctrine of the twentieth century urbanism, underpinned by the theoretical construction of a science of urban planning based on codified standards and on techniques associated with urban property development that has been instituted as two invaluable instruments for the quantification of urban facts. This model of the modern city, which sought to create international standards above local conditions and which has been reduced in many cases to mere land plots or subdivision of the territory, responded to the Nordic myth of the “inhabited forest” and tried to replace, with hygienic and productive advantages, to the “urban scene” of the Mediterranean city that seemed to surrender to the exponential growth of the European metropolis of the early twentieth century.

URBANIZING AND CIVILIZING: NORDIC AND MEDITERRANEAN CITIES The city is, fundamentally, a community space whose wealth springs from interaction, not from separation. The Mediterranean world preserves this idea of the city as one of its constituent archetypes and its notion of the urban is based on two principles: community and isolation. Community among its inhabitants in such a way that the quality of the representative spaces is transcendental. Isolation to build a second nature on a human scale since for Mediterranean man, the earth is, above all, a place, the support of the history and memory of his ancestors. In this tradition, the house and the city are so closely linked that

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from their relationship —coined by Roman law— the Western concept of citizenship arises. The Nordic world, on the other hand, conceives the city as the sublimation of the natural scenery and cannot abandon the original image of inhabiting a space of infinite vanishing points created by the forest archetype. The Continental city is always born on a crossroads that refers to a market, a fortress or a sanctuary. Aligned over them, the residences, although they are part of the city, never distinguish themselves from the countryside and that urban layout usually keeps a large green space, the Saxon Common, as a cut-out of the landscape in the city that is not a piazza, but a central park. The tradition of the Mediterranean world understands the city as a space for coexistence that is located and differentiates itself from nature. The Mediterranean city is born complete, in such a way that any expansion should be done by complete units too, with a limited existential centre: the Mundus. It could be said, therefore, that the Mediterranean world is created by cities while the Nordic would be made by urbanizations. This distinction is so important that it is present in the way historians belonging to one tradition or another analyze the urban phenomenon. Thus, Leonardo Benevolo (1967) or Aldo Rossi (1984) study and consider the city as history, because of a process of accumulation of layers of plans that maintain a formal relationship with each other. The city represents for them the great legacy of the history of architecture and architecture is important as it builds the urban scene through dialogue between the residence and the monuments. On the contrary, Kevin Lynch (1960) or Denise Scott-Brown (1990) perceive the city as a constantly changing and growing landscape, open to the transformation that society and architecture operate on a continuous map of constantly evolving flows and activities. The city is the living reflection of a society and architecture is the instrument of expression of its transformation, the result of its shaping forces, the physical landscape of inhabited territory. This reference to the landscape, in the continental world, defines its sense of inhabiting. His city is an urbs blended in nature and architecture is the urbanization of a part of the infinite natural space. Although the history of the West has been merging both traditions, for the Mediterranean the important thing is not the extension but the concentration, the memory and, ultimately, the culture. Urbanizing is a continental concept, but civilizing is a Mediterranean concept. Urbanizing is a science that works on the territory, while civilizing, creating citizens, is a humanism that operates on a historical place and uses a knowledge that has lost its validity during the 20th century.

THE FRAGMENTED CITY: UTOPIA TURNS INTO DYSTOPIA The decline is not due to the simple influence of the Soviet utopia of the OSA urbanists —such as Miljutin (1974), Ginzburg (2018) and Okhitovich in 1930— on Le Corbusier’s

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discourse elaborated around “The Radiant City” (1967) that was designed in 1933, nor to the principles of a rational analysis of the mechanisms of city creation, but rather it is due to the common aspiration to transform the traditional city into an open, frontier territory, like the contemporary proposal of “Broadacre City” (1943), carried out by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1932. This is a realization of the ideal of the garden city, self-sustaining and of low density, protected by the radical distinction between downtown and suburbia, between the business centre with its emblematic skyscraper and its single-family homes on one-acre plots that, theoretically, ensured self-consumption food. This model of city, based on the automobile and covered with genuinely American houses, has been globally imitated and has produced cities like the one in Monterrey in Mexico that, renouncing to its Hispanic origin as a compact and checkerboard city has grown like a huge mantle of isolated plots over a hundred kilometres. The outcome is a large but not intense city, made of private fragments and the result of such schematic zoning, supported by the multiplication and specialization of the service and communication infrastructures that converge on the city and its inhabitants, is a commercial instrument that facilitates disconnection and social marginalization. Urban highways, as well as sectoral regulations or security regulations, create ruptures that can gangrene an urban fabric and promote the isolated group identity of its inhabitants. A break that triggers the desire, not always satisfied, to inhabit something distinctive and exclusive, each one at his level. A dream that ends so often in a nightmare as in the film fiction The Truman Show or in the delirious reality of the abandoned city of Burj Al Babas in Turkey (Gall 2019).

Figure 1. Sketch for Broadacre City project from Frank L. Wright. Author: Olsen Kjell. Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: http://flickr.com/photo/41894185893@N01/3444914.

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These archaic planning modes are the origin of the urban saturation phenomena that we observe in cities such as Shanghai and the source of the policies prone to architectural stardom experienced in emerging cities such as Abu Dhabi or Baku. Faced with the impossibility of controlling the processes of massification and the deterritorialization of the great cities of the 21st century, theories have been put into a value which, like Rem Koolhaas’ brilliant journalistic formulations, emphasize the regenerative capacity of “junk space,” which it “is like a womb that organizes the transition of endless quantities of the Real —stone, trees, goods, daylight, people— into the unreal” (Koolhaas 2002, 189). That means that the space made up of the marginal areas left by the old neighbourhoods, as their primitive use declined, is promoted as areas of opportunity at the service of the new, submissive and interchangeable consumers of the virtual world of urban entertainment. Certainly the revolutionary architects of the early twentieth century put all their efforts into ideological construction of a new urban and social reality, because of the recipient of their proposals was a character turned militant of the new architecture and of the new city, destined to clean up the old Paris or London of the time. Years later, architecture claimed to recover the values of the inhabitant as a user of public and private spaces of comfort, grouped under the myth of the Contemporary and a new Nordic sensibility, but the proposals of architects like Aldo van Eyck (van Eyck and Strauven, 1998) or the Smithson’s (1967; 1970) hardly impacted on urbanism already submitted to a planning system that structured decisions on scientific methods. Subsequent attempts to recover traditional urban planning did not stop the process of the separation between urban planning and life, since, very quickly, from the 1980s onwards, the Postmodern perspective promoted a formalist vision of the city, devoid of ideological references, which has favoured the development of a superficial and trivial attitude on urban problems. It is the boldness of the visitor, the voyeur or the tourist who values, above all, the novelty and urban transformations loaded with symbolic messages associated with political interests. In this sociological environment and as Richard Sennett very well expresses in his texts on “ethics for the city,” urban planning has become “a fractured discipline, divided between the knowledge of the differences between building and dwelling. There are branches of knowledge that follow a path of progress, enriching over time its wealth of facts and ideas. But this has not been the case in urban planning. Consequently, there is currently not generally accepted and compelling proposal for how to open a city” (Sennett 2018, 118).

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HUMANIZING THE CITY: THE CHALLENGE OF THE 21ST CENTURY CITIES This concept of an open city that places the emphasis on the city of the 21st century — to recover the connection between dwelling and building— to bridge the gap between those who shape the city and those who live in as passive patients, seems today an essential task and, under the leadership of Ricky Burdett (2006), this is the way the 2006 Venice Biennale understood it. The challenge was to respond to the inevitable future mega-urban that haunts us and that shows the contrasts and inequalities of the current world through images as shocking as those of the Paraisópolis favela facing the luxurious towers of houses in Sao Paulo (Maziviero and da Silva 2018). However, it is necessary to point out that the current formulation of the concept of “open city” that releases a debate on the governance of the city and on the adaptation of planning instruments to current reality does not have the same characteristics as that formulation sponsored in the sixties by the English critic Reyner Banham which was looking for a scientific determination of architecture. To a large extent, this proposal was the last link in the race to make zoning an operational instrument detached from historical ties and adapted to the technocratic mid-century society that entrusted urban planning to infrastructures, or to the city conceived as infrastructure: “The physical planning of the territory: a city in continuous planning regime. This could be judged by someone as a theoretical idealization of the city. Nothing more opposed to his authentic approach. It is not a matter of imposing the city plan, but of a continuous planning attitude, of opening up to the citizen planning regime” (Bayón 1966, 66).

Figure 2. Architecture of Paraisópolis II City. Author: Rodrigo Vilar. The original work was colored. Souce: Wikimedia Commons. License: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parais%C3% B3polis_II.jpg.

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The architectures of Japanese Metabolism (Kurokawa 1977) or British Megastructures —Lubicz-Nycz’s “Urban-tecture” or Oskar Hansen’s “Continuous Linear System,” etc.— are examples of that primitive concept of an open city that was identified with notions like “indeterminate architecture” or “endless architecture,” etc. Some suggestive postulates that had their clearest expression, as an overcoming of the “clip-on architecture” of Banham, in the “Plug-in-city” by Peter Cook for Archigram in 1964. It was the city of the juxtaposition of inhabited objects, the metropolis of the units connected along diagonal distribution networks which stands very far from the city that protects the community space and opens it up to its citizens, a true example of the “anti-city” that has been rescued today by visions of virtual architecture. Faced with these science-fiction images made a dream come true, a certain nostalgia for the future without memory, the conclusions of that Biennial claimed to return to a “city architecture and social integration.” Buildings designed for the city and public spaces thought out with responsibility can reinforce social cohesion. Architecture cannot be the alibi for an intervention disconnected from urban reality, nor a pure fashionable commercial author’s object. In this sense, singular buildings, especially public ones will be less important for what they proclaim but for what they give to the city that has always offered them a privileged urban place, for its position or symbolic relevance, such as the case of the Parque-Biblioteca España in Medellín, Colombia. (Holmes and de Piñeres 2014).

Figure 3. The building of Plaza España Library in the hill-quarter of Santo Domingo Savio, North-East Medellín, Colombia. The original work was colored. Author: Albeiror24. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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The importance of weaving networks of “reticular transport and personal opportunities” were also emphasized in Venice 2006 because efficient and safe public transport contributes to social equity. Multiple networks of communications, energy grids, logistics supports, and infrastructures of all kinds contribute to creating a city open to the new century: the city of personal opportunities that are born from communication and accessibility. Jaime Lerner’s experience with the Integrated Transport Network in Curitiba (Brazil) is paradigmatic (Boisjoly et al. 2020). To achieve this, it was inevitable to appeal to “a dense city in a sustainable community.” The more cities and their citizens share, the less energy is consumed, and less pollution is produced. The compact city provides security to its inhabitants, avoids social segregation and privileges person-to-person exchange, over biased information that confuses the natural and empowers the sectarian. A city model that Europe fosters by speaking of the importance of urban density as civic support for a sustainable energy model and as a defence of an intensive city model against the extensive city model, where the Netherlands has such notable examples as the Borneo district in Amsterdam (Pierini 2018). Following the dictates of that Biennial, any model should be based on “shared space and public tolerance.” The quantity and quality of public spaces and community endowments directly affect the construction of an open-minded but strong society, the defence of its public heritage and its citizen values. A legacy that is not only buildings or institutions but also public spaces that give identity to its citizens and uniqueness to any city because they reflect the memory of overlapping layers in the historical city. An example of great impact has been the High Line park in Western Manhattan (Millington 2015).

Figure 4. High Line Park, New York. Author: Dansnguyen. The original work was colored. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licence: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:High_Line_Park,_ Section_1,_in_late_winter.jpg.

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Figure 5. Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum and estuary. Author: Kennisland. The original work was colored. Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kl/48935629922/.

Finally, it should be a city managed from “citizen dialogue and municipal leadership.” Political leaders must understand that only urban interventions based on dialogue between public and private, between actors and users, manage to create a way of acting that lasts overtime and generates a just, open and cohesive society: a true society of integrated citizens who feel represented by their city. The case of the transformation of Abandoibarra in Bilbao constitutes the paradigm of the well-known “Guggenheim effect” (Philippou 2015).

DEFRAGMENTING THE HETERO-DISTOPIC CITY These good practices will have no effect on the 21st century if the paradigm that supports the planning mechanisms that lead to a society of the fragmented zoning does not change. Therefore, the key is to defragment. Defragmenting the city and, at the same time, recovering the role of urbanism as a humanism capable of integrating the city, as knowledge of the dwelling that directs a knowing of the building, elaborated with a much broader perspective than the unconscious surrender of the metropolitan future guidance to the idolatry of the so-called “urban intelligence”: Big Data and Smart City. This idea of “defragmenting the city” as an urban resource was already exposed by the author at the II Universal Forum of Cultures in Monterrey (Mexico), in autumn 2007 (Alonso del Val 2007), within an urban project that advocated increasing the density and capillarity of Latin American cities which have succumbed to the extensive model of the

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city for the automobile and try now to be fatigued ordered by the authorities just operating obsessively on the traffic system, trying to redirect the great flows of mobility data that the new technologies provide. As in any computer, the important thing in a city is not the information that is obtained but its management. In its processing, too much information written and rewritten, used and reused in a fragmentary way, reduces performance and leads to blocking. To avoid this, the defragmentation tool is very useful but, for both IT and urban issues, needs to cover some stages. First, it is necessary to defragment the problems. Sometimes urban problems are concentrated in one point and are seen only from one aspect, when they must be understood as the result of many vicissitudes, of many stories that have happened. Traffic problems are a typical example of this mistake. The specialist’s way of looking cannot take precedence over the generalist vision that considers the city as a living, changing and adaptable organism, not as a summary of sealed compartments. This attitude implies that the functions must be defragmented, too. It must be decided who really can and should solve certain problems because sometimes power and decisionmaking capacity are too diffuse. This means that in many cases the responses are so scattered that they amplify problems rather than solve them. For this, it is essential to connect and involve the different functional units that deal with urban problems. You also must defragment the information. The information that a city provides to the different operators is today so extensive and its use so concerned that, due to the inevitable irruption of artificial intelligence, we need to oppose human intelligence, one of whose greatest samples of wisdom is common sense. Above all, if knowledge is applied to a shared asset like the urban space that provides cultural references to any society. This is a major problem because we know to what extent discrimination or manipulation of data can blur the response to a need or hide an opportunity for the city.

Figure 6. Aerial view of México City. Author: LBM1948. The original work was colored. Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ciudad_de_M%C3%A9xico, _a%C3%A9rea_1.jpg.

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This means that solutions must be defragmented. The solutions must be more global, complex and unitary actions, with a vision of the future, than simple emergency actions and, therefore, relevant procedures. Most of the urban surgery actions, starting in the 1950s, were carried out under traffic engineering and standards-based formulas. Thus, in the face of a congestion problem in a traffic knot, an expert tends to solve it by expanding the knot or superimposing a new knot when it becomes clogged, and then another and another as in Tokyo or Mexico. Such a solution attracts and concentrates more and more vehicles at one point, tends to become saturated and finally collapses and produces a harmful space for the city. Other very unfortunate examples of urban segregation arose when making urbanizations for certain groups, instead of looking for integrating formulas that dilute the problem helping the social integration of its occupants. The examples of the satellite cities of the Parisian peripheries are paradigmatic and the source of an unsolvable social problem compared to other examples such as in the Spanish cities of Pamplona or Vitoria, where public housing and public space have been the nerve of new residential plans for generations. Finally, defragmenting the city means that to understand the city is not just the result of multiple systems or objects, but the heritage of multiple subjects, that the city is a whole. For centuries, large cities were built with clear schemes and very simple techniques, but with a truly original sense of unity. Romans in the Mediterranean and Spaniards in America built hundreds of cities with few norms and coherent humanistic thought. A capacity for synthesis that is lost today, thanks to fragmentary knowledge and partial interactions, which turn any planning into an almost unsolvable puzzle. A tiring job where both the place sense and the special connection of the citizen with the local territory that characterizes any great city are lost.

CONCLUSION: THE 4 C CITY The goal of humanizing the city is at the origin of some movements to recover the public space invaded by automobiles, which the Danish urban planner Jan Gehl has carried out in his proposals included in books such as Life between buildings (1987). A movement that reviews the way in which we use shared space to give primacy to human beings and their relational capacities over functional pragmatism. A humanistic and integrative thought that witnesses the trend started in the sixties by well-known characters such as Gordon Cullen and his book Townscape (1961) or Jane Jacobs and his manifesto The death and life of great American cities (1961). The desire for social integration requires two urban instruments of proven efficacy, such as density and permeability. For this reason, creating permeable densities such as those generated in the Barcelona 92 actions, which means compacting the city and opening

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transversal connections, are parallel and key actions to avoid the abandonment and isolation of entire neighbourhoods of the current city that could be spaces of opportunity for its current and future inhabitants. Certainly, the gentrification or removal of its inhabitants from the consolidated districts is a problem, but greater is its physical and social ruin, hence the universal value of the European commitment to urban regeneration. This means a vital recovery of the consolidated city and work on its opportunities, which should guide the plans to build actions on the landscape rather than on the territory because the former is an environmental concern and the latter is an economic category. Some tasks that must be based on a series of shared criteria that can be succinctly expressed in the need to carry out collaborative actions to achieve a city or boroughs that are competitive with each other, which demands complexity, diversity and complementary uses. They must be operations of significant size that build a landscape transforming the territory, with a clear balance between economic viability and environmental sustainability. These urban actions must be arranged between the public and the private, with demands for commitments on the terms and conditions that make up the project. Always structuring actions that enhance public spaces and facilities, with a firm commitment to the common heritage of natural and cultural topics. Finally, actions with enough density to support public housing developments, which have proven to be an essential instrument for transformation and social cohesion of the urban domain. Thus, a new attitude towards the city is proposed that would include so many good practices consolidated over time, but whose greatest achievement would be to propose urban planning that responds, also in the 21st century, to a built city, not simply planned, with the use of simple notions that, like the word City, are also written with C: Compactness, Complexity and Connectivity. It is the defence of a compact city against the dispersed city, the city as a “meeting machine,” using the Corbusian simile, as a big cultural mechanism that favours the assembling of the different, where the diverse learns to coexist and to be a community. In addition to the compactness that reduces movements and helps exchanges, one must be in favour of social complexity and the mix of activities, of citizen miscegenation. Complexity scares managers, but it facilitates the encounter of diversity and is the fundamental support of a citizen security structure. The city is safer the more compact and complex it is, the more it is lived and shared because the encounter between different produces security. It is the great legacy of European cities, which are so attractive and safe precisely because they are dense, compact and complex cities. Boosting complexity also means incorporating the productive uses of the knowledgebased third industrial revolution in the city. A city is even more creative the more it favours the citizens’ merge thanks to its urban structure and technological infrastructure. Thus, connectivity must not only be thought of in terms of transport but also in terms of accessibility to services, energy or information networks, talent retention mechanisms and value generation environments in the twenty-first century.

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All this means that urban problems are not solved thanks to the speciality of those who only know about traffic, transport, hydraulics, electrical networks, regulations, heritage, sustainability, etc. Knowledge and solutions need to be integrated. The city designed by specialists or by experts is a fossilized city or thought for the short a term that quickly becomes obsolete, while a global vision of the city, as a living organism that adapts over time, conceives it as a place of mediation where the specific cultural heritage also qualifies the urban space that supports public and private activities for citizen service. Architecture must also be part of this same discourse supporting a common landscape and volumetric compactness against formal dispersion, with respect to the character of any program and its urban position. Architecture must be in favour of the vital complexity and the mixture of uses; and that favours connectivity between private and public spaces, also facilitating accessibility. Finally, the need to bet on the fourth city category appears on the horizon: Circularity. The Circular city can be understood in a restrictive, purely productive or energetic sense, or in a broad sense to recover a city model in balance with the nearby nature, which abandons the idea of territory and replaces it with an idea of a close integrated landscape where human beings find the balance of dwelling in friendly environments, even within the great conurbations to which the society of our century is bound.

Figure 7. Aerial view of four level interchange of Arroyo Seco parkway and highway 101. Los Angeles. Author: California State Department of Highways at al. Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print.

For this, the old concepts of zoning, segregation or specialization of functional areas that have led to the full fragmentation of the urban environment must be definitively abandoned. It is time to recover the city as an integral whole, as an inhabited landscape, as a body in which one lives and interacts with its inhabitants, an organism where, more and more, the public and the private must learn to collaborate to build the identity and character

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of that city of the future, the city of the 4C with which culture, coexistence, comprehension and cooperation are also written: the city of citizens.

REFERENCES Alonso del Val, Miguel A. 2007. “Densidad capilar” [“Capillary density”]. Paper presented in Conurbación y Ciudades Región. Seminar for the 2nd Universal Forum of Cultures. Monterrey. Bassett, Edward Murray. 1940. Zoning. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Bayón, Mariano. 1966. “La ciudad abierta.” [“The open city”]. Arquitectura 88: 65-72. Benevolo, Leonardo. 1967. Origins of Modern Town Planning. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul PLC. Blumenfeld, Hans. 1942. “Regional and City Planning in the Soviet Union.” Task 3: 3353. Boisjoly, Geneviève, Bernardo Serra, Gabriel Oliveira and Ahmed El-Geneidy. 2020. “Accessibility measurements in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba and Recife, Brazil.” Journal of Transport Geography 82 (art. no. 102551): 1-11. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2019.102551. Burdett, Richard. 2006. Meta-cities: La Biennale Di Venezia. Catalogue of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition. Venezia: Marsilio Editori. Gall, Carlotta. 2019. “Want a Castle in Turkey? You May Find a Bargain.” The New York Times, 03 March 2019. Accessed April, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/ world/europe/turkey-castle-development.html. Cullen, Gordon. 1961. Townscape. New York: Reinhold Publishers Corporation. Gehl, Jan. 1987. Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space. Whasington D. C.: Island Press. Ginzburg, Moisei. 2018. Dwelling: Five Years’ Work on the Problem of the Habitation. London: Fontanka Publishers. Holmes, Jennifer and Sheila Amin Gutierrez de Piñeres. 2014. “Medellín’s Biblioteca España: Progress in Unlikely Places.” Stability 3(1): 1-13. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/sta.cz. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Koolhaas, Rem. 2002. “Junkspace.” October 100: 175-190. https://www.jstor.org/stable/779098. Kurokawa, Kisho. 1977. Metabolism in Architecture. Colorado: Westview Press. Le Corbusier. 1967. The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization. Phoenix: Orion Press. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Maziviero, María Velcic and Alane Santos da Silva. 2018. “The case of the Paraisópolis Complex management: Conceptual differences of the slums intervention programs in São Paulo.” Urbe 1 (3): 500-520. doi: https://doi.org/10.1590/2175-3369.010. 003.AO03. Miljutin, Nikolai. 1974. Sotsgorod. The Problem of Building Socialist Cities. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Millington, Nate. 2015. “From urban scar to ‘park in the sky’: terrain vague, urban design, and the remaking of New York City’s High Line Park.” Environment and Planning A 47(11): 2324-2338. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X15599294. Pierini, Orsini Simona. 2018. “Housing experimental projects in the Netherlands.” In Urban Visions: From Planning Culture to Landscape Urbanism, 143-152. Switzerland: Springer. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59047-9_14. Philippou, Pavlos. 2015. “Cultural buildings’ genealogy of originality: The individual, the unique and the singular.” Journal of Architecture 20(6): 1032-1066. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1115421. Rossi, Aldo. 1984. The Architecture of the City. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Scott Brown, Denise. 1990. Urban Concepts: Rise and Fall of Community Architecture. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sennett, Richard. 2018. Building and dwelling. Ethics for the city. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Smithson, Alison and Peter Smithson. 1967. Urban Structuring: Studies of Alison & Peter Smithson. London: Studio Vista/Reinhold. Smithson, Alison and Peter Smithson. 1970. Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories, 1952-1960 and Their Application in a Building Project, 1963-1970. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Van Eyck, Aldo and Francis Strauven. 1998. Aldo van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity. Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura. Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1943. An Autobiography: Book Six, Broadacre City. Wisconsin: Taliesin Publication.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 3

FOUCAULT AND THE ROOTS OF THE SMART CITY Joaquin Fortanet*

Department of Philosophy, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

ABSTRACT This chapter aims to explain the different notions of the city that can be found in Foucault’s work. From the conceptualization of the punitive city in Discipline and Punish to the security or smart city that emerges from the Collège courses of ‘77-’79, we can observe the interest and deep synergies present in the genealogy of power and the genealogy of the city. As a privileged stage for observing the movement and exercise of different practices of power, the city provides a mapping of the social order and the rationality of government that intermingles with the development of Foucaultian thought, allowing us to review the new strategies and devices that were put in place after the great disciplinary strategy of the seventeenth century. We will end reflecting on the concept of urban heterotopia.

Keywords: Foucault, city, heterotopia, discipline, utopia

INTRODUCTION The presence of the city has underlain Michel Foucault’s thinking since the beginning. It is impossible to understand his great works without constant references to the specific modes of practices and knowledge that occurred within large cities. They are, in a way, the internal rhythm of his work. It could be stated that his great interpretive models such as the *

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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notion of sovereign power or biopower become unreadable without reference to the social homogenization typical of the big city, produced by the coordinated interplay of different institutions or by the need for urban hygiene in the second half of the eighteenth century. How to understand the transition from sovereign power —the sovereign city— to disciplinary power —the punitive city— without taking into account the urban mutations of the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries? In his great works Foucault’s analytical focus centers on the birth of the great knowledge that manages the modern experience occurring at the time of urban expansion. Everything seems to indicate that modernity, the city, wage labor and disciplinary power emerge to replace an ancient and medieval (sovereign) way of inhabiting space and time, of relating to oneself and others. And it is this transformation that in some way for Foucault constitutes a fundamental part of the ground we step on — this is what captured his interest. At least until 1977, the year in which he began to teach his course Securité, Territoire et Population at the Collège de France. The birth of disciplinary power, as Foucault details in Discipline and Punish, is simultaneous with the birth of institutions and the creation of the modern punitive city. The sovereign city, whose architecture was geared toward enabling visual manifestations of power (the centrality of the main square is one of the emblematic places of gathering and visualization of the sovereign power of torture) was from the second half of the seventeenth century —particularly evident in the French penal reform of the eighteenth century— gradually replaced by a city model that no longer privileged the public manifestation of power characteristic of the medieval government rationality. The emergence of the punitive or modern city is correlative to the development of market economy, of the modern State, of modern philosophy and science, of secularization and the loss of effectiveness of pastoral power. And, in addition, is correlative to a process that Foucault attends to above others: the creation of a whole network of institutions that undertake functions of governmental and social order: the hospital, the school, the prison, the psychiatric wards. Little by little, these institutions go from being mere retreats or confinements —like the old monasteries or leprosariums— to participating in the social whole and being part of the punitive city model. We know the architecture of this political anatomy of discipline: the panoptic, a model with which the institutions will frame their task of disciplinary management and production of normality. The rationale of the panoptic, the logic of its architecture, allows for a definition of how disciplinary power works in the institution: the panoptic is an architectural regime where the monitored are seen at all times, but whoever monitors is not. It ensures the preservation of order and the lack of communication. It makes resorting to force unnecessary and it works for all institutions because an automatism of power emerges in it. Consequently, the institutions represent a new policy of the body and are aimed at disciplinary relationships. By discipline, Foucault understands the techniques that guarantee the ordering of human multiplicities. The disciplines are the techniques of power

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that appear specifically in the modern era, when control and management of the bodies becomes necessary for the upholding of a new economy of power. Disciplines are characterized by making the exercise of power as low-cost as possible, cheaper and discreet. At the same time, through disciplines this exercise of power reaches the deepest part of the social body. It is all about getting power to places where it would have been previously unthinkable. Foucault will defend an idea of power that expands to all social corners through disciplinary techniques, whose purpose is none other than to create subdued and useful bodies. While traditional power subjected bodies, torturing and dismembering them, the new humanist power coined the requirement of forming subdued and useful bodies. Disciplines not only repress behaviors, but they are responsible for forming subjects. And they form subjects thanks to the proliferation of institutions that from the eighteenth century will populate the entire social network, organized through a strict logic. The rise of disciplines, their circulation and their colonization of the social, makes social space homogeneous. While disciplines train bodies, the homogeneity of the social is produced by the norm emanating from institutional exclusion. The norms are those that act as a link between the various institutions, producing homogeneity. The common rule does not repress or prohibit but intensifies the subjugations of the bodies that carry out disciplines, creating normal individuals. Its main effect is standardization and this is not derived from any law. It produces standards based on the principle of comparison established in the interplay of behavior regulation that penitentiary, medical and psychiatric institutions and devices implement, thus forging the intimate mechanism of disciplinary power. The city will live a complete urban redefinition as institutions centralize and produce the social homogenization of the city. Squares, parks, sidewalks, paths, streets will be reallocated to become a part of a different setting. The punitive city requires a power that encompasses the entire social system, which acts at each of its points, and takes charge of the body and of time, gestures and behavior to straighten citizens out individually under a social general function. It is not about the city punishing, but about individuals producing a homogeneous normality in a disciplined way. The institutions, whose intimate operating model —according to Foucault— is none other than the prison, are those that produce social homogenization through the interplay of confinements, exclusions and disciplines (kept to a minimum sometimes, but always far-reaching). They do not act independently, but coordinated with the rationality and the urban and social fabric required by the production of normality. A whole system, in short, that was set in motion in Europe after the deep medieval crisis of economy, knowledge and politics. Foucault seems to tell us that modernity, the lights, reason and freedom are parallel to the intimate movement of disciplinary power that spans an entire society following a correctional model supported by the human sciences, and which is tremendously effective. This movement requires more than the closed spaces of the institutions. Prison is not the

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only normalizer. The purpose of the prison is not prisoners. At least, not only. It is the connection with other institutions to forge a social continuum. The goal is the punitive city: “That in the central position that it occupies, it is not alone, but linked to a whole series of ‘carceral’ mechanisms which seem distinct enough —since they are intended to alleviate pain, to cure, to comfort— but which all tend, like the prison, to exercise a power of normalization. That these mechanisms are applied not to transgressions against a ‘central’ law, but to the apparatus of production —’commerce’ and ‘industry’— to a whole multiplicity of illegalities, in all their diversity of nature and origin, their specific role in profit and the different ways in which they are dealt with by the punitive mechanisms. And that ultimately what presides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy. That, consequently, the notions of institutions of repression, rejection, exclusion, marginalization, are not adequate to describe, at the very center of the carceral city, the formation of the insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, ‘sciences’ that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual.” (Foucault 1995, 308)

THE MODERN CITY The development of the punitive city demands profound urban changes. The reallocation of places is not enough. Although the public square becomes a place of vigilance and manifestation not only of power but of adopting discipline (Foucault 1995, 135), the effectiveness of the disciplinary power requires an urban translation of the maxims of the panoptic that encountered resistance in medieval urbanism (narrow, meandering, dark, unknown streets). Urban planning must become rational, crystal clear: the Cartesian light of reason must illuminate the entire urban reality. A rationality that, progressively, is delineated by the different human sciences, with the additional concurrence of urban medicine since the nineteenth century. One of the emblematic places of urban transformation according to the panoptic rules is found in the renovation carried out by the architect of Napoleon III, Haussmann, in Paris. The creation of the city, of the metropolis, is intrinsic to an urban management of public space. In Haussmann’s Paris, in Baudelaire’s, we clearly observe the ordering of the crowds through the new streets and boulevards. Under the heading of strategic embellishment, the modern city performs the double play of beautifying to fascinate and using the political technique of crowd management: “The true goal of Haussmann’s projects was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible for all time. With the same end in mind, Louis Philippe had already introduced wooden paving. Nonetheless,

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barricades played a role in the February Revolution. Engels studies the tactics of barricade fighting. Haussmann seeks to neutralize these tactics on two fronts. Widening the streets is designed to make the erection of barricades impossible, and new streets are to furnish the shortest route between the barracks and the workers’ districts. Contemporaries christen the operation ‘strategic embellishment.’” (Benjamin 2002, 12)

Paris represented the bright luxury made public. The splendor of galleries, boulevards, cafés, gas lights, shops, monuments. Benjamin sheds light on Haussmann’s urban renovation projects and on Parisian universal exhibitions. Haussmann intended to bring the coherence of reason (numbered houses, straight vs. curves, wide avenues vs. alleyways, light vs. shadows) to the city. But this coherence, this reason, according to W. Benjamin, is a political technique. A political technique developed at a time when political danger ceased to be in the countryside (peasant revolts, such as that of the Barefoot Peasants in Normandy, no longer implied a real danger) to explode, instead, in the city (The Paris Commune). The city must become a setting that governs the crowds. And, for this, Haussmann’s renovation provides the necessary visibility and circulation scheme necessary for such management. Human tasks are organized on the city stage —work, trade, housing, school, promenades. The new urban production, through modern urban planning techniques, is revealed as a technique at the service of a type of government that begins to distill its own rationality. The city becomes the homogeneous social whole that institutions produce, but that must be managed in a non-institutional way. The difference between city and institution becomes, from the nineteenth century, mobility. The city must promote and manage traffic, entrances and exits, promenades. There must be freedom of movement because both the crowd and goods require circulation. If in the punitive city each element had a specific place to which it should submit (discipline), in the new city traffic management will be the key and the necessity. Hence the Haussmann renovations seeked to minimize the risks of revolt and at the same time establish a way for the circulation of goods, vehicles and individuals as orderly and as easy to manage as possible. The idea of the boulevard, together with night lighting, is extraordinarily simple but tremendously effective. Wide, connected avenues, maximum visibility and connection between the circulation of merchandise and of individuals through the shop windows and cafés that inconspicuously guide the path of the anonymous pedestrian, wrapped in a halo of modernist fascination. It seemingly fulfills both the new mercantilist dream of consumption and the old demand for disciplinary visibility of the panoptic —without corners, without darkness. However, a problem immediately arises, one that Baudelaire already inimitably narrated in one of his Paris Spleen, called The eyes of the poor. The circulation is not only of goods, but also of dangerous classes, of industrial production and of diseases. Baudelaire relays a scene in a Parisian café on the boulevards where, behind the glass, a hungry father and son appear who contemplate the scene that

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occurs inside the café with a mixture of fascination and hate. The protagonist and his companion are immediately forced to face the gaze of another class, the eyes of the poor upon them. The thing is, the irruption of poverty within the general ebb and flow of the city forces a reconsideration of the traditional conception of urban poverty —and perhaps of the way of urban experience: “Haussmann, in tearing down the old medieval slums, inadvertently broke down the self-enclosed and hermetically sealed world of traditional urban poverty. The boulevards, blasting great holes through the poorest neighborhoods, enable the poor to walk through the holes and out of their ravaged neighborhoods, to discover for the first time what the rest of their city and the rest of life is like. And as they see, they are seen: the vision, the epiphany, flows both ways. In the midst of the great spaces, under the bright lights, there is no way to look away. The glitter lights up the rubble, and illuminates the dark lives of the people at whose expense the bright lights shine. Balzac had compared those old neighborhoods to the darkest jungles of Africa; for Eugene Sue they epitomized ‘The Mysteries of Paris.’ Haussmann’s boulevards transform the exotic into the immediate; the misery that was once a mystery is now a fact.” (Berman 1988, 153)

In the classic punitive city of the eighteenth century (the example of Paris is paradigmatic for Foucault) there were stately powers, the Church, religious communities, the representatives of royal power, the commissioner, parliamentary power —that is, a whole series of co-existing powers that lacked the necessary response to the new types of circulation that were being implemented in the city. Profound changes such as urban industrialization meant the need for new urban management in which the city was no longer merely a place of circulation of goods but also the place of production, which required specific and unitary regulation to avoid the multiplicity of jurisdictions and powers. There is, therefore, a deep economic rationale in the necessary development of the punitive city. But also political, since the development of cities meant the rise of a poor working population —the subsequent proletariat or working class— and, with it, the transfer of political conflicts from the countryside to the city, translated into urban riots and uprisings. And there were diseases. That meant the rise of the need to manage a new danger due to urban overcrowding: infection. An example can serve to show the lengths that urbanism goes to in order to mitigate the risks of new urban traffic: social medicine in France in the late eighteenth century. The need to manage the risk of disease and contagion arising from the new type of circulation in the large cities of the late eighteenth century entails a whole medical regulation whose object, unlike classical medicine, is not the individual but the population. Urban medicine was developed in France with the goal of ensuring public sanitation through three very specific strategies: waste circulation, air circulation and water circulation. It will be up to medical knowledge to determine the management guidelines for new urban health hazards. Precisely here we find the context in which the notion of salubrity was born:

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“It should be pointed out that salubrity did not mean the same thing as health; rather, it referred to the state of the environment and those factors of it which made the improvement of health possible. Salubrity was the material and social basis capable of ensuring the best possible health of individuals. In connection with this, the concept of public health appeared, as a technique for controlling and modifying those elements of the environment which might promote the health or, on the contrary, harm it. Salubrity and insalubrity designated the state of things and of the environment insofar as they affected health: public health was the politico-scientific control of that environment.” (Foucault 2001, 150)

The first salubrity strategy arises from the intuition of the health hazards posed by the accumulation of waste. Places such as slaughterhouses or cemeteries were taken to the periphery, expelled from the urban center. Traditions such as the coffin appeared, precisely due to the need for managing the risk of overcrowding disease in cemeteries. Secondly, the circulation of air and water, as potentially dangerous elements, led to the need to open large avenues, demolish houses that interrupted the circulation of air and carefully manage access to drinking water and the evacuation of sewage, to the point that the subsoil began to be a matter of importance in the urban management of salubrity. In short, the risks involved in the movement and circulation within large cities meant a profound crisis of the punitive city and the need —due to the same urban and government rationality— to open up through a new type of political, economic and urban management, towards the secured city, characteristic of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries.

TOWARDS THE SMART CITY From 1977, since the Collège courses aimed at the analysis of liberalism, Foucault’s perspective on the role of medicine and discipline in the rationality of government changes. He begins to glimpse the importance of the economy, specifically of ordoliberal knowledge in the constitution of the modern city. From the nineteenth century mobility begins to be a necessary part of both the economy and modern urbanism. In his Securité, Territoire et Population and La Naissance de la Biopolitique courses, Foucault studies certain government strategies that go beyond the scope of disciplinary power. Already with the emergence of social medicine and the biopolitics of Il faut défendre la societé, we could speak of an overcoming of the disciplinary power model. But with the courses of the years ’77-’79, Foucault initiates an analysis of the rationality of liberal government, paying attention to the so-called security devices closely linked to the development of the city, as we can see in Schuilenburg and Peeters (2018). In 1682 Alexandre Le Maitre wrote the text La Métropolitée in which, still within the disciplinary reason of State, predicts that the future challenges of the city will be those that

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have to do with mobility, with circulation: the circulation of diseases, goods, dangerous individuals, desires. And, of course, the aim is to protect citizens from the risks of such circulations. At the same time, the city must promote circulation and protect from the dangers of such circulation. Create, in short, a secure space. A safe environment in which movement is accompanied by reduced risk, not as solutions to specific problems but as the very heart of its reason for governance. Safety management of the city is treated by Foucault in his ’77 course Securité, Territorie et Population. Basically, Foucault’s mapping of urban strategies for managing circulation risks include four, highly relevant for the definition of a new type of power that, in the course of ’78 La naissance de la biopolitique, he will identify with the rationality of neoliberal government. In first place, we can state that safety devices do not prevent or discipline circulation, but, using a probabilistic approach, replace surveillance with the probable regulation of urban mobility (Castro Gómez 2013, 23). Secondly, and derived from the above, to achieve such a “probable movement,” what Foucault calls a medium is produced —an artificial environment that favors permanent traffic using a whole array of procedures: statistics, urban planning, architecture, urban hygiene. This is expected to affect a population and their living conditions. But intervention is no longer executed directly like disciplines, instead, suitable conditions are created within this produced environment in order for traffic to be properly channeled. This is how, in third place, we can state that all this circulation set in motion —including the circulation of desires which are no longer repressed, but channeled— has the goal of utility and wealth. Social utility and economic wealth are the maxims of economic knowledge that will guide the production of the urban environment in its job of traffic management. That’s why, in fourth place, the population, the public, changes and ceases to be considered as passive. Its self-productive task is favored by promoting all the movement and changes that occur within the security framework of the new city. Therefore, adapting to the traffic, to desires, to changes and to self-production will be the urban task of a city that is beginning to envision new times. In this manner, we see a profound variation of the knowledge charged with managing the rationality of government. Foucault detailed how, under the disciplines, penalties and human sciences were responsible for ensuring the epistemological solidity of the punitive city. Nevertheless the new city that will develop properly in the twentieth century will have as a knowledge paradigm the new neoliberal economy, implemented fundamentally by the Chicago School. This school will forge what will be called “governmentality”: the combination made up of the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics which enable that very specific, although very complex, form of power whose main target is the population, by way of knowing the political economy and by having safety devices as the essential technical instrument. In short, it constitutes a radical change with respect to disciplinary interventions:

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“What appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at all the ideal or project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by, let’s say, normative mechanisms. Nor is it a society in which a mechanism of general normalization and the exclusion of those who cannot be normalized is needed. On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.” (Foucault 2008, 260)

The urban task of the twentieth century, in line with the new economic knowledge that is being developed, will be to replace institutional disciplinary production with the creation of an environment that allows a) traffic management, and b) self-production of the subject through the channeling of useful desires. Perhaps two of the most suggestive urban innovations of the twentieth century in this regard can help us better ride the Foucaultian journey. These are two urban innovations that follow in the footsteps of Le Corbusier’s famous phrase: We must end the street. Because, precisely, the intention is to create new spaces that have nothing to do with the old urban places that possessed both an identity and a history, and involved a network of human relationships. The highway and the shopping center, as paradigms of mobility and desire management, respond perfectly to this urban call that governmental rationality makes which Foucault talks about. They form a perfect pair of mobility and human management aimed at the constant and changing selfproduction of citizen-subjects, to the point where it could compare to many other urban references of our century (airports, stations, theme parks, subways, trams, supermarkets, etc.) that share the same essential characteristic: utility and breakdown of any link with identity, history and relationships. Urban places are replaced by space: the urban example par excellence is that of replacing the old squares with hard squares —pure movement, no identity, history or possibility of relationship. As Leon and Urabayen (2018, 201) underline, there is a double urban and socio-legal strategy, aimed at the management of urban movement and the integration of citizen participation. The maximum distillation of the pure urban space-movement is the highway, as Le Corbusier designed it. And the useful counterpoint to that space-movement is the spacemerchandise represented by the economic traffic of the shopping center, outside the city, but connected to the urban centers by the highway. The secured city does not create security spaces through police surveillance —although its birth implies it (Barnet, Bridge 2016, 1186-1204). It is safe because it produces the right conditions for individuals to selfproduce according to the scheme of human capital, reaching the limit of the conversion of the individual into an entrepreneur of him or herself. And, for this, not only knowledge and power must be produced, but the substitution of places with the spaces that neoliberal rationality requires to carry out its goal: its utopia. We can analyze the attainment of the

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objective, with different degrees of comprehensiveness, in Rosol (2015, 256) and Purcell (2014, 29). Utopia is not an issue of exclusive socialist or communist thought. The liberal utopia exists and is implemented throughout a critique of the previous rationality, proposing a path in which citizens relinquish their place and inhabit the new spaces that will allow them to self-perfect. The liberal utopia is the establishment of the non-place as a way of life: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory,’ and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position. A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitue of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce. A world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object, whose unprecedented dimensions might usefully be measured before we start wondering to what sort of gaze it may be amenable.” (Augé 1995, 78)

CONCLUSION: BETWEEN UTOPIA AND HETEROTOPIA In 1967, Foucault wrote a short article entitled The other spaces, in which he brings into play two concepts somewhat alien to the rest of his thought. It is utopia and heterotopia, both applied to urban space. Foucault states that there are spaces —particular sites— that have the quality of neutralizing a set of habitual relations. Foucault describes a whole typology of heterotopia: heterotopias of crisis (military service), deviation (psychiatric hospital), functional (cemetery), contradictory (nineteenth-century garden), heterochronic (museum or fair), purification (Scandinavian saunas) or compensation (Fernández 2017). In this short article on urban space, Foucault brings into play the concept of heterotopia that has been very attractive for contemporary urban reflections. Usually, the antiestablishment nature of heterotopias and their inversion of the usual relational social values are revealed in order to conclude that, in the face of urban homogenization, heterotopic places are either the place of resistance to urban normalization (Heidi Sohn 2008, 41) or a “counterstrategy of the proliferation of camps and the spread of the exposure to the condition of bare life” (Dehane and Decauter 2008, 5).

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But perhaps, from the viewpoint of governmentality strategies, the strange topology of urban heterotopia is the effective location of the urban utopia conceived by the rationality of government of each historical era. That means that each power regime possesses utopias capable of being implemented in certain spaces, provoking, through the response and criticism of the relationships developed by the previous government strategy, a mutation of the urban environment and, consequently, of the instituted urban relationships. Heterotopias are practical exercises of the utopia of a new power, of each new power. Those practical exercises imply the defiance inherent to the censorship of a previous power. In this way, cemeteries can be understood as the censorship of a whole way of inhabiting death, and the psychiatric hospitals as the censorship of a whole way of dealing with madness and sanity. But this response only reveals the originality exerted by each power strategy carried out by each rationality of government, which does not mean there are no revolutionary heterotopias. Just think of the Paris Commune, the Fourier phalansteries or the Basaglia antipsychiatric community —or other more recent places (Rosol 2014, 70-84). But an automatic resistance or dissent cannot be inferred from the concept of heterotopia in Foucault, just as an act of revolutionary transgression cannot be inferred from literature. The shopping center is the quintessential heterotopia of the secured, intelligent or liberal city. It breaks with the urban anthropological place, it opens identity —cracking it— and it cancels relationships and history. Ultimately, it establishes a new way of inhabiting the secured and managed present. That’s why it is the most refined expression of neoliberal utopia. Our city, then, is pierced by new heterotopic non-places that realize the utopia of the citizen’s conversion into human capital. In the face of this, it may be possible to establish spaces or places that reclaim a way of being another. But, how to provide ourselves with the utopia that is capable of conceiving them?

REFERENCES Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places. New York: Verso. Barnet, Clive and Bridge, Garry. 2016. “The situations of urban inquire.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40: 1186-1204. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. The Arcades Project. London: Cambridge University Press. Berman, Marshall. 1998. All the solid melts into air. London: Penguin Books. Castro, Santiago. 2005. “El dispositivo Michel Foucault y el problema de la ciudad.” [“Michel Foucault Device and the problem of the city”]. Anuario. Revista de historia 25: 19-37. Dehane, Michel and De Cauter, Lieven. 2008. Heterotopia and the City. London: Routeledge.

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Fernández, Olaya. 2017. “Heterotopías urbanas: una mirada foucaultiana a las favelas cariocas.” [Urban heterotopias: a Foucauldian look at the slums from Rio de Janeiro”]. Daimon Revista Internacional de filosofia 71: 81-93. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and punish. Vintage Books: New York. Foucault, Michel. 2001. Power. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The birth of biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Purcell, Mark. 2014. “Resisting NeoLiberalization: Communicative Planning or CounterHegemonic Movements?” Planning Theory 8: 140-165. Rosol, Marit. 2014. “On resistance in the post-political city: conduct and counter-conduct.” Space and Polity 18: 70-84. Rosol, Marit. 2015. “Governing Cities through Participation. A Foucauldian Analysis of City Plan Vancouver.” Urban Geography 36: 256-276. Schuilenburg, Marc and Peters, Rick. 2018. “Smart cities and the architecture of security.” City, Territory and Architecture 5: 1-13. Sohn, Heidi. 2008. “Heterotopia: Anamnesis of a Medical Term.” In Heterotopia and the City, edited by Michel Dehane and Lieven De Cauter, 40-50. London: Routeledge. León, Jorge and Urabayen, Julia. 2018. “Espacio, poder y gubernamentalidad. Arquitectura y urbanismo en la obra de Foucault.” [“Space, power and governmentality. Architecture and urban planning in the work of Foucault”]. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 112: 181-212.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 4

THE INTERNET AND THE HETEROTOPIA OF THE POSTMETROPOLIS Juan Diego Parra Valencia*

Department of Arts and Humanities, Metropolitan Institute of Technology, Medellín, Colombia

ABSTRACT This essay aims to connect the concepts of heterotopia and hypermatter – introduced by Michel Foucault and Bernard Stiegler, respectively – with the virtual information technology universe of the postmetropolis. For this purpose, we shall analyse the technical infrastructure that facilitates access to information, that is, the Internet, understanding it as a ‘place’, halfway between the physical and mental worlds; this infrastructure, in turn, guides the forms of cognition and sensitive perception of individuals, leading them to not only inhabit heterotopic spaces but also become heterotopias themselves.

Keywords: postmetropolis, internet, hypermatter, heterotopia

INTRODUCTION The Internet is usually considered an abstract universe defined by devices and interfaces, which leads us through mental worlds, perhaps of metaphysical nature. In this context, although the general idea of a collective mental hyperconnection is not far from the Internet experience itself, we should bear in mind that it requires a material *

Corresponding author’s email: [email protected].

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infrastructure to operate. However, we hardly notice such infrastructure because of its discreet, hidden, imbricated, and overlooked materiality. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler proposes, as we will discuss later, the concept of ‘hypermatter’ to allude to the scenario of individual and collective psychic interaction provided by the Internet. This concept allows us to articulate some aspects related to the philosophical conception of virtuality (beyond its technological considerations) to understand the Internet as an open space of experiences that we can perfectly relate to the Foucauldian idea of ‘heterotopia’. In order to recognise the Internet as a heterotopic world, we should first understand it as a ‘place’ that is anchored to the geography of the earth; not only as a type of digital psychogeography but as a real space that can be observed and perceived. It, indeed, features a defined architecture despite the fact that it may be ambiguous. In addition, its interconnective expansion can be drawn on the area of the planet, uniting continents and oceans. Besides a logic, it also has a physics and a geography; hence, before jumping right to the virtual nature of its existence, its material and concrete roots must be acknowledged. In this regard, Andrew Blum clearly points out that ‘contrary to its ostensible fluidity, the geography of the Internet reflects the geography of the earth; it adheres to the borders of nations and the edges of continents’ (2012, 26). As a matter of fact, his great contribution to this matter is an exhaustive study of what he calls the ‘physical geography of the Internet’. Such study will help us to establish the connection with the notions of postmetropolis and hypermatter, which determine the mental and cognitive topology that makes the Internet a heterotopic model.

THE POSTMETROPOLIS, THE INTERNET, AND THE HYPERMATTER According to Edward Soja, after the crisis of the city-state model, the relationship between information technologies and urbanization strategies led to defining ‘metropolis’, rather than as a point of socio-economic stability between citizens and government systems, as an active field of collective revolutions that seem to be halfway between thought and materiality. This author states that a new idea of city, in line with the deep philosophical criticism of modernity (which has resulted in the concept of postmodernity), is required. The new city should be called ‘postmetropolis’ and understood ‘not only as an epitomizing model of contemporary social and economic development, but also as a “metaphysical reality”, a place where the real and the imagined are persistently commingled in ways we have only begun to understand’ (2000, 147). The postmetropolis is not, strictly speaking, an improvement of the modern industrial city (in fact, its dynamics is still rooted in the model of industrial capitalism) but rather a step towards a new modelling of the urban experience. In such modelling, the polis still rules as a control system, while human interaction spreads throughout territories of cognitive synchronisation, thus boosting completely new forms of social exchange.

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Based on the work by anthropologist, musician, and cultural critic Iain Chambers, Soja describes the emergence of the postmetropolis as a process through which the solid cities of modernity are integrated into the system of tourism capitalism. This integration, however, causes a ‘ruinous’ aestheticisation of the architectural heritage of such cities, which are depopulated by locals and populated by migrants, generally. The former inhabitants move to rural peripheral areas, provided these latter have all those technological tools (telephone, television, radio, and, of course, the Internet) that allow them to be in contact with the urban frenzy. Therefore, this ‘world of otherness’ of the urban exteriority (always understood as ‘public space’) manages to penetrate the private habitat, transforming the relations between the objective and subjective worlds and, thus, creating an ‘other-space’, i.e., a heterotopia. This heterotopia, as we will soon see, is favoured by the relational model of that onto-technological infrastructure referred to as the Internet. In point of fact, it is not a minor matter that Chambers and Soja consider this urban evolution to be perhaps the most dramatic transformation that has occurred throughout the history of urbanization (a process that comprises 10,000 years). It is so, in fact, because it affects not only the types of sociability – decreasingly driven by physical contact – with its economic and political impact but also the very internal consciousness of space and time. These two coordinates no longer depend on the direct relationships in the mindfulness dimension but on the information flow. This postmetropolitan city – increasingly unrelated to what Soja calls ‘spatial specificity’, that is, its territory, its material field of action – also brings about a different citizen typology, halfway between the physical experience sphere and the mental universe induced by computer machines. This causes the collective memory (the culture itself) to end up being absorbed by the merchandising of symbols in the tourism market. The Internet will, certainly, favour the parallel mobility of foreign tourists, who will be able to trace their experience routes virtually before the physical experience itself via itinerary planning on websites. Thus, transit around these museum-cities is possible through economic information flows which allow moving around at different speeds in logical, physical, and geographical areas. There may not be a better definition of heterotopia than the transit experience across intermediate states between mindfulness and imagination. Consequently, the heterotopic city (the postmetropolis favoured by the Internet) cannot be easily mapped; it is impossible to identify its borders, or frontiers, as it expands and contracts by means of data. These data recreate a limited image of infinity thanks to highly specific maps or access routes that detect places regardless of users’ degree of physical and mental disorientation1, as occurs when a Global Positioning System (GPS) is used. Therefore, this city induces a type of imagination less and less related to the oneiric

1

Soja, based on Celeste Olalquiaga’s work, points out that this disorientation is characteristic of a condition known as ‘psychasthenia’, which causes an alteration in individuals when they try to associate the physical space with its represented counterpart.

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world and increasingly anchored to the schematism of a map or the hyperrealism of digital photography. In this regard, Soja argues that ‘an increasing blurriness intercedes between the real city and the imagined city, making “the city” as much an imaginary or simulated reality as a real place’ (2000, 150), a city with an electronic topography that does not allow the recognition of the territorial ‘outside’. Thus, the electronic city promoted by the Internet can be conceived of as an ‘other-space’ (i.e., a heterotopia) according to some specific qualities that we will explain later. Our first problem, before addressing the heterotopia of this city, will be to understand the material meaning of the infrastructure that supports the very experience of the virtual world. For this purpose, we will analyse the concept of ‘hypermatter’ used by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. First of all, we will define the Internet as a complex communication system that is formed by discrete material components made of silicon, such as microchips, cables, networks, screens, pulsers, and sensors. These components serve to host all types of texts, letters, images, and sounds that are in constant interaction thanks to high-speed processors that transform encrypted systems into readable and understandable elements. Stiegler defines such system as a hypermaterial plexus: “I call hypermatter a complex of energy and information where it is no longer possible to distinguish its matter from its form – what first appears with quantum mechanics and what is necessary to overtake what Simondon called the hylemorphic scheme. This is the manner of thinking according to a pairing of concepts: form (morphē) and matter (hylē), that are thought as opposed to each other. I call hypermaterial a process where information – which is presented as a form – is in reality a sequence of states of matter produced by materials and apparatuses, by technological devices, in which the separation of matter and form is also totally devoid of meaning.” (2008, 110)

In this hypermaterial network, information is exchanged by means of the main set of the human sensorium: sight, hearing, and voice. Perception through this network involves, as we know, adapting to a large amount of information thanks to the hyperlinked structure of the perceptual system that integrates its sensorium, thus unifying its virtuality and actuality. Consequently, the Internet creates the internal experience of transcendent ubiquity inside a constant system of interactions. In this system, users do not only belong to the global ‘being’ (as part of a great thought or a great mind, heterotopically) but can also interact with other forms of themselves, without exhausting their identity. This is because their function of being extends to their own constructions of themselves, which are disseminated by avatars, nicknames, autonomous email accounts, chats, and passwords. Moreover, such possibility of self-extension guarantees a growing number of copies that surpass the ‘self’ as the original one, in terms of self-improvement (as in the case of the improved versions of ourselves that we promote through social networks). The digital space allowed by the Internet exceeds the analogical relations of both proportionality and

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attribution. This implies the complete de-hierarchisation of the elements with respect to a presumed origin, thus increasing the exponential degree of the perfectible projection message. Hence, the ‘being’ is improved when it is expanded, and such expansion, given the transcendental ubiquity that the system enables, is concomitant with the virtually inhabited space; therefore, the sense of space is perceived without a defined external attribution. This causes the city (or the idea of it) to be inhabited as a field of constant deterritorialisation. This situation, as we pointed out above, is reflected in the traceability of the GPS, where the old physical practices of geographic intuition (guided by the sun’s location, the wind direction, and the indexical semiotics of space) are overdetermined and exceeded. In the hypermaterial world of the Internet, knowledge and memory expand and are constantly updated beyond particular experience. This can, indeed, be observed in the close relationship between digital acts and the preservation of emotional memory via recording devices. Thanks to the Internet, the interactions between machines and humans are collected and stored in databases containing the interests, preferences, tastes, and ideas of users (data that the market has managed to algorithmise) who are always in a latent state waiting to be activated. Consequently, we may say that our self-being deploys hypermaterially in every interactive gesture with machines and is, in turn, preserved in the heterotopic universe of the digital active megamemory. This megamemory will always be available for us to reconstruct ourselves and retrieve those disseminated data that we are within the expansive world of the digital being. This means that not only do we inhabit a heterotopic world, but we, ourselves, are heterotopias. Thanks to the Internet, the postmetropolis makes us become heterotopias. Let us next examine the relationship between the concept of heterotopia and the postmetropolitan universe of the Internet.

THE INTERNET AND THE HETEROTOPIA In order to establish the relationship between the Internet and the concept of heterotopia, we believe that we should first provide a classification outline of the Foucauldian heterotopia (Foucault, 1984). We will be establishing such relationship as we describe Foucault’s heterotopic principles. This exercise will allow us to propose two qualitative dimensions from which we will address the heterotopic characteristics of the hypermaterial city of the Internet. Foucault points out that heterotopias are governed by six characteristics that determine the existential proximity between the normative-legalized field and the psychic structure at an individual and collective level. Let us analyse them in detail: The first characteristic – which concerns the relationship between crisis, deviation, and normality – is derived from the processes that facilitate transit between psychic and

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biological states within institutional structures. Disciplinary and pedagogical spaces are clear examples of this, as well as ritual or cultural practices that lead to sexual and social normalization from puberty to adulthood or from virginity to sexuality. This is why places for social normalization of offending (or abnormal) behaviours (e.g., prisons, mental health units, hospitals, and nursing homes), where levels of abnormality are measured, are also part of this heterotopic form. The second characteristic expresses a sort of abstract spatial (or spiritual) duplication of the concrete world referring to a nonassignable other-place. For example, this is the case of cemeteries where we house the inert matter of spiritualized entities. These heterotopias, thus, promote the dual existence in time of absent presences. The present material entity shares, by contiguity, the ontological qualities of the referred absence. The third characteristic involves the virtualisation of emotional states that are concentrated in states of matter. Examples of this are works of art or mimetic sensitivity distribution scenarios, such as cinemas or theatres. Moreover, this heterotopia entails temporary expansions in closed devices, such as books which distend spatialised time, through language, to prolong narrative times that are not equivalent to reading times. The fourth characteristic (very similar to the third one) can actually be understood as a heterochrony according to Foucault. These spaces can be regarded as devices of symbolic transmission, where exchanges between ages of knowledge and human creation take place. An exact example of these heterotopias are libraries and museums. However, this can also be extended to collective ritual celebrations that seek to synchronise states of social emotion across the time of repetition. The fifth characteristic implies a condition of minority secrecy with respect to hegemonic scenarios that are generally resolved under secret pacts demanding fidelity commitments. Secret societies and ghettos are clear examples of this characteristic. The sixth characteristic is concerned with regulated structures for which a defined externality is not possible. It is not a ghetto but rather a social concentration in spaces without links to the outside world. Without being centres for regulation, unlike prisons or mental health units, these spaces cannot be opened or expanded. Concrete examples of this are ships or oceanic islands, for which the ocean is their nonplace par excellence. Although, as we can see from the above, Foucault refers to some specific identifiable places in culture as heterotopias, our focus is placed on their spatial functionality, both at the physical and mental levels, rather than on their material condition (or their denomination) in order to understand the dynamics of collective interaction. In other words, we would like to understand the concept of ‘heterotopia’ based on the types of agencements(in Deleuzian terms) that it allows, rather than on its architectural didactics. For this reason, we need a qualitative classification, according to Foucault’s analysis, that goes beyond the exemplary architectural cases he proposes. In accordance with the characteristics mentioned above, we may define heterotopias as (1) frontier spaces that are not at the margin of something but are the margin; therefore, they are spaces of

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transformation and change, and even of mutation; and (2) spaces capable of closing on themselves based on self-organising regulations. According to these definitions, we could connect the characteristics of the Internet with the heterotopic principles. The Internet is a ‘frontier space’ between perception and cognition, which promotes the insertion of the subject into the objective information flow. It is worth recalling that, as we mentioned before, the materiality of the information flow lies in its electronic condition and pulse-induced activation. Blum points out that ‘the Internet is made of pulses of light. Those pulses might seem miraculous, but they are not magic. They are produced by powerful lasers contained in steel boxes housed (predominantly) in unmarked buildings’ (2012, 9). As we have already seen, this materiality should be understood, according to Stiegler, as a ‘hypermateriality’; in addition, it refers to the material flow of electricity employed in specific actions of the users’ body (both in the use of keyboards and in the haptic interface) to influence its receptive forms. Internet users invert their ontological status as ‘subjects’ to integrate a state of mind in which they are, at the same time, objects of themselves, thus occupying a place both in the virtual space (or cyberspace) and in their own imagination. Moreover, their imagination is determined by the layers of meaning processed through software and digital applications. Although the alienating effect of digital technologies, as well as their social impact as control and surveillance systems, is evident, the Internet is, above all, a scenario of struggle for knowledge and truth (both linked to the enunciative forms of information) at a clearly metaphysical level. In his reflection on the model of data exchange via the Internet, Boris Groys highlights the ontological evolution of the use of Google services. He says that Google search engine is “a metaphysical machine that is also manipulated by a metalinguistic, metaphysical subjectivity. Thus the subject of a Google search becomes involved in a struggle for the truth that is on the one hand metaphysical and on the other hand political and technological. It is metaphysical because it is a struggle not for this or that particular ‘worldly’ truth or – to put it in other terms – for a particular context. Rather, it is a struggle for access to the truth as such – understood as the sum total of all materially existing contexts.” (2012, 16)

The idea of ‘truth’ as a global sum of knowledge (in the same sense of the Platonic eidos) is experienced by Internet users thanks to the synchronous interconnectivity with information. This experience modifies the value of thought in terms of operational delegation and unifies the concrete space experience with the representation of such space, thus creating an alternative field that is halfway between consciousness and imagination (as occurs with heterotopias). Individuals who mentally inhabit the digital universe are also involved in an operational chain that induces them to behave in a manner that is never entirely in the physical world, nor in the alienation of software. Their existence lies exactly in the borderline of themselves, always between an act and a thought. In other words, their

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state is self-transformation, even when they evade themselves: Their state is, thus, completely heterotopic. Furthermore, the Internet is a perfect example of the second heterotopic quality that we extracted from Foucault’s proposal (i.e., heterotopias as spaces capable of closing on themselves based on self-organising regulations). Its transmedia multidimensionality demands types of operative competence adjusted to the unification of codes. As we know, such unification depends on computer systems and interfaces; hence, the scale of apprehension and knowledge of devices and codes is defined according to degrees of ‘depth’ in the habitat: this is why we speak, almost in terms of a pyramidal organization, of scenarios that seem to refer to the theological organization of heaven, earth, and hell using the names of ‘cloud’, ‘deep web’, and ‘dark web’, respectively. Each degree of ‘deepening’ implies hierarchy levels in the transit and adoption of information, which takes us from a higher to a lower level. For transit, users must pass each scenario using increasingly sophisticated access codes and require more complex, ambiguous, and cryptic levels of protection and support. Each level has self-organising rules, as heterotopias do. With a dynamics similar to that of secret societies, interactive groups are created and regulated by the service and the consumption of digital material, and their direct impact is reflected in emotional and psycho-affective states. Let us take a look at the hierarchical structure of the Internet in terms of its heterotopic self-organising constitution. In addition to the obvious reference to theology mentioned above, another standard alternative to represent the ‘worlds’ of the Internet is taken from the field of psychoanalysis, where the parts of the psyche, i.e., the Superego, the Ego, and the Id, are considered to be the equivalents of the cloud, the deep web, and the dark web, respectively. If we heterotopically overleap these universes, the resulting dimensions will then be the heights, the surface, and the depths, respectively. The heights, which resemble the idea of the Superego, are related to the notion of ‘cloud’ and represent a universe that is regulated, understandable, and guided by fixed rules which not only protect users but also promote their hedonic and autonomous individuality. The world of the cloud includes social networks, Google, and all kinds of regulated digital applications. The surface, which relates to the idea of ‘deep web’, represents the ‘Ego’ in the psychic triad. This scenario reveals the indefinite determination of identity (or at least its search). It is an apparently self-regulated world that contains the intimate secrets of each user, and although it is linked to the outside, it is managed according to individual categorisations. This world is precisely the one susceptible to algorithmisation and pattern detection, according to schemes defined by the digital expression of the individual desire. In this territory, users manage their own virtualisations at the cognitive and sensory levels. Between the Superego (‘cloud’) and the Ego (‘deep web’), there is a relationship that is perfectly regulated by contracts and prohibitions. Contracts offer the possibility of entering special dimensions where both desire and knowledge are synchronized. It is a clearly

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heterotopic dimension where the space of experience becomes another to guarantee the links between discrete matter (digital data), thought, and desire. Therefore, through digital actions (contact pulses with devices), traceability and operational calculation can be performed using algorithms. The digital machine, thus, offers the possibility of unifying the ‘Ego of action’ with the ‘Ego of desire’, and users are able to define themselves in a self-regulated heterotopic universe that guides their desires and wills. There is also the world of the depths, known as the dark web, which does not lack of rules and codes and corresponds to the notion of the Id in the psychic triad. Its internal operation requires greater sophistication in the use of codes while enabling users to navigate through the pulse-induced world (which is certainly esoteric) as anonymously as possible. Beyond its military use (both at a state and/or criminal level), dark web users can explore the most brutal forms of human expression (e.g., hardcore pornography, snuff, and extreme – free and induced – violence). At each level, which we may describe as ‘onto-technological’, users channel their desires and wills, tracing the route of themselves via digital footprints. These traces (of discreet materiality) do not belong to a single scenario of experience; their habitat is heterotopic. The question regarding these heterotopic digital modes of existence lies in their management: who is in charge of regulating, orienting, storing, intercepting, negotiating, and marketing them? Over the Internet, desire and cognition are managed by forces of discreet visibility, establishing a mystical link between users and machines, as it is, in turn, a mnemo-technical system where users store the digital versions of themselves, that is, their own linguistic, visual, and sound traces. As explained by Stiegler (2008), whoever accesses this discrete material exercises a special type of power (completely unprecedented until the emergence of the Internet): the ‘psycho-power’. We will not stop here; on the contrary, in order to better understand the heterotopic dimension of the psychic triad of the Internet, we will insist on the case of Google. With respect to Groys’ idea regarding a ‘beyond’ of Google’s grammar, it is worth noting that such mechanism – which emerged as a web search engine that used pre-existing data – managed to adequately formalise the historical metaphysical ambiguities of access to knowledge. First, it ensured the retrieval of required data thanks to its search engine while promoting multilanguage integration. This is accompanied by the choice of keywords, which does not require to formulate meaningful structures. In other words, it is not necessary to design questions to obtain answers; entering keywords is enough. Consequently, it is through words, rather than through linguistic structures, that we can access the world of knowledge, which distorts the very purpose of grammar: hierarchising words and meanings according to orders of appearance. Additionally, Google manages, as an extension of the deconstructive strategy, to multiply the contexts of each word, thus guaranteeing the availability of variants that make the requirement absolute. Although it does not promote an infinite search, this mechanism does stimulate the notion of infinity in the very searches, freeing words from their apparent unique grammatical context.

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Precisely, such a context deconstructive experience occurs, in heterotopic terms, in the informatics postmetropolis. The urban experience of Internet users is a frontier-state mapped in advance by apparently volitive reference points. Considering that the Internet is a hypermaterial infrastructure, users are, in turn, agents of hypermaterial migration, who change the direction of the processed codes in order to attract more correlative data, thus creating diagrams of their own experience. The physical world of this city is covered with algorithmic traces and behavioural patterns of passer-by, who are always in a trance. Yet, their transits, halfway between imagination and attentive consciousness, are not linear; they are characterised by the interconnection and superposition of levels. Users move through the degrees of encrypted immersion, going back and forth from the cloud to the deep web, and are always susceptible to being caught by a certain encrypted system in the dark web. The psychic layers of the Internet, in fact, match those of the physical city itself. The world of the cloud is experienced in public space thanks to the system of consumption, which requires memberships and processing of identity data. Users enter this world only if they get affiliated using their data, which are recorded, thus forming an algorithmic package. Pattern detection, thanks to users’ digital traces, manages to group their consumption actions and use of digital devices and links them, usually unconsciously, to the deep web. Moreover, tracking codes can be accessed by heading to interstitial areas of the computer economy. For instance, the best example of this is the purchase of mobile packages (mobile phones and smuggled SIM cards) in marginal or ghetto areas in the physical city itself. Although the dark web is more difficult to locate, it corresponds to the clandestine (usually illegal) commercial and sexual practices, where one can have access to areas, objects, and people who inhabit the city’s underworld.

CONCLUSION We have established the relationship between the computer habitat of the postmetropolis and its equivalent experience in the physical world using heterotopic metaphors from the field of theology and psychoanalysis. Such analogies are possible thanks to the hypermaterial nature of the Internet, which allows us to consider the direct correspondences between the sensory perception habits and the forms of abstract understanding of the virtual world. However, these correspondences are only apparent. The universe of meaning of the electronic postmetropolis is completely heterotopic. Its ascertainment in the physical reality does not invalidate but rather exacerbates its hypermaterial condition. Although, as we can infer from Foucault’s proposal, a heterotopia (or space of otherness) is not the other of space but the other in space, it is important to understand that such space is not ‘on the margin’ but ‘in the margin’. Therefore, a heterotopia is a space of indiscernibility – what represents the idea of frontier and limit,

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not as a differentiated point but as the difference itself. In our case, the Internet would be a heterotopia par excellence because it inverts, mixes, and superimposes the conditions of the subject and the object, making them reversible and interoperative and creating, in the relationship itself, an intermediate space of cohabitation. Thus, since the Internet is the one fostering the contemporary postmetropolitan state, we would not risk much in saying that it is nothing but the heterotopia of the postmetropolis in today’s world.

REFERENCES Berry, David M. 2011. The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital age. London: Palgrave. Blum, Andrew. 2012. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (Epub edition). New York: Harper Collins. De Landa, Manuel. 2011. Philosophy and Simulation: The emergence of synthetic reason. London: Continuum. Foucault, Michel 1984. “Des espaces autres” (Conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967) [“Of Other Spaces”]. Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5(5), 46-49. Groys, Boris. 2012. Google. Words beyond grammar. Serie: “100 noters-100 thoughs”, nº 46. Documenta 13. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. Groys, Boris. 2016. In the flow. New York: Verso Books. Soja, Edward W. 2000. Postmetropolis. Critical studies of cities and regions. Malden: Blackwell publishing. Stiegler, Bernard. 2008. Economie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir. Entretiens avec Philippe Petit et Vincent Bontens. [Ecomony of the Hipermatter and the Psychopower. Interviews with Philippe Petit and Vincent Bontens]. Paris: Mille et une nuits.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 5

SURFACE HETEROTOPIAS, PLATFORM URBANISM Jorge León Casero* and Julia Urabayen†

Department of Philosophy, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain Department of Philosophy, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain

ABSTRACT Post-metropolitan heterotopias are not formed from a homogeneous and mechanical notion of urban space, which was the case in the heterotopias of disciplinary governance. The reason is that the optical-geometric notion of urban space made possible by perspective in the 15th century and was valid until the 20th century has been replaced by a platform notion, where the environment which is intervened is defined by an artificial infrastructure whose operation coincides with that of complex non-trivial systems. This chapter analyzes the relationship between the way of conceiving-organizing the environment which is intervened at the infrastructural level and the type of heterotopias that arise from it. In addition, two models are compared: the disciplinary (based on perspective) and the postmetropolitan (based on cybernetics and platform urbanism).

Keywords: infrastructure, platform capitalism, urban space, non-trivial systems, megastructures

INTRODUCTION: HETEROTOPIA AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS As we know, the concept of heterotopia was used by Michel Foucault in a radio intervention that took place on December 7, 1966 and was part of a series dedicated to * †

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected]. Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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literature and utopias, entitled, precisely, “Heterotopias”. In a conference given on March 14, 1967 at the Cercle d’études architecturales, called Des espaces autres, he tried to delve into the meaning of this notion. However, due to its “frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent” character (Soja 1996, 162), Foucault decided to abandon the term completely. Despite the fact that in some of his later writings he attached great importance to space and territory, the French thinker did not speak of “heterotopia” again. However, Foucault continued to think about the subject and connected it with the usage he gave to the term “heterotopia” at the beginning of the preface to his book The Order of Things,1 published in 1966. On this occasion, instead of presenting it as an attempt to catalogue and describe the “heterotopic” spaces according to certain principles and/or classification rules, he used it to refer to those realities that resist all classification. More specifically, he used it to comment on the text where Borges describes the famous classification of the Emperor: “‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) etcetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’.” (Foucault 1994, xv)

According to Foucault, the heterotopic character of this classification lies in the fact that the only organizing criterion used is a purely alphabetical logic (a, b, c, d) completely detached from any link —material or semantic— with the items it classifies, which remain completely heterogeneous and juxtaposed with each other. In this sense, the only logic that exists in this classification is an order of succession of symbols (a, b, c, d... which could be 1, 2, 3, 4...) defined autonomously, a priori and ex nihilo with respect to what is being classified. In this case, Foucault considers that heterotopias have a counter-spatial character because the only area where completely heterogeneous items could juxtapose each other is “in the non-place of language” (Foucault 1994, xvii). According to him, only the fully phonetized, systematized and formalized languages (features of a structuralist notion of language) would allow it to be described as “an unthinkable space” (Foucault 1994, xvii). The first effect of a linguistic classification structure on the classified items is, then, that it “does away with the site” (Foucault 1994, xvii), thus nullifying any common spatiotemporal context that could link materially and/or semantically classified items. In later texts in which he analyzes the organizing of space and territory, Foucault shows that language is not the only factor that can produce heterotopias through the alphabetical organization of things: any system (of classification and/or organization) formalized in a

1

The original title in French was Le Mots et les Choses and not L’Ordre des Choses —which was the title he really wanted to use— because he abandoned it given that two structuralist texts with the same title had already been published.

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completely autonomous way that has a syntax and a grammar that determine the operations and assemblages that can be considered valid within the system has that capacity.2 In these systems, linguistic or not, all the effects generated by the system that undermine the order that those systems intend to establish are heterotopic since, ultimately, they “destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’ […] heterotopias […] contest the very possibility of grammar at its source” (Foucault 1994, xvii). Given that in his famous example Foucault is analyzing only the system-language, the syntactic constructions that are produced are sentences and the generated heterotopia refers to the divergence between words and things. On the other hand, in his subsequent analyses of space and territory, although he does not explicitly use the term “heterotopia,” he analyzes the heterotopic consequences generated by the use of the system-geometry as a purely material discipline of spatial ordering. Thus, the main point is that, although both language and geometry are organizing systems that have reached the threshold of formalization through the development of a completely autonomous syntax and grammar, only language implies a semantic dimension that, even if it may be considered as arbitrary with respect to the rules of organization of the signifier, it is completely inescapable. However, a language that does not mean anything is not a (human) language. (Human) language gives meaning and organizes. Geometry and mathematics, on the other hand, only organize. As Roland Barthes aptly commented, “among the urban planners […] there is no talk of signification” (Barthes 1986, 88). Instead, urban semiotic and the associated urban anthropology project the type of functioning of the (human) language on the (geometric and mathematical) language of the city. Rather than establishing meaningless symbolic systems like geometry, mathematics, and cybernetics, urban semiotics falls prey to a new kind of humanistic universalism by claiming that “symbolism […] must be understood as a general discourse concerning signification” (Barthes 1986, 89). In other words, urban semiotics considers that every sign and/or symbol has a meaning. Due to the distinction he makes between language and meaning, every symbolic system refers to an “organization of meaning” (Barthes 196, 90) 2

In Foucault’s analysis of discursive practices in The Archeology of Knowledge, the type of systems we are referring to matches those that have reached what he calls “threshold of formalization”. Foucault states that “the moment at which a discursive practice achieves individuality and autonomy, the moment therefore at which a single system for the formation of statements is put into operation, or the moment at which this system is transformed, might be called the threshold of positivity. When in the operation of a discursive formation, a group of statements is articulated, claims to validate (even unsuccessfully) norms of verification and coherence, and when it exercises a dominant function (as a model, a critique, or a verification) over knowledge, we will say that the discursive formation crosses a threshold of epistemologization. When the epistemological figure thus outlined obeys a number of formal criteria, when its statements comply not only with archaeological rules of formation, but also with certain laws for the construction of propositions, we will say that it has crossed a threshold of scientificity. And when this scientific discourse is able, in turn, to define the axioms necessary to it, the elements that it uses, the propositional structures that are legitimate to it, and the transformations that it accepts, when it is thus able, taking itself as a starting-point, to deploy the formal edifice that it constitutes, we will say that it has crossed the threshold of formalization” (Foucault 1972, 186-187).

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by establishing correlations between signifiers. Once we consider that, as Victor Hugo stated, “the city is a writing” (Barthes 1986, 91), urban semiotics is bound to admit that “signification, therefore, is experienced as in complete opposition to objective [big] data” (Barthes 1986, 89). The operation of disciplinary and post-metropolitan heterotopias that we are going to discuss in this chapter explicitly oppose this notion of urban semiotics and denies that the operation of urban management systems has any meaning. The city is neither read nor written. The city connects energy and information flows through the establishment of infrastructures. At first, the main infrastructure was the establishment of a complete visual and material continuity of urban space as the main transport and communication network. Most of the ancient and/or non-Western cities had developed a type of city characterized by an arboreal or one-directional conception of urban space. Instead, the late medieval and Western renaissance city developed a model characterized by circularity and greater connectivity. The streets were no longer understood as access roads to housing and became a continuous flow of people and goods. This first wave of urban inter-connection was carried out through the use of geometry and perspective —understood as autonomous systematization and formalization of space. Currently, we have entered a second wave of urban inter-connection characterized by cybernetics and platform infrastructures, which has significantly altered the way in which the flows that travel across the city and its heterotopias are (self)organized. The key issue here is that, strictly speaking, neither perspective nor cybernetics organize meanings. The infrastructures and spatial planning systems that each one of them defines do not either. Flows are not meanings. They are the movement derived from a connection that establishes potential differences.

PERSPECTIVE AND HETEROTOPIA Foucault centers his analysis of geometric heterotopias in the 17th and 18th centuries. He particularly studied the city of Richelieu and Les Salines de Chaux de Ledoux as precedents of the Bentham’s Panopticon. However, he did not take into account that the condition of possibility for these projects was the development of perspective during the 15th century and its application to architecture as a technique of organizing and measuring space. Before the development of perspective, the representation of bodies was not conceived through their composition within a perfectly homogeneous and unlimited system of spatialdimensional relationships (length, width, height) defined from a reference trihedron mathematically describable by coordinates (x, y, x). This representation conceived them as simple groups of contiguous contents whose coherence depended directly on the (essentially limited character) of the place (locus) to which, strictly speaking, they

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belonged.3 The development of perspective allowed the definitive separation between locus and objects. Well, to achieve this we need “the introduction of a perfectly representative system, [based on a] verifiable and mathematical process, which allows its formalization in a systematization of the world ‘staged as image’”4 (Tafuri 2006, 35). Now, the threshold of formalization developed by perspective as an autonomous systematization of space implies that, as Wittkower states, “the Renaissance perspective is not only the science of proportionality between object and image, but also the science of the proportion between different images”5 (Wittkower 1953, 276). The fundamental thing about perspective is not that it establishes a system of dimensional relationships between the physical object and its geometric representation, but rather that it establishes it between the different geometric representations included in the same plane. It is this completely autonomous character of perspective as a system of spatial construction that allows, just like the phonetic linguistic systems analyzed by Foucault, for the act of organizing things to generate its own heterotopias. The paradigmatic example with which Manfredo Tafuri explains this heterotopic character introduced by perspective in architecture is the Church of Santo Spirito, designed by Brunelleschi in 1444. An authentic classification of the emperor applied to architectural construction typologies, Brunelleschi’s project develops a modular systematization of the space that (only as a consequence of a numerical-dimensional measurability) allows the juxtaposition of three constructive typologies. These typologies define spaces that, prior to the perspective notion, would have been considered completely divergent and materially incommensurable due to their belonging to loci that are completely antagonistic to each other. Specifically, the Church of Santo Spirito juxtaposes three different typologies. The central nave of the transept “almost certainly resolved, in the original project, with vaulted roofs”6 (Tafuri 1969, 14), the smaller spaces of the two lateral naves covered with dome vaults and, finally, the domed perimeter apses. Therefore, by decoupling the forms of constructive typologies from their material connection with a certain locus and a concrete construction material, the perspective systematization of the space allows to consider each one of these typologies as “elements available for the invention of infinitely variable structures” (Tafuri 1969, 14). Meaning, it does the same thing that the phonetic systematization of language did with words.

Panofsky states that “as various as antique theories of space were, none of them succeeded in defining space as a system of simple relationships between height, width and depth” (Panofsky 1991, 43). 4 Translated by the author. 5 Translated by the author. 6 Translated by the author. 3

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Source: Wikimedia commons. Figure 1. Filippo Brunelleschi. Floor of the Holly Spirit Church, Firenze. 1444.

Source: Wikimedia commons. Figure 2. Piero della Francesca. Ideal City, Urbino. 1470.

The threshold of formalization reached with the systematization of phonetic languages and of perspective implies that all the supposed rationality of their organization ends up producing a completely irrational or heterotopic juxtaposition of the content, material or semantic, they intend to organize. The linguistic and spatial analyses developed by Foucault after Madness and Civilization. A history of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1988) show —following the thesis established in that work— that rational organizing and irrational (heterotopic) juxtaposition are two sides of the same formalization process that cannot be separated.7 That is, only because language and space are rationalized, can completely irrational heterotopias arise.

7

Their mutual correspondence is similar to that pointed out by Jacques Derrida when he affirms that the conditions of possibility of ethical phenomena are simultaneously and cannot not be their conditions of impossibility.

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In this regard, the more we want to organize and to systematize a set of elements, verbal or spatial, the more openness and indeterminability occurs. Disciplinary governance normalized the space with the aim of producing the bodies (and subjectivities) of the subjects according to a rule established a priori that served as a common measure for the population’s unification. Now, the result of this normalization —as seen in the Foucauldian analyses of the prisons, hospitals, psychiatric institutions and the heterogeneous cities of Richelieu and Les Salines— was not the desired unification, but the proliferation of a much greater diversity. This is due to the connection by juxtaposition that formal systematization makes over all the differences that previously remained controlled and limited by their connection to a certain place and horizon of meaning. Contrary to what Deleuze and Guattari (2000) believed, deterritorialization is not an effect of capitalism, but of discipline. It is not produced directly at the level of socio-economic relations of production that generate the socio-symbolic ghost of the exchange value, but at the level of the material infrastructures that constitute the true forces of production that enable both production and material exchange (use value) of commodities (Marx 1993, 4), from which properly heterotopic relationships are generated.

HETEROTOPIA AND NON-TRIVIALITY The structuralist systematization of language and the perspective systematization of space conceive the formalized environment in the same way that Lewis Mumford defined the mechanical system. In other words, they understand it as a homogenization —of space or the signifier— that is autonomous and isotropic. Or, put another way, the properties of the environment in which the contents are set (objects or meanings) are the same in any of their (spatial) positions or (discursive) moments: “one may define a mechanical system as one in which any random sample of the whole will serve in place of the whole: an ounce of pure water in the laboratory is supposed to have the same properties as a hundred cubic feet of equally pure water in the cistern and the environment of the object is nor supposed to affect its behavior.” (Mumford 1955, 47)

Therefore, the syntactic and grammatical rules that define the possible valid operations within a system will always have the same effects regardless of the time and place in which they are carried out. In this regard, Mumford stated that the same possibility of enacting scientific laws of a universal nature “became possible only when a mechanical system could be isolated from the entire tissue of relations” (Mumford 1955, 32). This type of mechanical systems is valid to describe the heterotopic effects produced by the ex nihilo normalization of space typical of the disciplinary governance regime. However, they are totally incapable of adequately explaining the mode of operation typical

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of the new heterotopias: those of the post-metropolis. In the latter, the medium in which the objects or meanings to be formalized are assigned is neither homogeneous nor isotropic. The space is heterogeneous and variable. Therefore, as in non-trivial machines, a certain action on a specific element of the system may not have the same effects at different times or positions. The difference between mechanical and non-mechanical systems is best explained by the operating differences of trivial and non-trivial machines. In a trivial machine, any action on an element of the system will have the same consequence regardless of the moment and position in which it is performed. Expressed in cyber terminology, every input (x) will always produce the same output (y) regardless of what the previous inputs have been. Because of this, all trivial machines are “1. Synthetically determined; 2. Independent of the past; 3. Analytically determinable; 4. Predictable” (Foerster 2003, 309).8 In contrast, non-trivial machines are characterized by the existence of at least one state function (Z) that alters their behavior with each new input (x) received. Take, for example, the simplest case of a non-trivial machine: one that has only a single state function. In this example, the two main functions: the motor function (F), which in the case of trivial machines determined the output (y) from the input (x), and the state function (Z), whose originality lies in that they co-determine the output (y) and this, in turn, co-determines the internal state of the machine (z). In trivial machines we simply had that y = F(x), however, in these we have that y = F (x,z) Motor Function z’= Z (x,z) State Function

Figure 3. Diagram of a trivial and a non-trivial machine. Adapted from Foerster (2003).

Thus, in non-trivial machines —even in the simplest possible case like the one we have described— assuming that the motor and status functions are not known, one would have to analyze 10620 possible configurations if the possible inputs and outputs were limited to

8

These mechanical systems do not necessarily have to be numerical. They can also be conceived as logical systems. Therefore, as Foerster states, “you don’t have to input numbers. You could also input other forms. For example, the medieval logicians input logical propositions” (Foerster 2003, 309).

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4 possibilities (a, b, c, d).9 Since the number of atoms that exist in the universe is calculated to be around 1080, that means that “non-trivial machines are 1. Synthetically determined; 2. Dependent on the past; 3. Analytically indeterminable; 4. Unpredictable.” (Foerster 2003, 311). Non-trivial machines, therefore, resemble the great principles that 20th century physics and mathematics established (Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) as opposed to the deterministic ideal of Newtonian mechanics. Currently, the platform infrastructures that define the urban environment on which it acts operate, like any other complex system, as a non-trivial machine with an exponential amount of different state and motor functions. This implies the radical indeterminacy of the effects that any intervention on the environment can cause. While the disciplinary heterotopias generated by the perspective organization of urban space functioned by simple spatial juxtaposition, the post-metropolitan heterotopias generated by the cybernetic organization of the medium do so by transductional interconnections (and generation of flows) that invalidate any hierarchical organization of space in strata. In this regard, “transduction of intensive states replaces topology, [in this respect] the graph regulating the circulation of [flows of] information is in a way the opposite of the hierarchical graph” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 17). As a consequence, the establishment of transductional connections “account[s] for the amplification of the resonance between the molecular and the molar, independently of order of magnitude; for the functional efficacy [of the elements of the systems], independently of distance; and for the possibility of a proliferation and even interlacing of forms, independently of codes (surplus values of code).” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 60)

In this respect, the multiple state functions of non-trivial machines promote that “each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 313). According to Lefebvre, this process of “transduction assumes an incessant feed-back between the conceptual framework used [outputs] and empirical observations [inputs]” (Lefebvre 1996, 151). That said, what Lefebvre considered typical of a spontaneous operation of the architect’s imagination in the process of projecting urban space —the artist’s creativity— has now been transformed into the operation of a post-metropolitan urban environment that does not need to resort to any type of creative subject. 9

The calculation, made by Foerster himself, is as follows: “Let n be the number of input and output symbols, then the number NT of possible trivial machines and the number NNT of non-trivial machines is: NT(n) = nn, NNT(n) = nnz, where z signifies the number of internal states of the NT machine, but z cannot be greater than the number of possible trivial machines, so that zmaz = nn, NNT(n)= nn(n)n. For a trivial anagrammaton (z = 1) with 4 letters (n = 4) the result is NT(4) = 44 = 22x4 = 28 = 256. For a non-trivial anagrammaton (which calculated different anagrams according to prescribed rules): NNT(4)=44x(4)4 = 22x2x2x256=22048=approx.10620” (Foerster 2003, 312). Among other consequences, this implies that even “if you pose a question to this machine every microsecond and have a very fast computer that can tell you in one microsecond what kind of a machine it is, yes or no, then all the time since the world began is not enough to analyse this machine” (Foerster 2003, 312).

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Urban platform infrastructures are, therefore, an open and indeterminate rhizomatic General Intellect. In them, order and heterotopia are not conceived as the two faces — rational and irrational— of the same process of systematization and formalization, but rather both faces are identical. When the operation and flow control are independent of any order of magnitude, distance and/or value, any reason (mathematics understood as a/b) initially aimed at measuring these magnitudes, distances and values, enters a definitive crisis and, strictly speaking, a heterotopic one. If Foucault’s linguistic heterotopias were counter-spatial, platform heterotopias are incommensurable.

CONCLUSIONS: HETEROTOPIA AND PLATFORM INFRASTRUCTURE In the last five years, the expression “platform urbanism” has started being used to refer to the great influence that global digital platforms have acquired as critical infrastructures of urban societies. In fact, platform urbanism is identified as a special, and hegemonic, case of Smart Urbanism. The latter “has been described as a focus on datacentred urban development and on digital technologies and infrastructures that enable more efficient and integrated urban management, governance and economic activity” (Kitchin 2014). Platform urbanism, on the other hand, has been defined “as digital software and hardware-based interfaces that: enable multiple users to interact and multiple (financial and other) transactions to be carried out in real time or nearreal time; are centrally focused on leveraging the ability to analyse, manipulate and (sometimes) monetise large flows of digital data; have an effect, or multiple effects, on the way urban life, broadly understood, is conducted.” (Caprotti and Liu 2020, 1)

The heterotopic character of this urbanism can be analyzed from two points of view: a technical level and a socio-political level. At the technical level, most of the research carried out under the label of platform urbanism has focused on the analysis of the consequences that peer to peer applications (such as Uber, Waze or Didi Chuxing) have for urban mobility. These studies have highlighted the increase in participation (supposedly democratic) linked to these applications (Van der Graaf and Ballon 2019; Van der Graaf 2018). But approaches are also made from an aesthetic or compositional point of view that spatially characterize the urban platform through “the reversibility of a design gesture’s ultimate effects” (Bratton 2015, 39). In the latter case, platform urbanism is related to the megastructures raised in the utopian projects of the 60s and 70s by authors such as Benjamin Constant, Superstudio, Archizoom or Paolo Soleri. According to Bratton, the fundamental point that would unite platform urbanism with megastructures is that in both cases the material determination of space is abandoned and the focus is on the design of

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atmospheres or clouds through envelope control. This is a space flexibility technique that the architecture of megastructures seems to share with the projects proposed in recent decades by Google (Googleplex in Mountain View), Apple (Campus 2 in Cupertino designed by Norman Foster) or Amazon (a huge high-rise campus in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle originally raised in 2012 and finally abandoned in 2019). In both cases, the heterotopic character of these architectures would lie, rather than in the normalization and juxtaposition of space, in the guarantee of their indeterminacy with the aim of allowing the greatest number of possible non-trivial interactions of the flows that travel across them. In a platform infrastructure, openness and flexibility replace standardization and ranking.10 On the socio-political level, on the other hand, this greater openness and spatial indeterminacy typical of platform infrastructures works “as key site for the development of new governance models” (Barns 2018, 5). Even though “at the level of everyday [they] facilitate highly participatory ecosystems of interactions, [these new models remain] linked to processes of data-driven commodification and value extraction” (Barns 2019, 1). In the face of these capture devices typical of “extractivist” capitalism or platform capitalism (Srineck 2016), some authors argue that “the task of an emancipatory politics today would be to build its own platforms, and to oppose those wielded in the name of profit” (Williams 2015, 224). Thus it can be said that “‘the common’ has become the oil of today’s ‘platform [post]metropolis’.” (Rossi 2019, 1418) In this regard, the difference between disciplinary and platform heterotopias is clear. Disciplinary heterotopias were capable of generating, at least in theory, counter-hegemonic spaces that allowed the empowerment of the excluded thanks to their juxtaposition. Platform heterotopias, instead of direct empowerment of citizens as a result of their simple “participatory” interconnection, require the establishment of the necessary control mechanisms to transform platform infrastructures into a common good that is not subject to the public sovereignty regime, nor to the private property regime. For this reason, most of the structural reforms proposed by Hardt and Negri in their book Comonwealth as absolutely essential to achieve social empowerment of the most disadvantaged sectors of the population are related to the establishment of mechanisms for common or collective infrastructure control.11 Contrary to what Richard Sennett (2018) proposes in his naive application of the concept of heteroglossia to the functioning of the city, the mere design of forms or open 10

11

This influence of complex or non-trivial systems on the notion of urban and architectural space contrasts openly with the position defended by Charles Jencks (1997). His position was more focused on the fragmentation and fractalization processes of the form characteristic of deconstructivist architecture or the folding architecture of authors such as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Alejandro Zaera or Jencks himself. Hardt and Negri establish the need to collectively self-manage, in first place, the information and knowledge infrastructure through free access to the networks, codes and protocols that define it. Secondly, the communication and transport infrastructure through the design of legal regulations that guarantee the freedom of movement of the population (Hardt and Negri 2009, 306-311). This is the only way the type of participation promoted by platform urbanism could function in a truly democratic way.

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systems is not enough to guarantee the social empowerment of residents. In a platform urbanism the heterotopias that are generated are not liberating by themselves but, rather, demand more than ever a type of control over the environment capable of redirecting with an iron fist the non-triviality of complex systems.

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Figure 4. Constant New Babylon.

Figure 5. Apple Park, Cupertino. 2019. Photo by Arne Müseler/arne-mueseler.com/CC-BY-SA-3.0.

REFERENCES Barns, Sarah. 2019. “Negotiating the platform pivot: From participatory digital ecosystems to infrastructures of everyday life.” Geography Compass 13(9), art. no. e12464, doi: 10.1111/gec3.12464. Barns, Sarah. 2018. “Smart cities and urban data platforms: Designing interfaces for smart governance.” City, Culture and Society 12: 5-12. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.ccs.2017.09.006.

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Barthes, Roland. 1986. “Semiology and the urban.” In The City and the Sign. An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, edited by Mark Gottdiener and Alexandros Lagopoulos, 87-99. New York: Columbia University Press. Bratton, Benjamin. 2015. “Clouds, Megasructures and Platform Utopias.” In Entr’acte. Performing Publics, Pervasive Media and Architecture, edited by Jordan Geiger, 3551. London: Palgrave Macmilan. Caprotti, Federico and Dong Liu. 2019. “Emerging platform urbanism in China: Reconfigurations of data, citizenship and materialities.” Technological Forecasting & Social Change 151: Article 119690. doi: 10.1016/j.techfore.2019.06.016. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2000. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foerster, Heinz von. 2003. Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition. New York: Springer-Verlag Inc. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Madness and Civilization. A history of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books. Jencks, Charles. 1997. The architecture of jumping universe. How complexity science is changing architecture and culture. New York: Academy editions. Kitchin, Rob. 2014. “The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism.” GeoJournal 79(1): 1–14. doi 10.1007/s10708-013-9516-8. Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. The Right to the City. New Jersey: Blackwell. Marx, Karl. 1993. A contribution to the critique of Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mumford, Lewis. 1955. Technics and Civilization. London: Routledge. Negri, Antonio and Hardt, Michael. 2009. Commonwealth. Masachussetts: Cambridge. Panofsky, Edwin. 1991. Perspective as symbolic form. New York: Zone Books. Rossi, Ugo. 2019. “The common-seekers: Capturing and reclaiming value in the platform metropolis.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 37: 1418-1433. doi: 10.1177/2399654419830975. Sennett, Richard. 2018. Building and dwelling. London: Penguin Books. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Srnicek, Nick. 2016. Platform capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tafuri, Manfredo. 2006. Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects. Boston: Yale and Harvard University Press. Tafuri, Manfredo. 1969. L’architettura dell’umanesimo. [Renaissance’ Architecture] Bari: Laterza.

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Van der Graaf, Shenja. 2018. “In Waze We Trust. Algorithmic Governance of the Public Sphere.” Media and Communication 6(4): 153–162. doi: 10.17645/mac.v6i4.1710. Van der Graaf, Shenja and Pieter Ballon. 2019. “Navigating platform urbanism.” Technological Forecasting & Social Change 142: 364–372. doi: 10.1016/j.techfore. 2018.07.027. Williams, Alex. 2015. “Control Societies and Platform Logic”. New Formations 84/85: 209-227. doi: 10.3898/neWf:84/85.10.2015. Wittkower, Rudolf. 1953. “Brunelleschi and ‘Proportion in Perspective’.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16(3/4): 275-291. DOI: 10.2307/750367. Whitby, Blay. 2012. “Do you Want a robot Lover? The Ethics of Caring Technologies.” In Robot Ethics, edited by Patrick Lin, Keith Abney and George Bekey, 234-248. Cambridge: MIT Press.

SECTION 2: HETEROTOPIA AND PUBLIC SPACE

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 6

OTHER SPACES AND PERIPHERAL URBANITIES Paula Cristina Pereira and Irandina Afonso*

Department of Philosophy, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

ABSTRACT Considering spatial phenomena as one of the most relevant characteristics of the contemporary world, we propose to reflect on the impact of migratory flows on urban space and on the emergence of new collective subjectivities. Migration and mobility phenomena nowadays redefine other spaces, spaces of discontinuity and spaces of transgression that present important challenges to the democratic experience as a fundamental dimension of the construction of the city and possibly of new forms of urbanity. This forces us to consider social and political participation as part of the creation of more collaborative models (Negri) in the face of the capitalist production of space (Harvey). Subjectivity is dominated by neoliberalism that prevents otherness and the emancipation movements of the invisibles in the national sovereignties. In this paper, we aim to revisit Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to elaborate on the opportunities afforded by other spaces: valuing the place of difference that is not subjected to a levelling identity (Foucault); confirming the right to the city as a right to effective participation, to the appropriation of space, and to the inclusion of difference (Lefebvre); alternative forms of power, political action and social and cultural transformation (Agier).

Keywords: migrations, other spaces, discontinuity, urbanity, transgression, heterotopia, democracy, power

* Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected]; [email protected].

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INTRODUCTION Migratory processes, involving large-scale spatial displacements, reflect one of the most visible and palpable social and political phenomena today. They put time and geographical distance into perspective, as well as intersect the international flows of several human communities. The effect of these processes on how we perceive and understand spatiality is unquestionable and is increasingly the locus of the human condition as urban condition that is interconnected with the terrestrial condition (Mbembe 2017), highlighting the interdependence among human beings, other living beings and the environment. In considering these phenomena, the city is the privileged space, not only in terms of the chosen final destination, but also as a place that brings together the identarian, ethical, cultural, political and social variables that underpin incessant reflection on the space of the other, especially when civil and social statuses in multinational contemporary cities are threatened. The global number of international migrants reached 272 million in 2019. The UN adds that: “Because the number of international migrants is growing faster than the total population, their share of the world’s population has been increasing. Currently, international migrants comprise 3.5 per cent of the global population, compared to 2.8 per cent in the year 2000. In the North, almost 12 of every 100 inhabitants are international migrants, compared to only 2 in 100 in the South.” 1

We nevertheless recognize that population flows across territories has always been a feature of human dynamics —whether first as nomadism, then for religious reasons, or, later, following the dictates of colonial trade and settlement.2 The figures mentioned above mean that, at the dawn of the 21st century, the repopulation of the Earth has soared globally to staggering levels, resulting particularly from extreme events such as economic crises, environmental disasters, armed conflicts and violence. We can also deduce that although state sovereignty has gradually weakened, especially in economic and technological terms, many peoples, communities, families and individuals are still battling with unequal access to mobility. Indeed, maintaining their identity and even their survival often depends directly on migrating, on placing geographical distance from sources of fear and instability. Above all, they depend on being able to cross borders. Understanding what is happening is closely linked to a persistent refusal to acknowledge that each time is also the time that preceded it and that which will follow — 1 2

https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/publications/populationfacts/docs/MigrationStock 2019_PopFacts_2019-04.pdf. The settlement colony, unlike the trade colony (trading post or holding, devised only to enrich the colonizing country, with asymmetrical trade practices and no investment in the territory), was designed as an extension of the nation, with the same social and political structure (Mbembe 2017; 2019).

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the present circumstances are heirs to past events and will influence the future. This notion of time is further changed when we take border problems —those who pass, those who wait, those who transgress— as essential to understanding the current political situation (Butler 2008a). The geopolitical boundaries of the historical and military narrative do not allow room for resizing the world and human life to scales that do not provide for walls and trenches. One might well say that in “our era,” “the story of progress […] is one that has, for good reason, come into crisis” (Butler 2008a, 3). Migrations and mobility phenomena of our time have redesigned other spaces, spaces of discontinuity, spaces of transgression and spaces of waiting. The principle of equality has been undone by the “laws of autochthony and common origin,” as well as divisions in the idea of citizenship in its “declension into ‘pure’ citizenship (that of the native born) and borrowed citizenship (one that, less secure from the start, is now not safe from forfeiture)” (Mbembe 2017, 10; 2019, 3). But that which could initially be considered negative —in that these spaces often denote a restriction or barrier to identity and citizenship, ruling out politics, society and public space— also raises interesting challenges. These other spaces require new approaches to spatiality as a specifically anthropological category, reaffirm dwelling as specifically human and demand that contemporary public space be reconceptualized. We must critically reassess the assumptions and norms that usually guide the distinction between “us” and the “other,” which delimit an inner and an outer self, and define who is the same and who is different.

OTHER SPACES AND PERIPHERAL URBANITY In this framework, we understand that the space of the other implies: a) showing the place of the different who is not subjected to the levelling identity (Foucault); b) revisiting the right to the city as a right to effective participation, to the appropriation of space and to the inclusion of difference (Lefebvre); c) configuring forms of power, political action and social and cultural transformation that emerge from other spaces (Agier). “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.” (Foucault 1984, 1)

Michel Foucault, in Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (1967), elaborates on the concept of heterotopia, which means the space of the other, pointing out that this has been forgotten by contemporary western culture. Since it is an identifiable, real space (as opposed to the non-place of utopia), it represents, contests and reverses the real places

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established by culture, politics, economics and society. Western reasoning, inherited from modernity, has assumed the demand for abstract universalisms and has forgone difference, multiplicity and the other in favor of the search for the one, the universal and, above all, the same. This is where Foucault’s philosophical work differs, because it rescues the “places [that] are outside of all places” and uses them to study the relations of power exercised with a view to their objectification (such as prisons, the school, the body, asylums, sexuality, family). What stand out are oppositional relations that operate in an insidious and camouflaged way, without critically analyzing their terms and concepts. These relations serve to distribute and regulate spaces, which confirm hegemonies and tear the different apart (Foucault 1984, 2). Foucault notes that when we go from legal societies, in which sovereign power is central, to new mechanisms of power molded into the surveillance of different institutions (family, places of work, hospitals, school, prisons, etc.), power becomes more complex, because it spreads and affects spatial organization itself (Pereira 2018). Hence, “together with geographers, we can talk of the spatial dimension of power. Indeed, Foucault’s contribution to understanding the practices and relations of power was essential, showing that power is everywhere” (Pereira 2018, 159). Foucault thinks of space as a form of relationship of positions, where life is still commanded by sacred spaces. This view feeds through into more recent reflections about the interpenetration of the religious and the secular in cultural and political formulations that underlie, for example, issues of migration and integration in the so-called progressive, “more advanced” civilizations, as Judith Butler puts it in Sexual politics, torture and secular time: “The problem is, of course, not progress per se, nor surely the future, but specific developmental narratives in which certain exclusionary and ever persecutory norms become at once the precondition and teleology of culture. Thus, framed both as transcendental condition and as teleology, culture in such instances can only produce a monstrous spectre of what lies outside its own framework of temporal thinkability. Outside of its own teleology exists a ruinous and foreboding sense of the future, and what lies before its transcendental condition lurks an aberrant anachronism, threatening, and intruding upon, the political present that becomes the grounds for general alarm within the secular frame.” (2008a, 14)3

For Foucault, any society can produce heterotopias and no universal form of heterotopia can be established. Even so, he does recognize two main categories: crisis 3

It is worth looking at Judith Butler’s aberrant anachronisms. They are often left unscathed in political and historical analyses, for example, of terrorist and counter-terrorist wars –they are, after all, home to scaremongering and atavistic fears that cause suspicion and insecurity about a foreign face. On aberrant anachronisms, however, opportunities to appropriate what conditions us are obliterated, as are the possibilities of an agency that does not confuse contingency with determinism, therefore, blocks the contribution of other spaces to break away from the parochialism of some political discourses in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

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heterotopias (places reserved for individuals who are in a state of crisis, in relation to society and/or the human environment) and the heterotopia of deviation, that is, those concerning deviant behaviors in relation to what society accepts and imposes as “proper”/”normal”/”healthy” conduct. These spaces of deviation contain the conflicts and tensions exercised by the power relations of a given society.4 Although for Foucault, the heterotopias of crisis were disappearing, giving way to heterotopias of deviation (1984, 5), we believe both types coexist within the current migration processes, which we consider (new) other spaces. We can take, for example, the refugee camps,5 seemingly spaces of crisis —real, delimited places, supposedly occurring within a time of transition, but which remain on the outskirts of the spaces of the citizens from the refugees’ “hosting” country. Also, the displacement of people within their territory (internal displacements) due to environmental disasters, armed conflict and violence, suggest a re-appropriation of Foucault’s ideas (see the case of Syria: 6.1 million displaced by the end of 2018, more than 30% of the population). The idea of extraterritoriality developed by Michel Agier (2008) adds the element of exteriority to Foucault’s heterotopias as experienced by both refugees and internally displaced people as a two-fold exclusion: from their territory of origin and from the spaces of local populations. They are restricted, however, to an exterior that “is empty, it is a pure mirage without thought or identity,” a real space “occupied by the ‘inside’ of another State” (2008, 267).6 The temporary can (and often does), however, become indefinite and enduring (lasting for decades, like in the cases of Kenya or Palestine). Occupants often feel they are in a prison, even though life within the camps does not strictly follow the same rules, because postponing a resolution and suspending a life project tend to dissipate feelings of expectation. The settlement and regrouping of camp occupants involve the biopolitical management of these large spaces which ends up transforming the victims of crisis into illegal and “abnormal” individuals to be kept at a distance (Agier 2008). As Agier points out, taking the example of the Palestine camps set up fifty years ago, these are the conditions that frame a new urbanity, especially because they do not follow a prior project designed for the long-term, as is usually the case with each new city plan. The transformation of these camps mimics the urban processes (in terms of social organization, material aspects, and economic activities) of the known peripheries around the world.

The origin of the idea of heterotopia refers to Foucault’s idea of space, especially in Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, published in 1967, and in The Order of Things, published in 1966. 5 For our purposes here, we are interested in the distinction made by the UN and the UNHCR (The United Nations Refugee Agency) between refugees and migrants (sources: https://refugeesmigrants.un.org/definitions and https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/who-we-help.html). 6 Authors’ translation. 4

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POWER, POLITICS, OTHER SPACES It is important to stress that Foucault’s approach to space provides a plural interpretation of society, taking into account agents and phenomena that would otherwise have been disregarded due to their marginal, inconsistent and apolitical nature. Space is related to social dynamics, changes, opposing views and new representations. Time, in turn, is associated to the consolidation of meanings and narratives, gaining value with stability, with established power arrangements, and with association to a dominant identity. It seems that, in relation to time, space implies social dynamism conducive to new representations, re-appropriations and creations. It is precisely according to the guiding line in which the apolitical and the pre-political are the place of new forms of doing politics that the right to the city can include and expand concepts of non-juridical rights and serves as a right requested by views extraneous to those of “I” and “us.” According to the World Charter for the Right to the City,7 all persons have the Right to the City “free of discrimination based on gender, age, health status, income, nationality, ethnicity, migratory condition, or political, religious or sexual orientation, and to preserve cultural memory and identity” (part I, article 1, first point). However, when such a right is not determined, or is strategically reserved for those who have been absorbed by power relations and normative structures, how can it be demanded or exercised? Does it come down to an individual quest or, on the contrary, does it take effect only when new meanings are established for what we understand to be the common? “Demonstrations are one of the few ways that police power is overcome, especially when those assemblies become at once too large and too mobile, too condensed and too diffuse, to be contained by police power and when they have the resources to regenerate themselves on the spot. […] Together they exercise the performative power to lay claim to the public in a way that is not yet codified into law and that can never be fully codified into law. And this performativity is not only speech, but the demands of bodily action, gesture, movement, congregation, persistence, and exposure to possible violence. […] Such actions reconfigure what will be public and what will be the space of politics.” (Butler 2018, 7475)

This is the space of presentation (or representation)8 and its problems, a space that should always be another space whenever the classic space of political debate ignores the

Social Forum of the Americas –Quito– July 2004, World Urban Forum –Barcelona– September 2004 and World Social Forum –Porto Alegre– January 2005. See World Charter for the Right to the City at http://hicgs.org/document.php?pid=2422. 8 In this context, Hannah Arendt’s definition, reworked by Butler in Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street (2018, 72-73). 7

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equally valid and creative participation of those who resist9 hegemony, or when this classic space ultimately decrees the unreality of the excluded. In the classical polis, the woman, the foreigner and the slave had no access to the space of presentation — in this sense, they did not exist— and this large part of the population, removed from plurality, ended up defining the space of presentation through exclusion (Butler 2018). Considering the space of presentation as being tied to the physical and plural presence, the body does not act alone when it acts politically. In fact, “the action emerges from the ‘between’, a spatial figure for a relation that both binds and differentiates” (Butler 2018, 77). And thus, many questions come to the fore: “How do we describe the action and the status of those beings disaggregated from the plural? What political language do we have in reserve for describing that exclusion and the forms of resistance that crack open the sphere of appearance as it is currently delimited? […] Are we to say that those who are excluded are simply unreal, disappeared, or that they have no being at all —shall they be cast off, theoretically, as the socially dead and the merely spectral? […] At stake is the question of whether the destitute are outside of politics and power, or are they in fact living out a specific form of political destitution.” (Butler 2018, 77-78)

If we were to answer these questions from the perspective of classical political space, which divides people into who can gain entry into the public arena and who should remain in the private sphere, we disregard those forms of political agency “that emerge precisely in those domains deemed pre-political or extra-political and that break into the sphere of appearance as from the outside, as its outside, confounding the distinction between inside and outside” (Butler 2018, 78). The vocabulary has to be changed (what is apolitical, extrapolitical, pre-political?), and the artificiality of some political dichotomies exposed (for example, public/private, reason/emotion, real/unreal, national/foreign) and power relations (Butler 2018, 80). This discussion, we recall, started from broadening the understanding of non-juridical right inscribed in the right to the city, and included exercising this right as a performative political agency within the reach of agents considered to be on the fringes of politics (the “apolitical” and the “extra-political”). We will now focus on another point in the Charter that is relevant to the design and articulation of spaces and, inherently, of other spaces, the heterotopic ones, which considers all people who live on a permanent or transitory basis in the cities as citizen(s).10 The concept of citizenship thus becomes denser and provides more readings if civic inclusion does not consist of an uncritical acceptance of an existing conception of Resistance is understood herein not in terms of denial, but as a transforming action in an essential dynamic with power relations, as explained by Foucault (1997, 167-168). 10 Part I, article 1, fifth point of World Charter for the Right to the City, as seen in http://hicgs.org/document.php?pid=2422. 9

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citizenship, of the rules of the game, and of a one-sided and hegemonic view that turns “exsubordinates” into “new equals” (Butler 2008a). Having thus grasped the concept as dynamic and revisable, it is important, both for being a citizen and for becoming a citizen, to have a right to not just be recognized as such, but to debate the terms of such recognition (Butler 2008b).

DIFFERENT AND EQUAL We know that studies and reflections on the city are increasingly specialized, ranging from pollution and traffic to social exclusion, to name but a few. These specializations tend to also compartmentalize rights, causing their meaning to fade away. The World Charter on the Right to the City plays an important role in defending the citizen and the quality of life in the city, but it also seems to feed the specializations based on the division of powers that correspond to distinct (separate) spaces: physical, legal, political, administrative, cultural and economic. These differences also imply formulations of the subject of these spaces and rights that underlie them and operate according to the categories available for their intelligibility (race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality) —thus the “cultural subject,” the “religious subject,” the “sexual subject,” etc. are established, all of which tally with the recognition we have referred to before. In fact, it is legitimate to doubt that the terms of recognition are themselves infallible, so much so that trying to accommodate the many world transformations, which reformulate that which we call “identity(ies),” is a sensitive and constant challenge. Moreover, if such recognition does occur, is it the result of simplification (and consolidation of the subjects) operated by vocabularies, or is it truly “recognizing” the complexity of current social and political conflicts? (Butler 2008b). In his text Le Droit à la ville (1967) (The Right to the City, 2000 [1968]), Henri Lefebvre reflects on the dominant class and the State, which reinforce the city as a center of political and decision-making power. He concludes that this reinforcement eventually shatters the city, since the right to the city, as a right similar to those stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundation of democracy, is not just a right in the legal sense, as we have stressed. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, had turned her attention to refugees and displaced people, defending the right to have rights, a right whose legitimacy does not depend on political endorsement and, therefore, takes precedence over any organization that could guarantee it. This right arises when it is exercised by more than one person in coordination, something which is only a step away from being a performative act and lacks delimitation from the public sphere. As we have seen, those excluded from this sphere find in this exercise a form of alternative political agency. This is visible, for instance, in the recurring protests by sans papiers immigrants in France, the protests on an unprecedented scale at Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011 (ongoing from 25 January to 11 February) and, more recently, in February 2020, the

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immigrant protests against overcrowding and poor conditions in the Moria camp, where about twenty thousand people “live” in a place designed to accommodate three thousand.11 Under the right to the city, what is most important for Lefebvre is the anthropological dimension of the city, man as the nucleus and support of the community, the anthropological dimension of space as a place of human coexistence (Pereira 2011). Lefebvre defends the right to the city as an affirmation of difference and of integration in the social whole, in other words, to live with the dimensions of individualization, socialization and freedom. The right to the city is the right to appropriate space through effective participation. Discontinuity in the urban space reflects a lack of integration that can lead to feelings of dissatisfaction. The issue of dwelling is clearly political, ethical and anthropological, seeking to restore the rights of citizens and, in the case of migrant citizens, to ultimately rethink human rights. This is not therefore simply the right to live in a physical space and the materialization of rights to housing, health and education. We have to insist on the right to the city as a work in progress, that is, as a creative activity that enables new spaces,12 which arise from the encounter and sharing of differences, symbolism and imagery of citizens, but also of recreational activities (Pereira 2018, 160). While tensions materialize in the urban space, it is also here that manifestations of freedom and actions, in their collective and subjective dimensions, are mostly associated thereto. Unlike the consumerist activity into which contemporary megacities have turned, the city as a work in progress is the “place of free enjoyment, as domain of use value” (Lefebvre 1967, 35).13 That means the right to appropriation (creation, reinvention) and the right to participation (to be included in the decision-making process). The creation of spaces where the various forms that make up society can intervene. In relation hereto, we find connections with, for example, the protests at Tahrir Square in Cairo, in 2011: “In those instances in which demonstrators were, after all, sleeping and eating in the public square, constructing toilets and various systems for sharing the space, they were not only refusing to disappear, refusing to go or stay home, and not only claiming the public domain for themselves-acting in concert on conditions of equality-but also maintaining themselves as persisting bodies with needs, desires, and requirements […] In other words, it was only when those needs that are supposed to remain private came out into the day and night of the square, formed into image and discourse for the media, that it finally became

For more details, see the Financial Times’ article:https://www.ft.com/content/013d95d6-54d3-11ea-a1efda1721a0541e 12 But not always architectonic spaces, for example, in public manifestations, the appropriation of established spaces permeated by the ruling power (monuments, squares, universities) often serves to deconstruct the political “stage of legitimacy” and seizes that power, lending it new meaning in another space, the space between bodies claimed by a new joint action (Butler 2018). 13 Authors’ translation. 11

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We are not far from Foucault’s findings. Contrary to the affirmation of power through political agendas and the concentration of political innovation in the party apparatus, the advantage of citizens’ movements is precisely that they streamline changes of opinion and behaviors in a quicker, more effective and immediate way than the passing and implementation of laws could ever achieve: “There has been political innovation, political creation, and political experimentation outside the great political parties, and outside the normal or ordinary program. It’s a fact that people’s everyday lives have changed from the early sixties to now, and certainly within my own life. And surely that is not due to political parties but is the result of many movements. These social movements have really changed our whole lives, our mentality, our attitudes, and the attitudes and mentality of other people who do not belong to these movements.” (Foucault 1997, 172-173)

OTHER SPACES AND OTHER SPACES OF WAITING Other spaces, the spaces of discontinuity and the spaces of transgression —because they move away from the representations and figurations that confine the new contemporary spaces “at the margins and at the non-existence” (Agier 2008, 281)14 —can also be, even if imperfectly, summarized in spaces of waiting.15 “Immobility is necessarily localized: it therefore refers to the place where this waiting occurs (whether closed, saturated or coercive), a place where man often experiences the

Authors’ translation. In the spaces of waiting, we can identify the limitations and intersections of political, social and cultural meanings that represent opportunities for the emergence of other meanings. Thus, we should note what the word contain in terms of the meanings of waiting: “if we think of the languages in the American continent as the key to entry, we note that in French, Spanish and Portuguese there is only one term for it: ‘espera,’ ‘attente,’ which covers two clearly distinct meanings — immobility, on the one hand, and hope on the other. The English language, though, has three words or expressions that allow one to grasp more accurately the variety of meanings that the word waiting can encompass. To hold on: indicates a cut-off, ‘time to kill,’ a suspension, an entre-deux (literally ‘between two,’ this expression evokes an intermediately unstable situation), but contains a promise of resumption. From the famous ‘please hold-on’ to the current on hold marketing (the purpose of ‘on hold marketing’ is to take advantage of the waiting times —in a telephone call, at airports and other waiting places— to broadcast advertisements). To wait for: indicates a projection, a goal to achieve, a waiting time horizon. The wait refers to a psychological predisposition, something that affects. It creates a tension projected to the goal to be achieved. The word ‘waitier’ [is] a Norman variant of ‘guaitier’ from the Old French. To wait is also ‘guaitier’ or peek. Standstill: neutral, pause, a situation in which something does not move or walk. In the legal dimension: a standstill period in legal proceedings. We note that these different definitions of ‘waiting’ contain, deep down, implicitly or explicitly, spatial dimensions” (Vidal and al. 2011). Authors’ translation. 14 15

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tyranny of spatiality. As for hope, it crystallizes around a desired, imagined place (from the famous St. Augustine’s City of God, to Thomas Moore’s utopian island and the contemporary avatars of countries of plenty for migrants from poor countries). This distant place pervades the present. […] One can gauge, from there, how much these territories of waiting induce or constrain the possibility of action: dreamed, they generate mobility; endured, they impose mobility.” (Vidal et al. 2011)16

How can we not think of this ambivalence in a contemporary version of the public sphere (Butler 2018)? This version emerges, for example, in the consonance of the media with public manifestations. To be successful, claims rely on the broadcasting of images and sound in a circuit in which the place is confirmed, but at the same time outstrips its spatiality. The pressure and indignation of the world can change markets and diplomatic relations, phenomena that are the epitome of a global movement that stemmed from the statics of the bodies where the manifestation took place. The impact of images would not have been so great had we not understood that those bodies at that place resist, expose themselves directly (and live) to the danger, do not travel, are contained, wait (Butler 2018). How can one not consider this ambivalence of mobility and immobility when transmitting a local identity from one generation to the next (Agier 2008)? Is the transmission of memory and of an identity from/with a place less mobile than an actual displacement of bodies across territories? This is what shines through when the anthropological place interferes with another initially vacant space, with all the consequences that this entails: “Nothing is more trivial for a living person than making a hole, their immediate territory. The rest will follow. ‘The ‘rest’ is all that will remain, technically and administratively, from the necessary anthropological foundation of spaces as places of identification.” (Agier, 2008, 181, quoting M. Détienne) 17

Contemporary societies are undeniably societies that build spaces of waiting, and all those excluded from globalization are on hold. Some contemporary spatial phenomena provide the possibility of overcoming these spaces and unveil other paths. They give, in particular, the opportunity to analyze “forms of political exclusion [and] the contextslimitations of political action” (Agier 2008, 273)18 that emerge in those places, outside of all spaces, in the spaces of waiting and transit that end up adopting and adapting the way of the cities. Violence and existence can be identified in the space of waiting, as well as creativity. In fact, far from being a delay, waiting time can be a time for reinventing spaces, power Authors’ translation. Authors’ translation. 18 Authors’ translation. 16 17

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relations therein, for reinventing relations between politics, society and the public space. The crisis situation that leads to the waiting forces the individual, the group, the community to reconsider the categories that allow them to act upon the present and to project themselves to the future.

GOING FORWARD Essential categories have to be extracted from the new spaces designed by migrations, mobilities, flows, and displacements, which serve to rethink the necessary and urgent rapprochement between politics, society and public space and, thus, to rethink the politics of the present and of the future. If that means having “[t]o traverse the world; to take the measure of the accident represented by our place of birth, with its weight of arbitrariness and constraint; to wed the irreversible flow comprising the time of life and existence; to learn to assume our status as passers-by as the condition, in the last instance, of our humanity, as the base from which we create culture” (Mbembe 2017, 245),19 then we seek to appropriate our own condition on our own terms. In this endeavor we are repeatedly confronted with the dimension of (re)constructions of identity(ies) and of political, social, cultural identifications; these notions are intertwined in contexts of multiculturalism shaped by displacements and migrations. It is in this field of reflection that the very idea of “us-them” (and our spaces and their spaces) requires a deeper understanding of the “us,” realizing that the “us” is more branched than it might appear at first sight. So much so that “[…] the ethical problem posed by multiculturalism is not, strictly speaking, that of coming to understand the Other, but, rather, of revising and expanding an understanding of who ‘we’ are” (Butler 1998, 43).20 We started by pointing out that at the dawn of the 21st century geopolitical borders remained a barrier to those who depend on circulation and movement to stay alive. Other frontiers, however, are being determined with the obstinate idea of categorizing, differentiating, rendering people and spaces incompatible, crystallized in the policies of fear of the alien, of the Other, of the unknown. Far from eroding discrimination, racism, and xenophobia, this young century still clings to the “constitution of worlds-spaces under the aegis of capitalism” (Mbembe 2017, 217)21, to the illusion of possession, to a partitioned and disarticulated way of thinking that is reproduced into “new” spatialities. In an unstoppable urbanization, the problems multiply and require solutions that seem hard to achieve. The issues of quality of life, a welcoming and humanized city, the right to

Authors’ translation. In the field of multiculturalism represented by other spaces, it is interesting to note the contrast of this ethical proposal, which seems to be more in line with our own reasoning, with the Levinasian ethical proposal of the ineffability of the Other, which Judith Butler questions (1998, 43-44). 21 Authors’ translation. 19 20

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the city and social justice are at stake. We are possibly ready to transition, as Achille Mbembe did, to the cosmic condition, “the scene of reconciliation between the human, the animal, the vegetable, the organic, the mineral, and all the other vital forces, whether borne of the sun, the night, or the stars” (2017, 216).22 Going forward, and extrapolating that condition, an ultimate space, one of extraplanetary exploration, will configure new other spaces wherein the human will again be “outside” the human which is the condition for new (peripheral?) urbaneness.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT This publication is funded with National Funds through the FCT/MCTES: Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior (Foundation for Science and Technology, Ministry for Science, Technology and Higher Education. Portugal), in the framework of the Project of the Institute of Philosophy with the reference UIDB/00502/2020.

REFERENCES Agier, Michel. 2008. Gérer les indésirables, Des camps de réfugiés au gouvernement humanitaire. [Managing the undesirables. From refugee camps to humanitarian government]. Paris: Éditions Flammarion. Arendt, Hannah. 1998 [1958]. The Human Condition. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 1998. “Reply to Robert Gooding-Williams.” Constellations 5(1): 42-47. Butler, Judith. 2008a. “Sexual politics, torture and secular time.” The British Journal of Sociology 59(1): 1-23. Butler, Judith. 2008b. “A response to Ali, Beckford, Bhatt, Modood and Woodhead.” The British Journal of Sociology 59(2): 255-260. Butler, Judith. 2018. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (conference at Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 March 1967.)” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5(octobre): 46-49 (1-9 in the translation from the French by Jay Miskowiec, available at http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf).

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Authors’ translation.

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Foucault, Michel. 1997. “Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1), edited by Paul Rabinow, 163-173. New York: The New Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell. Harvey, David. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53(September-October): 23-40. Lefebvre, Henri. 1967. “Le droit à la ville.” L’Homme et la société 6: 29-35. Lefebvre, Henri. 2000 [1968]. Writing on Cities. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Políticas da Inimizade. Lisboa: Antígona. [The Politics of hostility English translation. Durham: Duke University Press]. Pereira, Paula C. 2011. Condição humana e condição urbana. [Human condition and urban condition]. Porto: Afrontamento. Pereira, Paula C. 2018. “Philosophy of the City.” In Philosophy, City and Public Space, edited by Paula C. Pereira and Maria J. Couto, 151-162. Porto: Afrontamento. Pereira, Paula C. 2019. “City and common space.” In The Routledge Handbook on Philosophy of the City, edited by Sharon Meagher, Samantha Noll and Joseph Biehl, 253- 262. London and New York: Routledge. Vidal, Laurent, Alain Musset and Dominique Vidal. 2011. “Sociedades, mobilidades, deslocamentos: os territórios da espera. O caso dos mundos americanos (de ontem a hoje).” [“Societies, mobility, displacement: the territories of waiting. The case of American worlds (from yesterday to today)”]. Confins [Online], 13|2011. http://journals.openedition.org/confins/7274; Accessed March 11, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/confins.7274.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 7

HETEROTOPIA AS A MANIFEST OF MULTIPLE PUBLICS Meriç Demir Kahraman and Tayfun Kahraman* Independent Researcher, Istanbul, Turkey Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey

ABSTRACT Public spaces are defined as open mediators for social decision-making and participation in political life. However, ruling powers, which also define the dominant discourse, tend to suppress and ban any possibility that could result in mass objections, which could bring differences together. Therefore this idealized definition of public space is only valid in times of revolts, riots —so-called crises. These are the times when social groups “different” than the dominant appear in public space. These moments of crisis are the points in which public spaces reach their manifestational identity. This paradox becomes crystal clear in the pluralistic democracy demands of today’s social movements. This study aims to open a discussion on the concept of heterotopia from Foucauldian and Lefebvrian perspectives to utilize it to understand the appearance struggle of different publics’ and the moments of crises as the outcome of these struggles. Finally, the social production of heterotopic spaces appears to be the temporary spaces of political resistance and freedom, as well as the multiple publics’ representation struggle. In other words, heterotopias are “temporary public spaces,” where all differences come side-by-side on the common grounds while protecting their own colors.

Keywords: heterotopia, public sphere, public space, multiple publics, difference

*

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected]; [email protected].

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INTRODUCTION Social scientists have perceived and commented on the concept of heterotopia with increasing interest since the beginning of the 1960s but especially over the last decades. These discussions also include the concept of the public sphere, which became a rising agenda in the same period. However, through a spatial sciences lens, the social production process and the characteristics of heterotopic space is still ambiguous. This study considers this ambiguity as a problem, and (1) discovers the concept of heterotopia by Foucauldian and Lefebvrian approaches thoroughly, and (2) aims to reveal the conditions of different publics for the production of heterotopic space struggling to appear in the public sphere.

FOUCAULT AND LEFEBVRE ON HETEROTOPIA The concept of heterotopia is a medical term that describes a phenomenon occurring in an unusual place or a spatial displacement of healthy tissue, which does not affect the development or organism as a whole since it is not diseased or dangerous (Sohn 2008, 41; Lax 1997, 115). Heterotopia is introduced to the social sciences for the very first time by French philosopher Michel Foucault in his work “Des Escapes Autres” (1967) translated into English as “Of Other Spaces” in 1986 and as “Different Spaces” in 1998. However, Foucault never mentioned the concept of heterotopia in his subsequent writings. Even though heterotopia was not a concept that Foucault continued to develop over time, the potential of the analogy he made to describe the situation itself is a topic of study for various disciplines until today. “A heterotopia is different from all the emplacements that they reflect or refer to.” (Foucault 1998, 178). As Johnson emphasizes, Foucault’s understanding of heterotopia is embedded in his definition of the term “emplacement” (2006, 77). He defines “emplacement” as “the relations of proximity between points or elements,” which means “the action of marking out a position” (2006, 77). Foucault’s approach was space-oriented; however, his emphasis is on the relationality of people’s positioning of themselves and others, together with the appropriation of certain, defined and differentiated emplacements that develop through this relationality. Therefore, “otherness” rises from this positional logic as it describes a “normal” tissue at a place regarded as abnormal. However, this logic does not indicate a dichotomy between normal and abnormal, and it does not describe the “other” as the “unknown.” The “other” rather appears as the “different.” The difference has always been a concept in the center of political thinking. Since differences like sex, sexual orientation, race, religion, and language are subjects to political discrimination, marginalization, pressure, and recognition, so the protection of “differences” is the primary demand of equality struggles.

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Accordingly, considering the relation between the differences and their spatial emplacements, a heterotopia either appears as different from all differences or includes all af them (Foucault 1998, 178). Foucault was interested in “certain emplacements,” which both connect and contradict with all the others: utopias and heterotopias (Foucault 1998, 178). Real and unreal; it is the main distinction between these two terms for Foucault: utopias are either a perfected or reversed form of societies but with no real place whereas heterotopias are enacted utopias with real places. Unlike Foucauldian utopia, heterotopic real place is represented, contested, and inverted within the current social order. Foucault attempted to offer a description of heterotopias in six principles, as summarized below. First, he claimed that every culture and human group establishes its heterotopias, so there is no single and universal form of it. However, it is possible to classify them into two major types: (1) primitive societies’ heterotopias of crisis and (2) modern heterotopias of deviation. Heterotopias of crisis are the places of “in-between” situations where individuals are outside the places of the majority. As examples of these heterotopias, as personal and temporary crises, Foucault mentions boarding school years or military service for adolescent boys, which were spent outside of home, or honeymoon trips, where girls’ deflowering takes place. The situation of being temporarily outside of the society evolves from crisis to deviation over time. While heterotopias of crisis vanish, heterotopias of deviation occupy their places like rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons for those whose behavior is “deviant” from the “required” norms in a society. Second, heterotopias may operate differently in function and meaning in different historical periods like the cemeteries’ changing locations from the center to the edge of cities after the end of the 18th century. Third, a heterotopia can “juxtapose several emplacements in a single real place that are incompatible” like theatres, cinemas, and Persian gardens. Fourth, heterotopias are often linked to slices in time; they operate utilizing breaking points in time. Time accumulates, and heterotopias either “record” it like in museums and libraries or “periodize” it like in temporal festivals, fairs, and trips. Fifth, a heterotopia always opens and closes due to the systems or rituals that make it both isolated and accessible. “One cannot enter to a heterotopia like a public space”; it requires certain permissions or conditions, as in Foucault’s examples of prisons and Guest Houses in South America. Finally, heterotopia is always in relation with the remaining space by reflecting them through creating either real or illusional spaces. It is like brothels or some colonial settlements as illusional spaces and ships as real spaces (Foucault 1998, 180-184). Although Foucault framed six principles to explain what a heterotopia is, it is still confusing when his concrete examples, together with his very general definition as “different from all the emplacements that they reflect or refer to” are considered. This confusion is why there are Foucauldian approaches to the term and also opposing criticisms

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that might be called Lefebvrian since it is the earliest (1970) followed by Soja (1996), Harvey (2000), Cenzatti (2008) and many others. Soja comments on Foucault’s work as “frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent and narrowly focused on peculiar micro-geographies, near-sited, deviant and deviously apolitical.” (1996, 162). Harvey (2000, 538) also criticizes him as “banal” because his approach put heterotopias somehow outside the dominant social order, which means that whatever happens in them is acceptable or appropriate in some sense. Lefebvre (1976, 116) criticized Foucault because he has failed to explore the “collective subject” and his examples of heterotopia as being not integrated, falling apart from each other in time and space. On his foreword to The Urban Revolution, Neil Smith (2003, xii) also mentions that in contrast to Foucault’s randomness, Lefebvre envisaged heterotopias from a political and historical perspective. Lefebvre pictured the idea of heterotopia in The Urban Revolution (1970) right after Foucault (1967). It was a traditional formulation of “differentiation” and he stated that “anomic groups construct heterotopic spaces, which are eventually reclaimed by the dominant praxis” (Lefebvre 2003, 129). He categorized three types of space (topoi) as the conceptual keys to solve complex spaces and explain the dissolution of abstract space; isotopia (analogous place), heterotopia (contrasting place), and utopia (places of what has no place). In contrast to Foucault, Lefebvre distinguished heterotopia and utopia. For him, utopia is a non-place, but it seeks a place of its own. It is everywhere and nowhere, hanging in the air in an urban context embedded in the idea of monumentality. Monumentality is “the fullness of space beyond its material boundaries”; it is a plurality within a differential and contradictive reality of urban space as a dream on the unity of differences. It might be one of Lefebvre’s most remarkable and optimistic allegation on utopia when he argued contradictions and passes between isotopias and heterotopias together might lead a society to think about the possibility of plurality. So the discovery of a utopia can be assumed as his ideal, imaginary, revolutionary, and permanent thinking of socialist space (Lefebvre 2003, 37-39). In terms of production of space, Lefebvre defined isotopia as identical places in neighboring order and heterotopia as the other place both excluded and interwoven in distant order. Isotopias refer to “sameness” as being identical, homologous, and analogous; alongside them, there are different places as heterotopias (Lefebvre 2003, 128). In his understanding, isotopia corresponds to the “dominated” and “abstract space” while heterotopia corresponds to “appropriated” and “differential space” in the capitalist mode of production of space. Foucauldian interpretation of the term “heterotopia” appears not fertile to understand the politics of space. Indeed, Lefebvre further developed the term together with isotopia and gave the chance to understand an urban context as a whole. Still, what is missing in Lefebvrian understanding of heterotopia is that it is only based on the right to inhabit as a political reaction. As Harvey stablishes in Rebel Cities, due to the contemporary conditions and influential occupy movements around the world, it is possible to say that explicit

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objections do not occur only in the form of squatting. If one pictures the act of “squatting” as the birth of “occupying” (Shields 1999, 165), then it is possible to say in Lefebvrian terms that public spaces might also become heterotopias (differential space) for a while — until the dominant praxis reclaims them. Here, what Lefebvre focused on is also the production of space as a standardized commodity and its homogenous consideration in the capitalist mode of production. His critiques on the production of abstract/dominated/isotopic spaces overlap with the rising concerns after the 1970s, which argue that the expected heterogeneity of public spaces has been violated by the capitalist and neoliberal practices more than ever in history. Thereby, as Harvey said (2012), it is fertile to see his consideration of the social production of heterotopia in the form of an act of occupation as the only way left to the differences today to make themselves politically apparent. In this sense, Lefebvrian point of view opens the discussion for both the role of heterotopias in the social production of space, together with the relations and the representations between different praxis over space. In other words, although Foucault mentions rituals, festivals, etc., in principle, heterotopias are spaces. Unlike Lefebvre, heterotopia is not related to any process, actuality, or incident in Foucauldian discourse. Foucauldian heterotopias are in relation only to the urban structure as a whole. Heterotopias described by Lefebvre define a dynamic social space, which is produced through the actuality of differences concerning the politics of space. Consequently, the Lefebvrian concept of heterotopia refers to the social production of space with apparency, representation, actuality of multiple publics, and the relation between them. In this sense, unlike Foucault, it is possible to contextualize the Lefebvrian definition of the concept of heterotopia in terms of social production of conventional public spaces with the confrontation of dominant and counter-publics.

MULTIPLE PUBLICS AND HETEROTOPIC PUBLIC SPACE Considering public space means working through all features of collective social life beyond a limited physical space. Therefore one must approach the concepts of public space and public sphere together, asking questions about the nature of social patterns structured in conditions of inequality to understand and reveal the actual “publicness” of public space, which is de facto open to everybody and accessible. Within the framework of social sciences, the public sphere refers to “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed” (Habermas 1974, 49). While Habermas (1991) describes it as a medium where people can get together freely and independently of their sex, race, religion, language, occupation, etc. this gathering is expected to result in voicing criticism against the state authority, as well as to control and legitimize the policies of the ruling political power.

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Humans’ way of social living and their constant need for the existence of others reveal the fact that they are, by nature, social (Arendt 1998). Here “social” corresponds politically to a form of organization, alliance, and partnership for a cause between people. This partnership mentioned above can only be built after humans ensure their publicness and appearance over praxis and lexis. Hence both praxis and lexis are political and public. In this sense, the human-made material world is common to the ones who live together in the world, and this world both connects and divides people. People are similar to each other as a consequence of existing in this world, yet, they are also different from each other due to their natural and acquired characteristics. This matter of simultaneous existence and segregation corresponds not to a single and static public sphere but to interactive multiple publics (Fraser 1990). As a communicative phenomenon, it is not possible for a human to ensure her/his apparency under isolation. Accordingly, creating public opinion requires the existence of others. So these created publicnesses are surrounded and in contact with a network of others’ publicnesses. In this approach, the production and the reproduction of public spheres are independent of the material common world and are ambiguous; it is potentially at any time and anywhere (Arendt 1998). Nevertheless, the aspects that reach beyond the physical limits of publicness neither deny nor ignore the existence of conventional public spaces within any city. The role and the offer of such public spaces are vital in terms of establishing public opinion; while they enable face to face relations and the encountering of the others, they also contribute to awareness of the society and unity. Historically the concept of “public” was first mentioned in the Hellenistic Ancient Greek thought. It is also not a coincidence that the very first democracy model, as in the Athenian (Direct) Democracy, belongs to the same period and geography. Even though there were defined public places like the agoras, courts, hippodromes, the concept was not physically limited by these (Arendt 1998). It is possible to define the public sphere as an arena of differences, where they contact each other, and as a communicative setting, where democracy is legitimized. Direct democracy was idealized as a participatory model. However, the tools and the rights of public opinion creation were in the hands of only young, free, male Greeks. On the other hand, the majority of the population —women, slaves, elderly, children, and non-citizens— was excluded from political decision making and political participation processes (Raaflaub et al. 2007). Consequently, the public sphere represents a setting for the sovereign to dominate, not for the democratic contact of differences in reality. Despite the legalization of free speech, press, and the right to assembly for everyone, even in the liberal public sphere the space was open to everyone only in principle (Iveson 1998). In reality, society has been polarized by class struggles, so the public has been fragmented into a mass of competing interest groups: multiple publics (Fraser 1990). What or who is dominant fundamentally defines what or who is different. Therefore “the other” is described as the one who is not —hence is the opposite of— the dominant. Even though

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the dominant and the counter-discourses are dynamic —meaning today’s dominant discourse can be tomorrow’s counter-discourse or vice versa— certain parts of society have been fighting for their demand for justice and equality. Thereby, some fragments of the society have always been described as “the other” regardless of time and geography. So the answer to Robin’s (1993) question of “for whom was the city once more public than now; for workers, women, lesbians, and gay men, in other words, for the differences, minorities and the poor?” is blindingly obvious. What has not changed since the Ancient Greek is that justice, equality, and recognition mean struggle of the others. Legally everyone has the right to appearance and inclusion. However, even today both the domination of privileged groups in stratified societies and the coded relations and signs of status inequality as the informal challenges to democracy make it possible to claim that historically there has never been a public sphere, which is open to everyone and can be freely accessed (Fraser 1990). Keeping Kluge’s laconic “the public sphere is the site, where struggles are decided by other means than war” (1993, ix) in mind, the historical achievement of today is the legitimate struggle of the dominant and counter publics, which constitute the multiple publics, to be included in the public sphere and to create public opinion. Today, where individuals’ daily practices and activities take place has spatially shifted. The development of standardized culture, together with the economic and security centered approaches to spatial reconstruction, has turned places like shopping malls, theme parks, etc., which are controlled by guards and cameras, into new public spaces instead of traditional squares. These controlled spaces aim not to ensure the freedom of action and speech, but to consume activities, especially of certain social groups. While this situation creates identical, homologous, and analogous isotopias as described by Lefebvre, it results in the disappearance of the idea of the public sphere and how is physically represented, and even easier control and manipulation of the isolated public sphere. Yet, there are still problems when it comes to using traditional squares and streets. First of all, all the visual and printed media, as well as the social media channels that feed the public sphere, which is considered to be the place to criticize state authority —and control political power— is under the influence of the dominant discourse. They are tended to be censored, banned, and closed. In the conditions of representative democracy, when people represent themselves, political representation collapses, and representatives so far become unqualified. Briefly, the continuity of the representative democracy requires non-objection, which is called the “paradox of political representation” (Pitkin 1967; Runciman 2007). Therefore, the right to assembly and freedom of speech of “the others” have been limited. While the apparency of dominant discourses that confirm the practices of the existing powers is stimulated and their meetings are subsidized, the freedoms of the counterdiscourses are ignored and suppressed by police violence and fear regimes. However, throughout history, even in monarchy regimes and oligarchies, social differences found their way to make their praxis and lexis apparent over revolts and riots

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in every part of the world. In other words, no ruling power has succeeded in degrading plurality into unity. On the contrary, this struggle to apparency has resulted in intensifying the group-specific organization and own publicness network of the women, LGBTI individuals, ethnic and religious minorities, working class. The primary demand for pluralistic democracy brings all these differences side by side beyond their own publicnesses and singular right claims. In other words, a process in which the singular demands of different social groups are ignored by the sovereign, a representation crisis occurs, and this reveals a common demand for the pluralistic democracy. Today demands on issues such as pluralistic democracy or ecologic crisis, which are common concern, might bring differences together against the dominant. Such co-existence is heterotopic as being different from all the emplacements that they reflect or refer to. In this sense, it juxtaposes several emplacements in a single real place that are incompatible. In contrast to Foucault’s random examples of heterotopia, these real places are explicitly public spaces. Nevertheless, this Foucauldian definition of the term heterotopia is stimulating to explain the manifestational realization of an ideal public space (Demir Kahraman et al. 2018, 142). However, Lefebvrian definition of heterotopia as the differential spaces of anomic groups, which are eventually reclaimed by the dominant praxis, is fertile to explain and understand the contemporary examples of such co-existence of differences. Contemporary social movements such as the 15-M in Puerta del Sol Square (Madrid), the Egyptian Revolution in Tahrir Square (Cairo), Occupy Gezi in Taksim Republican Square (Istanbul), Chilean Protests in Plaza Baquedano (Santiago), Yellow Vests Movement in Place de l’Étoile (Paris), Catalan Protests in Plaça Urquinaona (Barcelona) and many others represented similarities regarding their demands in public spaces: pluralistic democracy. All these social movements have particular reasons to occur; however, police violence is the common ground to make millions of people go on the streets. Also, they all have accumulated social tension in the background. While different social groups come side-byside declaring objections, all their internal differences and discourses have been included as they are. Yet, they become able to communicate and act together to discover the common. During these spontaneous coming together in a moment of crisis, heterotopic groups somehow prove the possibility of another world (Harvey 2012). These movements are the examples of the Lefebvrian production of heterotopias as a political resistance but only for a temporary period until their dissolution. After a relatively short time, differences, which produce heterotopic spaces, face the violence of the rulers that see their representation capacity as a threat; hence they are detained, arrested, and lawsuits are filed against them. Thereby, protestors are dispersed eventually, and manifestational realization of public spaces fades away. Each heterotopia becomes back the abstract spaces of capitalism and are reclaimed by the dominant praxis. Eventually, the attempt of multiple publics to reclaim the public space as a part of their political life requires certain heterotopic actions and spatializations. The appearance of the

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marginalized publics in the urban space creates heterotopic public spaces as the places of contestation and confrontation. Therefore, in contrast to the Foucauldian approach, Lefebvrian actional heterotopias are the spaces of political resistance and freedom, in which all anomic groups are represented.

CONCLUSION One of the most significant results of this Foucauldian-Lefebvrian comparative study is the relation of the concept of heterotopia to the “different.” In this sense, it is possible to describe the concept of heterotopia and the production of space over (1) different groups’ (sex, sexual orientation, race, religion, language, ethos and political view wise) interrelationships and (2) these groups’ interaction with the rest of the society. Beyond group-specific interactions, these networks of relations eventually become public, and from this point, heterotopia crystallizes. The appearance of differences side by side with other differences beyond their own networks reveals heterotopic praxis and lexis, resulting in the social production of heterotopic spaces. However, Foucault does not reveal such a relation between heterotopia and differences. The reason for the failure of Foucault’s approach is the inconsistency between his very general definition of heterotopia and his six principles. His approach appears nor holistic neither systematic. Studying the Foucauldian perspective results in the fact that the concept of heterotopia cannot be explained with a spatial approach. The main problem is the tendency to marginalize certain groups such as adolescent boys and girls, elders, people with a mental health condition, criminals, sex workers, and the spaces they use. Besides, considering the definition of heterotopia as a medical term, it is not possible to make an analogy that would define the spaces as heterotopic where the “different” is present. Because the spaces Foucault defines are neither unusual nor are cases of spatial displacement. As a consequence, the failure of the Foucauldian approach is caused by the labeling of given parts of society and urban patterns as extraordinary. On the contrary, Lefebvre’s actional approach does not marginalize the difference, while defining it over political resistance. He discusses the concept of heterotopia with reference to the right to the city and unifies the differences as the anomic that produces the heterotopic space. In this approach, all subordinated groups that occur as a result of inequality, become one in the political resistance level. It is significant that in the Lefebvrian approach, public places such as city squares, streets, parks, or universities, where social differences happen to be coincidentally together, are not heterotopic. They only become heterotopic when they are used to express civil, political, or intellectual rights by these differences. The integrity created by differences’ spontaneous coming together around a common concern becomes apparent in public spaces. However, not only the unity but also the space

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produced is temporary and eventually reclaimed by the dominant praxis. The contrary case would point to a worldwide political change. Today, the new COVID-19 Pandemic prognosticates a paradigm shift in the world order. The uniting of differences around a common cause at the local level is now occurring simultaneously and globally against an existential threat. The Pandemic disseminates the message to unite by touching all differences, regardless of religion, color, social status, richness, or poverty. This paradigm shift might change our understanding of heterotopia as a manifestational realization of public spaces. This might lead our societies to discover the permanent production of pluralistic space. Yet, this possibility also requires redefining the heterotopic space or the concept of heterotopia that might yield to the realization of utopia. After all, the definition of heterotopic space depends on the kind of social order we will have.

REFERENCES Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. London: The University of Chicago Press. Cenzatti, Marco. 2008. “Heterotopias of Difference.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Post-civil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 7587. London: Routledge. Demir Kahraman M., Burak Pak, and Kris W. B. Scheerlinck. 2018. “Production of heterotopias as public spaces and paradox of political representation: A Lefebvrian approach. ” A/Z ITU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 15(1):135-145. Foucault, Michel. 1998. “Different Spaces.” In Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, edited by James D. Faubion, 175-185. New York: The New Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26:56-80. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge and Massachusetts: MIT Press. Harvey, David. 2000. “Cosmpolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.” Public Culture 12(2):529-564. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso Books. Iveson, Kurt. 1998. “Putting the Public Back into Public Space.” Urban Policy and Research 16(1):21-33. Johnson, Peter. 2006. “Unravelling Foucault’s Different Spaces.” History of the Human Sciences 19(4):75-90.

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Lax, F. Sigurd. 1997. “Heterotopia from a Biological and Medical Point of View.” In Other Spaces: The Affair of the Heterotopia. Dokumente zur Architektur 10, edited by Roland Ritter and Bernd Knaller-Vlay, 114-23. Austria: Haus der Architektur. Lefebvre, Henri. 1976. Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Negt, Oskar., and Kluge, Alexander. 1993. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pitkin, F. Hanna. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Raaflaub, Kurt A., Josiah Ober, and Robert W. Wallace. 2007. Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robbins, Bruce. 1993. The Phantom Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Runciman, David. 2007. “The Paradox of Political Representation.” The Journal of Political Philosophy 15(1):93-114. Shields, Rob. 1999. Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics. London: Routledge. Sohn, Heidi. 2008. “Heterotopia: Anamnesis of a Medical Term.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Post-civil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 41-51. London: Routledge. Soja, W. Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Expanding the Geographical Imagination. London: Blackwell Publishing.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 8

HETEROTOPIA AND THE ORDERING OF CONTESTED URBAN PUBLIC SPACE: A CASE STUDY OF THE SARPI NEIGHBOURHOOD (CHINATOWN) IN MILAN Jingyi Zhu† Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, London, UK

ABSTRACT Public spaces in contemporary cities are facing increasingly complex situations of conflict and co-existence. As public space is growingly recognised as a process in the making rather than a pre-made container for static social realities, new research perspectives are needed to aid our understanding of public spaces’ role in the ever-evolving urban world. This chapter adopts heterotopia as an analytical framework to discuss the layered qualities of public spaces and their adaptive function underpinned by an assimilation-accommodation mechanism. Instead of using heterotopia as a label for certain “other” sites, this chapter looks into the Sarpi neighbourhood, the so-called Chinatown of Milan, as an example of a contested public space and argues that a key lesson offered by a heterotopian perspective on public space study is to untangle the processes of different actors and forces interacting with each other to produce specific socio-spatial outcomes as a result of ordering and adaptation.

Keywords: public space, heterotopia, Milan, Chinatown, change, process

An early version of this chapter was presented at the 52nd annual congress of the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP), Durban SA, 2016. † Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected]. 

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INTRODUCTION: CONDITIONS OF CONTEMPORARY URBAN PUBLIC SPACE Contemporary cities are marked by highly contested spatial fragments and overlapping economic, cultural and social forces that produce conflicting effects within a single site. This context makes research on urban public spaces challenging, as it produces a “treacherous and fertile ground of conditions that are not merely hybrid, but rather defy an easy description in these terms” (Dehaene and Cauter 2008, 3). Public spaces have long been the centre of coexistence and therefore constant tensions and conflicts, and this is even more so in the present urban setting where “the constant redefinition of the physical and social fabric of the urban space creates a permanent state of uncertainty” (Sacco et al. 2019, 200). Literature on contemporary public spaces often features a tone of loss (Akkar 2005; Banerjee 2001; Kohn 2004; Sennett 2002). Key critiques point out the negative impacts brought by the private sector’s increasing involvement in public space and urban development in general (Akkar 2005), people’s innate tendency to fear even loath interactions with strangers aided by security and illusion-centred design (Lofland 1998), and the fear of uncertain situations leading to both the public and private sectors imposing stricter control of space (Madanipour 1999). While justified, these critiques are inevitably grounded in the premise of a pre-existent “ideal” public space based on a single “public” with shared interests and static social relations. On the contrary, public spaces are sites for multiple publics contingent upon changing power relations, and are consequently places where “many-sided truths co-exist and tolerance of different opinions is practised” (Madanipour 2003, 206). Although many studies still tend to consider public space “in the sense of fixed and permanent physical spaces” (Hajer and Reijndorp 2001, 16), it is being recognised that public space is rather a process in the making, shaped by the changing society and its various transient processes, that should be viewed as part of the evolving social systems and practices. Public spaces are also where changes take place and become adapted into the urban socio-spatial fabrics. Drawing on heterotopia as an analytical perspective, public spaces, with a layered and adaptive nature, are spaces of ordering where different actors are in constant negotiation over the uses and the social meanings of these sites. A concept characterised less by its clarity than its “undecidability,” heterotopia offers “a third term in situations where strict dichotomies —such as public/private, urban/rural or local/global— no longer provide viable frameworks for analysis” (Heynen 2008, 312). In this chapter, I do not intend to use heterotopia as a labelling device, since defining what is (or is not) a heterotopia may be futile and sometimes misleading. Instead, I will elaborate on how heterotopia could inspire analysing the processes and mechanisms underpinning spaces of change and negotiation, before turning to the Sarpi neighbourhood, the so-called Milan Chinatown, as an example of a contested, layered and adaptive urban public space.

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A HETEROTOPIAN APPROACH TO PUBLIC SPACE Heterotopia, originally used in medical contexts but brought to a wider audience by Foucault, remains a “sketchy, open-ended and ambiguous” concept (Johnson 2013, 790). In his account, heterotopias are sites with “the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralise, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect” (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 24). The brief definition, however, brings more confusion than clarity, and is susceptible to an array of interpretations from multiple angles. As such, it is better used as a theoretical inspiration to understand “how parts, aspects, or qualities of space fit in and establish conventions, structures and orders” rather than “a label for any non-dominant space, nor a theoretical ‘yardstick’ to measure actual spaces against” (Wesselman 2013, 22). Looking at Foucault’s six principles of heterotopia (which, unsurprisingly, have been used as the exact yardstick to measure various case studies) —the presence of heterotopias in every culture; different functions of heterotopias throughout time in a given society; their capability to juxtapose several incompatible spaces in a single space; linkage to slices in time; possession of a system of opening and closing that isolates and makes them penetrable at the same time; and a function in relation to all the space that remains (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986)— it is notable how the descriptions fit into even the most ordinary urban public spaces, which are a constant in almost all societies and inherently linked to the socio-temporal realities beyond the spatial boundaries, and possess different faces of inclusion and exclusion (sometimes simultaneously). The growingly complex urban contexts and consequently the rich forces that shape public spaces further validate a heterotopian perspective to understand the production of public space. The examples of heterotopia Foucault gave were “very much spaces distinct and set apart from the everyday world most people inhabited, institutions that were worlds into themselves” (Kern 2008, 105–6). Following Foucault’s discussion of heterotopia of crisis and deviance, subsequent studies invariably consider heterotopias marginal, characterised by taboo or defiance, and cast out from the “normal” experiences. As a somewhat segregated urban element, heterotopia, “an exceptional space, a miniature city or sub-city that forms an important part of the larger city,” is to house those undesirable but ineliminable taboos of the society (Shane 2005, 232). But heterotopia should not be seen as closed or hidden; it is an open and visible system increasingly connected to different layers and flows beyond its “boundary.” Some authors coin the term “public-space heterotopias,” denoting the spaces that “squarely exist within the full daylight of public space and appear as explicitly deviant with regard to the common codes of conduct” (Allweil and Kallus 2008, 193). This conception rightly points out how the “deviant” heterotopias can become quite visible on the public space stages, but it downplays a further implication that heterotopias themselves are becoming less marginal and more openly “embedded” in the given urban contexts and interconnected with the rest spaces.

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A subsequent and more fundamental issue concerns the “otherness” of heterotopia. It is not always clear what makes heterotopia “other” than the rest of the space, apart from “a somewhat general sense of being set-apart from what might contrastingly be thought of as the ‘normal’ or the ‘everyday’” (Palladino and Miller 2015, 1). Otherness is often considered a defining character of a given heterotopia, and the “disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory and transforming” taboo and deviance are arguably the most ostensible forms of otherness (Johnson 2013, 790). As societies are becoming more plural, however, what was once considered deviant may have become “normal” or at least acceptable; as a result, heterotopias are no longer enclaves of deviance but “places where differences meet” (Stavrides 2007, 177). Heterotopia of difference emerges as a new type of heterotopia produced by social shifts, charactered by a myriad of changing spaces and population (Cenzatti 2008, 76–79), and otherness is not intrinsic but combines “materialism, social practices, events and characteristics that represent contradictions with other sites” (Shoshana 2014, 532). Heterotopia is therefore not a site that has innate characteristics that make it appear different from other places; rather its otherness only exists in relation to other sites. Neither is otherness absolute, stable or transformative; despite their destabilising potentials, heterotopias could still be institutionalised or normalised (Guillot 2008, 186–87), or in other words, “become seductively metastable, insinuating [themselves] into the rest of the society” (Stavrides 2007, 178). Considering the increasing openness of heterotopias and the elusive otherness as a defining character, how could heterotopia offer a new perspective into understanding contemporary public spaces? This chapter proposes two underlying mechanisms of heterotopias —heterotopia as a layered space and heterotopia as an adaptive space— as key to the issue. On the one hand, a heterotopia is a layered space that is simultaneously “intensely local” and “resonates across the world” (McDonogh 2013, 109). It is composed of a variety of different, sometimes incompatible layers of social relations and corresponding spatial representations. These layers are becoming increasingly open and dynamic as they are often tied together with much broader global contexts. On the other hand, a heterotopia is an adaptive space. Attitudes towards differences and changes vary in different societies, and the adaptive nature of heterotopia is utilised to different ends. In a relatively stable and singular society, a heterotopia sorts out the “deviant” and contains potential changes, providing “heterotopic spatial pockets or patches” where urban actors “conduct concrete utopian experiments without endangering the established disequilibrium of the larger system” (Shane 2005, 10). In a more dynamic and plural society, heterotopias remain places for constant changes and experiments where differences are difficult to contain and conceal but are more openly displayed. A present-day heterotopia is inevitably more “everyday” but maintains its function of mediating conflicting forces and interests. Heterotopias are not about established sets of orders but the processes of ordering (Hetherington 1997), and this “process” perspective helps analyse the working mechanism of a heterotopian space. Despite the inevitable friction arising from the ordering processes,

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most spaces appear to be in relative stability as the local spatial and social patterns could match each other and co-evolve, maintaining a state of equilibrium.1 This equilibrium is not static but fluid and ever-changing, as new elements (the “deviance” or difference) entering the urban system could be assimilated, by way of co-existing with the existent social relations or mutually adapting to each other to fit into the spatial setting. However, while social relations are relatively flexible, spatial structures are often more stable and in a way restrictive, creating a threshold beyond which the new social elements could no longer be contained and the equilibrium will be broken by conflicting uses and perceptions of space. Through an accommodation process, the existing spatial-social dynamics are transformed, space usually being the first point of intervention, until a new equilibrium is achieved. This does not mean that social relations themselves don’t evolve in the space; social and spatial patterns inevitably shape each other, but space, especially urban public space, is often at the forefront of change, led by powerful decision-makers or initiated bottom-up. And it is in this re-establishing equilibrium process that otherness becomes manifest, which is not simply the “difference” itself but the entire process of urban actor negotiation. Essentially, discussing public space from a heterotopian point of view is to look into the processes of different, sometimes confrontational forces coming into the picture and interacting with each other, and the layered and adaptive qualities of heterotopia set a framework for analysis. Just as some authors argue, “the concept becomes more productive when looking at how a space (structurally or spatially) works as a heterotopia” and heterotopias “should be taken as heterogenous pluralities with elements that can be diverse and different in nature” (Wesselman 2013, 25). The case study that follows, therefore, analyses how different spatial and social layers and processes come together to shape a particular public space, how this space is simultaneously “normal” and “other”, and how it works as an adaptive space to mediate changes and conflicts while potentially “foster[ing] alternative ways of thinking, acting, feeling and being” (Bowers 2018, 235).

MILAN ‘CHINATOWN’: CONFLICT, TRANSFORMATION AND CONTINUING BATTLE FOR PUBLIC SPACE The Milan Chinatown, known to the locals as the Paolo Sarpi neighbourhood, is located north to the historic city centre (Figure 1). Unlike many other Chinatowns around the world that have become prominent tourist attractions, Milan Chinatown lacks this high profile; indeed, as the majority of residents are not Chinese (Monteleone and Manzo 2010,

1

The terms “equilibrium”, “assimilation” and “accommodation” are borrowed from Jean Piaget. They were originally used to discuss the cognitive process of young children’s intellectual growth, and assimilation and accommodation represent two ways of internalising knowledge from the outside world.

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139), the district is simply a “regular” Milanese residential neighbourhood with slightly more Chinese-language shops signs and Asian visitors rather than a genuine ethnic ghetto (Figure 2). Another marked difference from other Chinatowns is the presence of a large number of wholesale clothing stores alongside the more conventional ethnic-flavoured culinary and service businesses which, as will be analysed, has been central to the various contentions around the public space in the neighbourhood and the formation of its heterotopian character.

Figure 1. Location of the Sarpi neighbourhood (Milan Chinatown) as shown on the Google Map/ Map data: Google, CNES.

Figure 2. Milan Chinatown today. Photo by author.

Today the Milan Chinatown centres around the main road, via Sarpi, the major public space in the neighbourhood where most of the activities are concentrated, but the district originally sprang from its western border, via Canonica. Flanked by dense farmhouses within a primarily rural setting, it was part of a major thoroughfare for trade and commerce that had been prominent since the Roman times (Monteleone and Manzo 2010, 134–35). Since the Middle Ages, the area had been predominately agricultural in nature, reflect by its old name “Borgo degli Ortolani” (“village of the gardeners”). Buildings faced the street, with the upper floors used as residences and the ground floor as small workshops for handicrafts and trades; at the back of the building, rectangular plots for agricultural production were arranged for crop cultivation (Monteleone and Manzo 2010, 134–35). Since the late 19th century, the city expanded beyond the city wall, and the area gradually became part of the dense urban fabric packed with service networks and industrial production facilities. With the new industries also arrived migrants from the surrounding

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rural areas seeking work in Milan (Farina et al. 1997, 172). The new neighbourhood where the present-day Chinatown would later emerge, characterised by multi-storey residential buildings with shops scattered on the ground floor, was then a “slightly peripheral and affordable area” that attracted different groups of immigrants (Hatziprokopiou and Montagna 2012, 714). By the early 1900s, via Sarpi had taken via Carnonica’s place to become the centre of the area that was already becoming a major business district. Similar to the traditional building typology, the ground floor of houses was used for shops and other commercial activities, while the upper floors housed residents of various social classes (Farina et al. 1997, 173). The Sarpi neighbourhood later became the entry point for the Chinese immigrants entering Italy via other European countries, who were attracted by the lower rent as well as a relatively inclusive air shaped by the diverse population already residing there (Manzo 2012, 418–19). Starting from the 1920s, the earliest wave of Chinese immigrants started to settle down, who at first sold cheap accessories along the road and later set up leather and silk workshops to cater for the great need for these goods during the wars (Monteleone and Manzo 2010, 138–39). After the Second World War, new Chinese immigrants directly coming from China arrived to join their families and started to run small enterprises like supermarkets and restaurants serving both the Chinese community and the Italian residents. These family businesses, similar to the earlier workshops, were able to adapt to and utilise the courtyard building typology in the neighbourhood. For decades the number of Chinese immigrants remained quite small and the neighbourhood was not distinctively “Chinese.” During the post-war real estate boom, the presence of the Chinese community quite unexpectedly helped preserve the original socio-economic organisation of the area featuring the coexistence of workplaces and residences (Farina et al. 1997, 183). The mix of workers, craftsmen, businessmen and residents created a lively everyday atmosphere but in a way also led to problems such as housing devaluation, lack of maintenance and deterioration. The wholesale activities that later give the Milan Chinatown its most visible character began to develop in the 1990s, resulting from the expansion of Chinese foreign trade and the de-industrialisation process in the Italian context. More Chinese immigrants had arrived after the economic reform in mainland China, and the trades they were involved in corresponded to dominant development trends back home (Manzo 2012, 420). Roughly at the same time, the Sarpi neighbourhood, with its now central location, rich service facilities and the still affordable housing price, started to experience the first wave gentrification; new middle-class residents arrived, while many handicraft shops were forced to close as rent went up (Farina et al. 1997, 185–87; Cologna 2008, 115–16). In a way, this gentrification process foreboded the tensions around the local public space as a migrant neighbourhood for trade and commerce became growingly residential, and different space users inevitably had different perceptions and uses of space.

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Clothing wholesale stores quickly mushroomed in the Sarpi neighbourhood. As the interior space of the shops were limited for the stocks, Chinese businessmen started to put goods and even garbage like wrapping cardboards on the narrow streets, occupying public spaces such as the sidewalks and intersections. The wholesale stores also kept replacing the existing trades, reducing business diversity in the neighbourhood. These conflicts, fuelled by the political propaganda of a “Chinese invasion,” were used by the municipality to control the Chinese trades in this area by strictly sanctioning loading and unloading activities (Manzo 2012, 428–31). To deal with the strict rules, Chinese traders started to use trolleys and bicycles with luggage racks to deliver goods from outside of the neighbourhood to their shops; and when these activities also became closely monitored, they started to carry the packages to the shops on their backs (Figure 3). Tension kept accumulating until April 2007 when a simple incident ignited an unexpected turmoil. It started when two traffic wardens gave a parking fine to a Chinese trader, and other local businessmen soon joined their compatriot to voice their dissatisfaction. During the protest, which would finally become one of the biggest ethinic riots in the history of Milan, “cars were overturned and bottles were thrown at police who were preventing 200-300 people from marching towards Piazza Duomo” (Hatziprokopiou and Montagna 2012, 707). Following the riot, there were various discussions about how to deal with the wholesale businesses, including a proposal in April 2008 to build a Milan-Asia Trade Centre at the outskirt of the city to host the wholesale stores, but none were put into effect (Cologna 2008, 112). Then, in November 2008, the municipality announced the resolution to pedestrianise the Sarpi neighbourhood as it officially became one of the limited traffic zones (Zona Traffico Limitato, ZTL) in Milan. Under the regulations of ZTL, the district was only open to residents’ cars, excluding taxis and motorcycles, and goods delivery was restricted to certain time slots. These measures did reduce the wholesale businesses in percentage but did not reverse its dominant position (Manzo 2012, 427). Subsequently, starting from January 2010, a regeneration project was executed to further pedestrianise and beautify the area. Road sections were redesigned to add new greenery, street furniture and lighting, providing more space for pedestrians and the community (Figure 4). The establishment of ZTL and the pedestrianisation have greatly changed the lives of both the traders and the residents, the Italians and the Chinese alike. Despite the municipality’s efforts to regulate and even eliminate the wholesale businesses, trolleys and bikes for delivering goods are everywhere to be seen, and goods are still piling up on the pedestrian walks. For most of the Chinese traders, these regeneration schemes that target the loading and unloading of goods cause great inconvenience for their business. Local Italian population, on the other hand, have varied opinions on the establishment of ZTL and the pedestrianisation. The residents welcome the ideas, embracing them as a step towards a more liveable environment. But the Italian traders have reservations about these decisions as the regulations create difficulties in goods delievery for them as well (Monteleone and Manzo 2010, 152–53).

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Figure 3. Delivery with trolley. Photo by author.

Figure 4. Greenery created as part of the pedestrianisation project. Photo by author.

While local residents may hope for a quiet and predominantly residential neighbourhood and the Chinatown identity is often seen as “an intrusive obstacle to the prosperity of the area rather than an economic asset” (Hatziprokopiou and Montagna 2012, 722), the Sarpi neighbourhood is nevertheless an important local economic hub that needed invigoration. In 2012, the Lombardy Region designated the Sarpi district as an Urban Business Districts (Distretto Urbano del Commercio, DUC) that aimed to “increase attractiveness, regenerate the urban fabric and support the competitiveness of its commercial polarity” (as defined by the Lombardy regional law, February 2010, n.6, art.5). Following the DUC Sarpi designation, a new regeneration project in the neighbourhood

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was announced, primarily focusing on designing a new logo for the shops in the neighbourhood and implementing new flower beds and benches. While the new logo was considered crucial for “strengthen[ing] the sense of identity and community of the district, recognising the historical value of its heritage and its various economic and social vocations” (as indicated by the Municipality of Milan’s call for design entry in 2018), the redesigned flowerbeds were to be adopted and maintained by local businesses owners and residents, in a way symbolising the return of the public space from being occupied by business needs to the people but also, paradoxically, an expected synergy between the public and private interests.

MILAN CHINATOWN AS LAYERED AND ADAPTIVE SPACE A public space with heterotopian character inevitably possesses two faces: a “global” face that superimposes different layers of changes and a “local” one that in itself is a continuous spatial-social adaptive process, or in other words, an exogenous heterotopia and an endogenous heterotopia (Heyns 2008, 231) (Figure 5). Throughout the years, the Sarpi neighbourhood has developed from an agricultural field to a productive enclave and further to a residential/commercial hub with contested identity, and it has always been subject to changing socio-economic balances. In most of its history, new elements such as new trade types and immigrants have been successfully assimilated into the original local equilibrium, as they were absorbed into the private spaces. Early Chinese immigrants were able to blend in the neighbourhood by adapting the existing courtyard building typology to their living and productive needs; despite their respective cultures and living routines, different groups of people were able to coexist, until the rapid development of the wholesale business started to drastically change the public space in the neighbourhood where tensions easily played out. Looking at the entire processes, it is clear that continuous assimilation of new urban elements could not continue, as the development of both a wholesale industry and a middle-class residential neighbourhood demanded certain public spaces, and the contradictory use and imagination of the space clash with each other. At this point, the existing built fabrics were no longer able to sustain the new uses, and the ZTL and several regeneration projects were put in place to fundamentally change the spatial structure of the public space to accommodate the changes in the hope of establishing a new equilibrium. While these projects are relatively rigid and restrictive as they rather block the problems than seek a positive solution, the DUC and various other communities initiatives may prove to be more flexible and effective in striking a new socio-spatial balance. But right now the local condition is at best a semi-equilibrium, as it is still unclear if the new regeneration project could serve the needs of residents and traders by creating a public space that promotes a sense of community and simultaneously cultivate a vibrant business environment.

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Figure 5. An illustration of the heterotopian mechanism of Milan Chinatown. Diagram by author.

And on a broader scale, the layered quality of the space explains why the interventions only partially work. The initiatives so far remain inevitably local and could not touch on some supra-local and structural restraints. The key moment for the neighbourhood, the rise of the wholesale, corresponded to the Milanese and global economic development trajectory since the 1980s, when Italy experienced an economic decline from which Milan as a major industrial hub suffered severely. While the local economy was going downhill,

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the “made-in-China” wholesale started to boom in the Italian market as Chinese foreign trade expanded. This global context greatly contributed to the Sarpi neighbourhood becoming the Chinatown as it is today and many subsequent conflicts. But simultaneously, the heterotopian space is not merely an objective representation but a purposeful construction of the multiple realities. With the expansion of Chinese trade came the association of the Chinese community with aggressiveness, danger and crime, and the Chinatown subsequently became perceived as a mysterious and inaccessible place for the general public. Initially, the government adopted a relatively neutral attitude towards the Chinese immigrants and their wholesale businesses; however, as the right-wing politicians came to power, the local government started to use the conflicts between the traders and residents and emphasise the aggressiveness of the Chinese trades and the isolation of the Chinese community to achieve its political goal (Monteleone and Manzo 2010, 144–47). People were led to believe that the Chinese wholesale businesses squeezed out the local retail trade, even though the traditional family-based local economy was already undergoing a crisis of its own, with the younger regeneration unwilling to inherit the family businesses (Oriani and Staglianò 2008, 81). Today this conflict is gradually evolving into one between the growing middle-class community and the supposedly “low-level” businesses represented by the wholesale. While the various spatial regeneration projects help improve the quality of the public space and in a way restore the real estate value that is at the heart of the community’s aspirations, the neighbourhood is still ambiguously positioned between a local community space and a vibrant commercial space of municipal, national or even international significance. It remains to be seen how the neighbourhood will readjust itself on different stages and respond to the different new “global” layers that are no less complicated than those faced in the past decades. A final question, linking up the adaptive and layered nature of the space, concerns the “Chineseness,” perhaps the most ostensible “otherness” of this heterotopian public space. Here in the Sarpi neighbourhood, the Chinese identity, though initially embraced by Italian locals as a sign of diversity (Farina et al. 1997, 181), was for a long time not a defining character, but only began to emerge as a response to the suppression of the Chinese businesses and the discriminative voices against the Chinese community. The not consciously created “Chineseness” is inevitably underpinning the reinvigoration of the neighbourhood as an obvious source of “attractiveness.” In a way, all the interventions following the 2007 riot aim at gradually erasing the traces of Chinese wholesale businesses and returning the public space to selected users. Although the neighbourhood is inevitably often associated with a “Chinese character,” the various regeneration interventions never explicitly preserve this character, as the “Chinesenes”’ of the neighbourhood is considered by the residents and local authorities to have devalued the area by only attracting specific ethnic groups and lowering property prices (Hatziprokopiou and Montagna 2012, 720). While Chinese New Year is celebrated in the neighbourhood annually, other manifestations of the Chinese identity, such as the proposal to install Chinese-style portals before the 2015

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Expo (Fugnoli 2014) and exhibiting Christmas lights that read displayed its sponsor’s name “ChinaPower” (an incident reported by online newspaper MilanoToday on December 10, 2018), are often met with strong opposition. But the real issue is never simply ethnicity itself, despite it being a persistent force in the space’s evolution in the last century. Although the Chinese immigration, since the early days of wholesale expansion, has often been manipulated by different political forces to achieve their respective ideals (Zhang 2012, 22–23), ultimately it is about different actors’ perceptions of the public space, whether it should belong to the residents who value the more everyday living scenarios, or to the various business interests, for whom the Chineseness is simply one way to build a higher and perhaps more diverse profile for the neighbourhood. Even today, Chinatowns around the globe are often “mystified, cleaned up, even moved for ‘the good of the greater city’” (McDonogh 2013, 109), but the emphasis on ethnicity sometimes blurs the more acute issues regarding uses of space, gentrification, local economic development and image-making on a much larger scale. In a way, the “Chineseness” is indispensable in maintaining an obvious source of “attractiveness” for the neighbourhood and is still what gives the neighbourhood its “otherness,” but the recent policy moves like the DUC is downplaying this distinct cultural image. Ultimately, it is questionable if this “Chineseness” is really the defining character of this heterotopia, or if it is just a specific, heterotopian moment of this contested public space that is still evolving towards an uncertain end.

CONCLUSION This chapter bridges the heterotopia study to the research on public space, two areas that are not always obviously relevant to each other but are both so fast developing against the same evolving urban backdrop that a discussion bringing different perspectives together could hopefully produce inspirations for both. Instead of attempting to define a certain site as a heterotopia or falling into the complication of different philosophical grounds, I borrow some insights offered by the vast body of heterotopia literature and build an illustrative framework to understand how a contested public space, in this chapter exemplified by the Milan Chinatown, emerge and develop, how competing powers and actors play a part, and more practically, how some spatial and regulatory interventions that are used to manage conflicts and changes enter the urban system of various scale and produce certain spatial and social results in this process. Inevitablly, applying heterotopia to discussing the rather generic field of public space study could either restrain the critical potential of the concept or risk unduly broadening its scope, and this specific case study is arguably so distinct in its ethnic nature that some more fundamental tensions around public space resulting from a much broader context become hidden. Still, heterotopia could lend some new perspectives to this specific line of enquiry and unveil an alternative way of

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understanding public space’s role as a layered and adaptive element within the urban system, and hopefully, the meaning of heterotopia could also be enriched by its engagement with the contemporary public spaces of different forms and shapes.

REFERENCES Akkar, Z. Muge. 2005. “Questioning the ‘Publicness’ of Public Spaces in Postindustrial Cities.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 16: 75–91. Allweil, Yael, and Rachel Kallus. 2008. “Public-Space Heterotopias Heterotopias of Masculinity along the Tel Aviv Shoreline.” In Heterotopia and the City Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter, 191–202. London; New York: Routledge. Banerjee, Tridib. 2001. “The Future of Public Space Beyond Invented Streets and Reinvented Places.” Journal of the American Planning Association 67 (1): 9–24. Bowers, Tom. 2018. “Heterotopia and Actor-Network Theory: Visualizing the Normalization of Remediated Landscapes.” Space and Culture 21 (3): 233–46. Cenzatti, Marco. 2008. “Heterotopia of Difference.” In Heterotopia and the City Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter, 75–86. London; New York: Routledge. Cologna, Daniele. 2008. “The ‘Sarpi Case’ and the Growing Diversification of Chinese Entrepreneurship in Italy.” In A Dragon in the Po. China in Piedmont between Perception and Reality, edited by Rossana Cima, Mirko Dancelli, Tania Parisi, and Giorgia Rinaldi, 111–26. Turin: Edizioni dell’Orso. Dehaene, Michiel, and Lieven de Cauter. 2008. “Heterotopia in a Postcivil Society.” In Heterotopia and the City Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter, 3–9. London; New York: Routledge. Farina, Patrizia, Daniele Cologna, Arturo Lanzani, and Lorenzo Breveglieri. 1997. China to Milan. Families, Environments and Jobs of the Chinese Population in China. Milan: Abitare Segesta Catalogs. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (3): 22–27. Guillot, Xavier. 2008. “The ‘institutionalization’ of Heterotopias in Singapore.” In Heterotopia and the City Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter, 179–88. London; New York: Routledge. Hajer, Maarten A., and Arnold Reijndorp. 2001. In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy. Rotterdam: NAi. Hatziprokopiou, Panos, and Nicola Montagna. 2012. “Contested Chinatown: Chinese Migrants’ Incorporation and the Urban Space in London and Milan.” Ethnicities 12 (6): 706–29.

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Hetherington, Kevin. 1997. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge. Heynen, Hilde. 2008. “Heterotopia Unfolded?” In Heterotopia and the City Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter, 311–23. London; New York: Routledge. Heyns, Maureen. 2008. “‘Rubbing the Magic Lamp’. Heterotopian Strategies in London’s Eastern City Fringe.” In Heterotopia and the City Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter, 227–45. London; New York: Routledge. Johnson, Peter. 2013. “The Geographies of Heterotopia.” Geography Compass 7 (11): 790–803. Kern, Kathleen. 2008. “Heterotopia of the Theme Park Street.” In Heterotopia and the City Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter, 105–16. London; New York: Routledge. Kohn, Margaret. 2004. Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space. London: Routledge. Lofland, Lyn H. 1998. The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory. New Brunswick ; London: AldineTransaction. Madanipour, Ali. 1999. “Why Are the Design and Development of Public Spaces Significant for Cities?” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26 (6): 879–91. Madanipour, Ali. 2003. Public and Private Spaces of the City. London: Routledge. Manzo, Lidia K. C. 2012. “Emergent Spaces, Contemporary Urban Conflicts: Experiences of Social Mix in Changing Neighborhoods–The Case Study of Milan’s Chinatown.” In Living on the Boundaries: Urban Marginality in National and International Contexts, edited by Carol Camp Yeakey, 415–49. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. McDonogh, Gary W. 2013. “Chinatowns: Heterotopic Space, Urban Conflict, and Global Meanings.” Quaderns-e de l’Institut Català d’Antropologia 18 (2): 96–111. Monteleone, Raffaele, and Lidia K. C. Manzo. 2010. “Canonica-Sarpi. A Historic Neighbourhood Fleeing from the Present.” In Milan Downtown. Public Action and Places of Living, edited by Massimo Bricocoli and Paola Savoldi, 133–61. Milan: et al. /EDIZIONI. Oriani, Raffaele, and Riccardo Staglianò. 2008. The Chinese Never Die. Milan: Chiarelettere. Palladino, Mariangela, and John Miller. 2015. “Introduction to the Globalisation of Space: Foucault and Heterotopia.” In The Globalisation of Space: Foucault and Heterotopia, edited by Mariangela Palladino and John Miller, 1–12. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge.

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Sacco, Pier Luigi, Sendy Ghirardi, Maria Tartari, and Marianna Trimarchi. 2019. “Two Versions of Heterotopia: The Role of Art Practices in Participative Urban Renewal Processes.” Cities 89: 199–208. Sennett, Richard. 2002. The Fall of Public Man. Penguin. London: Faber. Shane, David Grahame. 2005. Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory. Chichester: J. Wiley. Shoshana, Avi. 2014. “Space, Heterogeneity, and Everyday Life: Ultra-Orthodox Heterotopia in Israel.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 43 (5): 527–55. Stavrides, Stavros. 2007. “Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Urban Space.” In Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, edited by Karen A Franck and Quentin Stevens, 174–92. Abingdon: Routledge. Wesselman, Daan. 2013. “The High Line, ‘The Balloon,’ and Heterotopia.” Space and Culture 16 (1): 16–27. Zhang, Gaoheng. 2012. “The Protest in Milan’s Chinatown and the Chinese Immigrants in Italy in the Media (2007–2009).” Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 1 (1): 21–37.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 9

SEPARATION AND OPEN HETEROTOPIAS IN NEW YORK AND TOKYO José Mª Castejón Esteban*

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

ABSTRACT Tokyo and New York, the two most important global cities at present, have opposite origins from the point of view of urban planning. While New York develops within a rigid urban plan, Tokyo does so according to a constant state of change and adaptation to the environment. The first responds to separation as a Cartesian technique, which was criticized by Debord, and the second to the metabolic separation of a body without organs. However, in both we can contrast the way in which unsuspected spaces that fit the concept of heterotopia emerge in cities. Foucault’s definition of heterotopias has put the focus on enclosed spaces; but a rereading of his fifth principle, applied to both cities, enables us to understand that there are open and unclear heterotopias, characterized in one way or another depending on the internal order of each city.

Keywords: separation, Foucault, heterotopias, New York, Debord, Tokyo

INTRODUCTION “The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage replaces adventure, and the police the pirates” (Foucault 2008, 22).1 * 1

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected]. In the Spanish version it says: “The ship is the quintessential heterotopia. Civilizations without ships are like children whose parents would not have a large bed on which to play; their dreams then dry up, espionage replaces adventure and the horrible ugliness of the police, the sunny beauty of the pirates”. (Foucault 2010, 32).

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Ambiguity is inherent in the notion of heterotopia. Its definition is not clear, which has generated a vast collection of examples of everything that somewhat resembles what Foucault described in one way or another. To settle into this ambiguity, we can return to the five principles through which Foucault presented heterotopias. Namely: “Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable […] There are others, on the contrary, that look like pure and simple openings, but that, generally, conceal curious exclusions. Everybody can enter into those heterotopian emplacements, but in fact it is only an illusion: one believes to have entered and, by the very fact of entering, one is excluded.”2 (Foucault 2008, 21)

Consequently, we have the ambiguity that heterotopias can be closed or open. But they all share one common feature: they are isolated. Furthermore, at another time Foucault offers another common feature by pointing out that all types of heterotopias share the fact of contesting other spaces (Foucault 2008, 17). To contest meaning to reject the validity of an idea. Therefore, there is no doubt about the fact that heterotopias exist as isolated places—the way in which this isolation occurs being ambiguous—that challenge all others through their mere existence. Most of the heterotopias referred to by Foucault himself (prisons, hospitals, schools, etc.) are hierarchically planned closed spaces that try to impart order rigidly, but within which uncontrollable effects are generated. However, as we have seen in his fifth principle, Foucault raises the possibility of heterotopias existing as unorganized open spaces, as an illusion in which the paradox occurs of not knowing if one has entered or not—open places that have the ability to keep you outside. These heterotopias are the ones analyzed in the present study. Both open and closed heterotopias share the characteristic of being spaces separated through architectural elements. Even in the classical world there already were segregated (and segregating) spaces, whose shape responded to that function, such as the circular-plan temple that could not be entered because it housed the sacred, or the rectangular-shaped basilica that was a meeting place (Argan 1980, 31). Positivism, and more generally scientific thought, will delve into the classification of the world and society, understanding this classification as a separation into categories of everything known. And so, during the 19th and 20th centuries, through architecture, new spaces will continue to be created, according to uses and shapes, of a clearly separating nature. It even got to the point where, through urban planning, this idea was transferred to the whole city when, in 1933, the Athens Charter was drafted, which proposed a city organized by separate areas that responded, each of them, to a different role. 2

In the Spanish version, the text continues: “Heterotopia is an open place, but it has that property of keeping you out” (Foucault 2010, 28).

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Separation is one of the phenomena that Guy Debord most strongly criticized in his multiple writings.3 For Debord Separation is inoculated in the structure of modern thought to the point that “it is part of the world unit” (Debord 1994, thesis 7). For this reason he considers it “the alpha and omega of spectacle” (Debord 1994, thesis 25).4 Specifically, he states that “although all the technical forces of capitalist economy must be interpreted as forces of separation, in the case of urban planning it is the very technique of separation” (Debord 1994, thesis 171). In 1961, Debord presented a film entitled Critique of Separation, and that same year reflected in Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life about how “modern society is made up of specialized fragments, little less than intransmissible”, which have the effect of “atomizing people as isolated consumers [and] prevent all communication. Daily life is thus made private life, the domain of separation and spectacle” (Debord 1961). The present chapter suggests that, in the Western world, the heterotopias that Foucault conceived at a time when a disciplinary notion of power prevailed (hospitals, prisons, schools, museums, theaters, libraries, hotels...) are born from the same separation that Debord criticized. As León and Urabayen state, “practically all the studies on heterotopias produced in the architectural discipline are oriented to the identification or development of certain spaces as countersites capable of generating resistance against the disciplinary techniques of an administrative power that normalizes and controls individuals” (León and Urabayen 2017, 2); however, its analysis has not been considered in practically any study from the perspective of separation criticized by Debord. Thus, although there are some examples that approach the study of heterotopias from the notion of spectacle (Kohrs 2018) or surveillance (Jarvis 2019),5 the vast majority maintain consistent approaches of reclaiming spaces, and even discourses, as political reality (Pakhalyuk 2018). Unlike previous ones, this study intends to analyze those places that have been produced in an unplanned way, those that are only the result of disaster, products —or rather by-products —of urbanization action, spaces inscribed between the folds and close to an eternal junkspace (Koolhaas 2002), resulting orphaned and unexpected, constantly mutating, appearing and disappearing, visible and invisible, because it is typical of heterotopias to exist as a counterpoint to the presence of architecture and city planning. Ultimately, because “perhaps one would not find one single form of heterotopia that is absolutely universal”6 (Foucault 2008, 18).

As it happens, the first chapter of his book The Society of Spectacle, written in 1968, is entitled “The Perfect Separation” (Debord 1994). 4 According to Debord “The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images [but] rather as a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.” (Debord 1994, thesis 5). 5 Specifically, Jarvis argues that “in Discipline and Punishment, Foucault implicitly rebukes Guy Debord by proclaiming that ‘our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance […] We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptical machine’” (Jarvis 2019, 217). 6 Instead of ‘universal’, in the Spanish version the text says “perhaps there is not, in world’s history, one single form of heterotopia that has stayed constant”. 3

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As Foucault suggests, there are many other spaces of a vaporous, illusory nature, built with unclear limits. If the first principle says that there is no society that does not establish its heterotopias, it should be added that many heterotopias are not constituted in a conscious process, nor with clearly defined spaces. Therefore, since the separation mechanisms become especially strong in the city, through the most fundamental distinction of all — public and private—, and to demonstrate the deep link that exists between Debord’s notion of separation and Foucault’s heterotopias at the urban level, we propose the analysis of the two cities that constitute the two most extreme paradigmatic models of urban reproduction: New York and Tokyo. If there is one thing that New York and Tokyo have in common, it is their state of constant change. Koolhaas begins his book Delirious New York by quoting a tourist brochure that says “Manhattan: small island of the United States in perpetual reconversion” (Koolhaas 2004, 9). On the other hand, in Tokyo, the average life of a building is only 26 years (Kitayama et al. 2010, 29). After that time, the building is demolished and a new one is built. What sets them apart, however, is that while New York is the result of rigid and definitive planning through a street grid established a priori, “in Tokyo, different and contradictory morphological principles have been superimposed: that of the mesh, the radial, the boulevards, etc.” (García Vázquez 2004, 150). There is also another fundamental difference that has to do with the nature of Japanese architecture, profoundly different from that of the West: while Western architecture can be considered an “architecture of the wall, the Japanese, on the other hand, is an architecture of the ground” (Ashihara 1989, 56), which means that “because walls do not play a significant structural role in this construction, their presence is of diminished importance. Instead, the floor and the roof are the crucial elements, thus affording an uninterrupted continuity between interior and exterior” (Ashihara 1989, 15). In this chapter we will analyze both cities from the notion of the fragmentation and the division of space that generates open heterotopias of unclear limits, through the Debordian concept of separation, and keeping in mind the difference between the public-private nature character in the western and eastern cities.

NEW YORK Research on the relationship between New York and the concept of heterotopia to date approach the issue from different points of view, focusing on different aspects such as the techné-poiesis duality of the city’s layout (Englot 2018), or following semiotic perspectives that try to understand “geographies generated by the need to find space outside of the normal urban fabric, reflecting the rules and wills of the societies that produce them” (Sandin 2008). In our case, we applied the concept of heterotopia to New York City, considering it the paradigm of the idea of separation transferred to an urban fabric:

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Manhattan’s grid, with its twelve avenues and one hundred and fifty-five streets, is a model of planning that should be understood as the “most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization: the land it divides, unoccupied; the population it describes, conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms, the activities it frames, nonexistent” (Koolhaas 1994, 18). The city is an homage to real estate speculation through the fragmentation, classification and qualification of a space still to be inhabited. It is the abstract creation of a space that materializes around the idea of property. In Koolhaas’s words, it is “a utilitarian polemic” (Koolhaas 1994, 19). In October 1909 Life magazine published a comic strip that staged a giant steel infrastructure with 84 levels linked by an elevator. Known as the “1909 theorem” (Koolhaas 1994, 83), since then the idea of reproducing space in height to multiply it an unlimited number of times has been inherent to the development of the island of Manhattan. Building as much as possible to get the most out of land ownership led to such uncontrolled growth that in 1916 legislation was passed in an attempt to “humanize” the abstraction of the Manhattan grid through the Zoning Law, which limited the growth in height of the buildings up to a limit from which they had to be set back: “The New York Law was based on purely practical considerations, [because] by limiting the bulk of a building, the number of occupants was limited; fewer people required access and egress; traffic on adjacent streets was lightened. The limitation in mass had also of course the effect of permitting more light and air into the streets as well as into the buildings themselves. The Zoning Law was not at all inspired by concern for its possible effect on architecture (Koolhaas 1994, 109). As a result, buildings with setbacks from a certain height upwards will emerge, seeking as much advantage as allowed and, consequently, the grid will be strengthened through a rigid definition of the limits that separate the public from the private. Public space will become the vulgar one resulting from the partition, in what is left over when dividing the space. Thus, the division and fragmentation of the land, its separation, hardly has any space suited for the development of daily life beyond its simple functionalism, because the city must function to produce, and because what it produces has value. Even Central Park will be the sum of a huge set of plots that had been given a different classification: the “green zone”. In 1958 the Seagram Building broke that logic. The architect who designed it, Mies van der Rohe, proposed a completely new scenario by setting the entire building back from the street, generating a plaza, slightly elevated above it, open to the use of citizens, and without any specific planned activity. The consequence was that the New York City Council ended up fining the Seagram Building because the taxes that would have been generated by the businesses on the ground floor level were not being collected.7 7

Given that, if it had been applied, the commercial use of the space dedicated to the square would have produced the amount of three hundred thousand dollars a year at that time solely due to the application of urban taxes, the City Council brought the case to the Supreme Court, who finally dismissed it. In similar fashion, the company

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Figure 1. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. A floor plan of the ground floor of the Seagram Building, located at 375 Park Avenue, New York. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

What is truly paradoxical is that in reality the architect who designed it said that he simply “set it back so it could be seen. If you go to New York, you really have to look at the canopies to know where you are. You can’t even see the building; you only see it from afar. For this reason I set it back” (Puente 2013, 83). But people stop, sit down to eat their lunch, or meet to chat on the break from work, having so become an unexpected meeting place. For this reason, the plaza has become an object of study in relation to the spontaneous behavior of the population in an urban environment like this one. In 1969, William H. Whyte began to wonder how newly planned city spaces were actually working out. The use of the plaza analyzed in front of the Seagram Building was erratic, undefined. It is not possible to establish a category that outlines the use that is given to the plaza, within a grid created from and by capitalist utilitarianism. Although Mies only wanted the building to be seen, what has happened is that it generated a new and unknown space in the city, an other space where you don’t really enter anywhere. Seagram Building’s plaza has no closure or opening, nothing is produced within its limits, and due to the ephemeral nature of its occupation, it is worth asking whether one is aware of even having entered it. In other words, it meets all the parameters set forth by Foucault’s fifth principle of heterotopias.

that owns the building tried to request in advance the landmark title —a document that would avoid any future payment of fees— for the building, but as it did not meet the requirement of being at least 30 years old at the time of the petition, it was denied. Finally, the solution that was found to pay the huge debt to the City Council was to sell the building in 1979 (Cattani 2013, 160).

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Figure 2. Seagram building and the Plaza in the grid of Manhattan. Adapted from the original Site Plan by Mies van der Rohe (1956).

Suddenly, in the center of the abstract and inhuman grid, a space full of everyday life has been generated, extracted from the specialized division, a pure and simple opening (Foucault 2008, 21) in which people stop briefly, so no bond is created, no idea of belonging. An unproductive heterotopia in which you do not get to enter but at the same time expels you. In which nothing happens, because no external hierarchical structure is reproduced. In Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life, Debord refers to the definition posited by Lefebvre for everyday life, which is none other than “whatever remains after one has eliminated all specialized activities” (Debord 1961). Seagram Building’s plaza is a disruption in the middle of the grid because it promotes everyday life within a lot whose intended use was associated with its production, and it does so in an unplanned way, constituting an open heterotopia. Another example of division and subtraction of pieces of space as a result of urban planning in New York City is the one recreated by the American architect and artist Gordon Matta-Clark who, in 1974, bought 15 plots that the New York City Council offered at auction and sold for quantities of $25 to $75. The work consisted of gathering the documentation referring to the property deeds and the plans of those plots, accompanied by their photographs. It received the name of Reality Properties: Fake Estates, given that they were actually ridiculously sized and completely useless plots; some were even rated “inaccessible” by the New York City Auction. As a whole, the work was a performative reflection on the concept of property, the geometric techniques that define it, and the value of use of urban space (Castejón 2016).

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Figure 3. Reality Properties: Fake Estates, Little Alley Block 2497, Lot 42. Adapted from Gordon Matta-Clark (1974).

The plots that are part of the Fake Estates are the residues of what is done with the city: it has been chopped up, parceled, qualified and put up for sale, to the point of no return where all unified single vision of it has been destroyed. The Fake Estates are worthless remains, the result of an architect’s pencil drawing that have been left out of the distribution. Pieces of city that do not have a categorization because they are useless. They are gutter spaces. Meaning, they are invisible heterotopias, because no one is ever aware of their existence. They are ignored, forgotten and unknown counterspaces. They are open and unknown heterotopias that will never be claimed by anyone, but which undoubtedly represent the contesting of those other spaces (Foucault 2010, 30), when the rest of the spaces are exclusively utilitarian artificial separations as a result of urban planning technique.

TOKYO As a counterpoint to the Manhattan grid, in Tokyo the division of the city is not an orchestrated act. The city has not been planned; its division has been produced by multiple factors: the evolution of society, the transformation of the family model, the rising cost of land, attachment to the land and to owning a piece of land, as well as taxes linked to the above. Urbanism as the very technique of separation —as Debord posits— has not intervened in Tokyo.

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Figure 4. Evolution in land division. Adapted from Kitayama 2010.

Unlike the Fake Estates detected by Matta-Clark, which had an administrative origin, when observing the unstoppable phenomenon of fragmentation in the city of Tokyo, you can see how spaces in the form of alleys spontaneously emerge, because they are necessary to access new allotments. These spaces are ambiguous regarding their public or private nature, and at the same time they represent another type of open heterotopia in which “one believes to have entered and, by the very fact of entering, one is excluded” (Foucault 2008, 21). In this regard, it is important not to lose sight of one of the fundamental differences between East and West pointed out by Kenzo Tange, one of the most paradigmatic representatives of the Japanese metabolist architecture developed during the 1960s: “the Japanese approach to making space tangible involves defining, marking off, and limiting space in nature, and it contrasts with the Western approach of erecting a single mass into space; the former expresses space on the horizontal, two-dimensional plane, the latter on the vertical, three-dimensional plane” (Altarelli 2013, 13).

Figure 5. New alleys emerge to access new allotments. Adapted from Puig 2011.

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Figure 6. Prada Building in Tokyo, setback from the road creating a Plaza.

As García Vázquez states, the relationship between the interior and exterior of Japanese architecture —as well as between public and private spaces and, consequently, the outline of the boundaries of these spaces— generates an “urban environment incomprehensible to a Westerner. Their dual perception of the world inclines them towards perfectly structured and hierarchical spaces in black and white, an inclination that translates in the city into a preference for alignments of rigid and harmonious façades, for straightlined pathways that link monuments [...] nothing of that exists in Tokyo. The façades do not aspire to form powerful visuals, the great arteries do not link together landmarks and the squares were never an urban element” (García Vázquez 2004, 166). Delving into this idea, the architect Koh Kitayama explains the way in which the city of Tokyo evolves: “Unlike the urban structures one finds in Europe that were created with a series of walls, Tokyo consists of an assemblage of independent buildings. In other words, constant change is an inherent part of the system. […] In contrast to cities of the past that were shaped by tremendous administrative and financial power, Tokyo has the potential to create change in the city through the quiet accumulation of urban elements rooted in daily life” (Kitayama et al. 2010, 11).

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Figure 7. Moriyama House.

In his exhibition for the 10th Venice Biennale, Kitayama raised the idea of this Tokyo Metabolizing, given that “the houses are invariably detached and lined up side-by-side with a narrow gap between them”, which makes them easily replaceable. “In Japan, this is due to an ordinance stipulating that only one structure can be built on a lot, and a civil law that requires the exterior wall to be set 0,5 meters back from the edge of the lot” (Kitayama et al. 2010, 21). As a consequence, the city is made up of independent cells, and the space between them —open and with unclear boundaries— changes with the replacement of each one of those cells. A paradigmatic example is the building built by Herzog and de Meuron for the Prada Tokyo headquarters. According to Kitayama himself, it is a building in which “the architecture creates an icon that is detached from the surrounding townscape. In effect, Prada Boutique Aoyama is a billboard for a superbrand that is completely disconnected from its physical context. The only rule the building obeys in regard to context is an imperceptible one: it is setback from the road.” (Kitayama et al. 2010, 15). While in New

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York the Seagram is accused with the aim of making them pay a fine for uncollected taxes, in Tokyo no one builds adjacent to the street line. Subsequently, Fumihiko Maki will posit, in his book City with a Hidden Past, a city in which the streets are composed by superimposing external layers, through different treatments of the boundaries between the public and the private that generate an illusory space. These spaces will be taken to the limit of experimentation in examples such as the Moriyama house by Ryue Nishizawa, in which we find ourselves, due to the fragmentation and manipulation of boundaries, with a contesting of the dichotomy between public or private space, as well as with the contesting of the notion of the street, reaffirming once again that type of heterotopias which are pure openness.

CONCLUSION The division of land in the city is a materialization of Separation. Such division of land is linked to the appearance of unforeseen places for which no specific activity has been planned, which turns them into voids whose nature is ambiguous. Although this phenomenon is radically different in New York and Tokyo, in both cities it responds to the idea of other spaces that contest, or challenge, the rest. In Manhattan every block is the same. The isotropy of urban space is complete because its urban planning is based on the premise that “a city is composed principally of the habitations of men, and that strait sided and right angled houses are the most cheap to build, and the most convenient to live in” (Koolhaas 1994, 19). For this reason, Manhattan was created, thought and planned through a grid “advocated by its authors as facilitating the buying, selling and improving of real estate” (Koolhaas 1994, 18). However, within these blocks, unexpected phenomena have appeared that question the validity of the established (spatial) order. Seagram Building’s plaza, or the Fake Estates by Gordon Matta-Clark, are good examples of it. On the contrary, in Tokyo, as the architect Fumihiko Maki points out, in the absence of general planning, “different and contradictory morphological principles have been superimposed. But under this tangled reality there is a principle that governs it: property rights are inalienable, that is, lots, farms and buildings have priority. The streets have no choice but to meander through the filaments they leave free” (García Vázquez 2004, 150). As a result, the city is in a state of constant metabolization in which the lots change and divide, and buildings are demolished and rebuilt, leading to the appearance of equally unexpected phenomena. “Tokyo is the perfect example of the fluid, regenerating city. [...] An ‘amoeba city’ with its amorphous sprawl and the constant change it undergoes, like the pulsating body of the organism” (Ashihara 1989, 58). Separation and division of land here is radically different, and so, unexpected and ambiguous spaces emerge as another type of open heterotopia

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The strong contrast between public and private generates open and unclear heterotopias in both cities. From radically opposite premises we find examples that respond to the idea put forward by Foucault in his fifth principle for heterotopias. If in New York they are the result of the separation that Debord announced, in Tokyo they respond to the metabolically changing essence of the city.

REFERENCES Almonacid, Rodrigo. (2014). “Mies van der Rohe y el rascacielos Seagram: la inversión del mito en Manhattan” [“Mies van der Rohe and the Seagram skyscraper: inverting the myth in Manhattan”]. In Arquitectura, símbolo y modernidad. [Architecture, symbol and modernity], edited by Daniel Villalobos Alonso, Iván Rincón Borrego and Sara Pérez Barreiro, 469-482. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid – Real Embajada de Noruega en España. Altarelli, Giulia & Elsa Beniada. (2013). Landscape anachronism. The story of Tama. Master Thesis, Part I. Lausanne: EPFL. Argan, Giulio. (1980). El concepto del espacio arquitectónico: desde el barroco a nuestros días. [The concept of architectural space: from the baroque until today] Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión. Ashihara, Yoshinobu. (1989). The Hidden Order. Tokyo through the Twentieth Century. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International. Castejón, José María. (2016). “Fake Estates, el situacionismo en la obra de Matta-Clark.” [“Fake Estates, situationism in the work of Matta-Clark”] In Open Sourcing. Investigación y formación avanzada en arquitectura [Open Sourcing. Research and advanced training in architecture], edited by Lourdes Diego Barrado, Jorge Fernández-Santos and Jorge León Casero, 303-311. Zaragoza: Universidad San Jorge. Cattani, Rudivan. (2013). Nueva York. Torres que rematan manzanas [New York. Towers that finish up blocks]. Barcelona: PhD, UPCommons. http://hdl.handle.net/ 2117/95022. Corbera, Darío, comp. (2000). Construir… o deconstruir? Textos sobre Gordon MattaClark, [Build ...or deconstruct? Articles about Gordon Matta-Clark]. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Debord, Guy. (1961). Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life. Published in Internationale Situationniste #6, May 1961. Debord, Guy. (1994). The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Englot, A. S. (2018). “Situating Jerusalem: Poiesis and techne in the American urbanism of Jemima Wilkinson and Thomas Jefferson.” In Modern Architecture and Religious Communities, 1850-1970: Building the Kingdom. Edited by Kate Jordan and Ayla Lepine, 159-176. London: Routledge.

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Foucault, Michel. (2008). “Of Other Spaces.” In Heterotopia and the City. Public space in a postcivil society. Edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 13-29. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. (2010). El cuerpo utópico. Las heterotopías. [The utopian body. Heterotopias]. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión. García Vázquez, Carlos. (2004). Ciudad Hojaldre. Visiones urbanas del siglo XX. [Puff Pastry City. Urban visions of the 20th century]. Barcelona: GG. Jarvis, Brian. (2019). “Surveillance and spectacle inside the circle.” In Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture, edited by Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay, 275-293. New York: Springer International Publishing, 2019 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-00371-5_14. Kitayama, Koh, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto & Ryue Nishizawa. (2010). Tokyo Metabolizing. Tokyo: Tōtōshuppan. Kohrs, Kirsten. (2018). “Public relations as visual meaning-making”. In Visual Public Relations: Strategic Communication beyond Text. Edited by Simon Collister and Sarah Roberts-Bowman, 13-28. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781315160290. Koolhaas, Rem. (1994). Delirious New York. A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan. New York: The Monacelli Press. Koolhaas, Rem. (2002). “Junkspace”. October, 100, 175-90. Koolhaas, Rem. (2004). Delirio de Nueva York. Un manifiesto retroactivo para Manhattan. Barcelona: Ediciones Gustavo Gili. Lambert, Phyllis. (2013). Seagram: Union of Building and Landscape. Places Journal. León Casero, Jorge & Julia Urabayen. (2017). “Heterotopía y capitalismo en arquitectura. La función ideológica de las heterotopías como discurso propio de la disciplina arquitectónica en la era de la gobernanza biopolítica.” [“Heterotopia and capitalism in architecture. The ideological role of heterotopias as a discourse characteristic to architectural discipline in the era of biopolitical governance”]. Arbor, 193 (784), a386. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2017.784n2008. Maki, Fumihiko, Yukitoshi Wakatsuki, Hidetoshi Ohno, Tokihiko Takatani & Naomi Pollock. (2018). City with a Hidden Past. Tokyo: Kajima Institute Publishing. Pakhalyuk, K. A. (2018). “Discourse critique: Research programs and protest practices.” Polis. Political Studies., 1, 157-74. DOI: 10.17976/jpps/2018.01.11. Puente, Moisés. (2013). Conversaciones con Mies van der Rohe. [Conversations with Mies van der Rohe. Barcelona: GG. Puig, Montse. (2011). Análisis de la necesidad solar en una trasformación urbana de densificación. Una experiencia en Tokio. [Analysis of the solar need in an urban transformation of densification. An experience in Tokyo]. Barcelona: Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya. Sacchi, Livio. (2004). Tokyo: City and Architecture. Milan: Skira Editore.

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Sandin, Gunnar. (2009). “Spatial negotiations. An actant analysis model for the interpretation of land use.” Lexia, 3, 397-414.

SECTION 3: HETEROTOPIA AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 10

DELUSIONS OF HETEROTOPIA Ibán Díaz-Parra*

Department of Human Geography, University of Seville, Seville, Spain

ABSTRACT The notion of heterotopia has a radical and critical potential that has often been exploited by intellectuals and political movements. It has been associated to the criticism of functionalist urbanism, control policies and the homogenizing planning of the territory. However, some of these elements also resonate in the neoliberal ethos of the end of history and in the production practices of urban space carried out under this framework, which is very different from the hegemonic practices of the 1960s. What is the relationship between post-modern critical thinking and neoliberal urban planning? The chapter progresses from this question and offers a critical reading of the works of Foucault and Lefebvre.

Keywords: heterotopia, utopia, neoliberal urbanism, post-modern radicalism

FOUCAULT, IDEOLOGIST OF URBAN NEOLIBERALISM? In the 1990s, the desire for the recovery of historic centers reached much of Latin America. The huge and popular historic center of Mexico City had gone through a halfcentury long period of disinvestment, with an increasingly impoverished and marginalized population. In addition, that space had been largely taken over by street trade. Within the framework of the renovation and regeneration policies for this fundamental area of the city, the Mesones-Regina cultural corridor was a personal initiative of the Mexican billionaire *

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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and philanthropist Carlos Slim. At the beginning of the 21st century, Slim started by buying two hotels at the southern end of the historic center to repurpose them as artist residencies. Some of whom I was able to interview described the explosion of creativity and the climate of freedom that was experienced in those spaces in those early days. From there, Slim expanded his project in collaboration with the city government, taking the form of a cultural enclave around Regina and Mesones streets, pedestrianized and protected by a special police force. Street trading and other illegal or pseudo-legal activities were conveniently relocated. Slim bought a large number of buildings in the area, paying the occupants to leave, with the aim of dedicating them to artist residencies with shops and workshops, with rents well below market prices. At that time, they were requesting a curriculum vitae to enter the area. They were looking for people from the art world, designers, writers, young people with a certain aesthetic and habits. There was even room for the creation of a social center, La Casa Vecina, which seemed to replicate the typical “second generation” European squatted social center. There were also workshops for artists, a library and a micro-urbanism workshop dedicated to carrying out street interventions improving the public space of downtown neighborhoods through recycling initiatives. An empty lot was refunctionalized as a beautiful park, flanked by a mural at its entrance. The streets were filled with graffiti, recycling interventions and works of art turned into street furniture, all to the tunes of Rage Against the Machine. Along with the real estate agency that managed the properties and the neighboring house center, Slim even created a social assistance space for marginalized population, who subsisted in the area, aimed at promoting positive leadership in the neighborhoods and controlling violence. Despite the displacement of vendors and irregular occupants, there was a desire to maintain a heterogeneous and diverse space at all levels. The space had its heyday in the first decade of the 21st century and when I first visited it in 2013, it had already become a bohemian bar-lined area. The artists had been joined by other much more prosaic professional middle-class inhabitants who lived in more ostentatious buildings. Some of the first residents expressed disappointment at the change in space, while poor tenants found it increasingly difficult to pay their rents and street vendors constantly challenged the authority’s ban in order to maintain their source of income. Slim’s project seemed to replicate the one George Soros had developed a decade earlier in the El Abasto area of Buenos Aires. More limited and perhaps unsuccessful, today it is an enclave of small theaters dominated by a large shopping center, which gives its name to the area, and is built on the re-functionalized old market. Both operations respond to a similar model. Are they not a perfect example of post-modern urbanism? The collaboration between such diverse agents, the (simulation) of spontaneity, aestheticism, multifunctionality, recycling, the redefinition of spaces, even the contradictory, ephemeral

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and always changing (and disappointing) character of the created places are typical features of post-modern urbanism. Zizek (2004) quotes a third author when speaking of a yuppie who was on the Paris subway reading Deleuze and Guattari’s book What is philosophy?, which for the narrator of the anecdote should lead the reader to bewilderment, given the powerful radical and revolutionary character of the work. Of course, Zizek wonders to what extent, instead of bewilderment, the yuppie does not receive the work of these philosophers with enthusiasm, seeing himself fully reflected in its contents. To what extent the already old figure of the yuppie was not the most advanced example of the coupling of man to machine, perfectly integrated with the then not so ubiquitous mobile phone? To what extent the collapse of the fixed, conservative roles did not also find its vanguard in this figure, with his need to constantly reinvent himself so as not to be devoured by the competition, or to adapt in order to enjoy the consumption of the latest fashion? Zizek comes to play with the idea that “the thought of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, the philosophers best characterized by the resistance of the marginal positions crushed by hegemonic power [...], is effectively the ideology of the new ruling class” in contemporary capitalism (Zizek 2004, 220). If there are reasons to speak of Deleuze as a philosopher of neoliberalism, would there not be similar reasons to think of Foucault as the ideologist of neoliberal urbanism? Despite the fact that his main and best-known works focused on history, he is undoubtedly one of the philosophers who has contributed to the spatial shift in the social sciences since the 1980s. His deliberations on heterotopias, although not particularly abundant in his work, have had a notable influence on urban planning and, above all, on architecture. His statements are an inspiration for radical thought, which can be linked to today’s pervasive criticism of the imposition of European modernity’s rationality on the world. His work is also related to the central aspects of the post-modern criticism of functionalist urbanism, rigid models, the homogenization of the landscape and also to the interest in creating contending spaces in the here and now for urban activism. However, some of these elements are also present in the neoliberal ethos of the end of history and in the practices of production of urban space carried out under this framework, which is very different from hegemonic practices in the 1960s. For their part, Slim and Soros are a type of capitalist that is a far cry from the old industrialist with conservative morals —they correspond to a greater extent with the figure of the liberal philanthropist. Slim was enriched by the privatization of public companies stemming from the neoliberal reconversion of the Mexican state. Soros has speculated on the debt markets and has bankrupted entire nations with his bets. Both represent a notorious example of the concentration and centralization of capital in its neoliberal form, after Fordist production regimes typical of the post-war period. Well then, it would not be completely outlandish to think of George Soros or Carlos Slim returning in the back of their limousines, approvingly reading a text about Foucault’s heterotopias. Perhaps we could even imagine Soros, having grown tired of experimenting with El Abasto in the

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1990s, passing the book to Slim and recommending he read it, which would have immediately led to the idea of creating the Mesones-Regina cultural corridor in the historical center of Mexico City. Hasn’t Slim sought to create some kind of heterotopic space there? The artists’ hotel, the social center and the bohemian enclave can be a strategy for valuing the space which seeks to obtain speculative returns in the future from previous positions obtained in the land market. But neither can we rule out from the start a sincere philanthropic will and a quest by Slim to create his own heterotopia. Or can real estate speculation and cultural and philanthropic initiative be two sides of the same coin in contemporary urban planning?

FOUCAULT AND LEFEBVRE, HETEROTOPIAS AND UTOPIAS “Des espaces autres” was a reading given by Foucault before the Circle of Architectural Studies in 1967. The date is not a minor matter. This was a year before the publication of Right to the City and the well-known countercultural revolts of French students. It was a reading at the end of the glorious thirty years of capitalism after World War II, of nationalist economies, interventionist states and the development of welfare regimes. At this time France and the West in general were reaching the end of a cycle, of a way of thinking about politics and economics and of a way to organize space, something Foucault seems quite aware of in the conference transcript. This took place in a state like the French, which even today, after four decades of neoliberalism, is still one of the most interventionist and protectionist European states with its economy, and which at that time was a pioneer within the capitalist bloc in terms of bureaucratic organization of space and mass consumption. I would say that in the heterotopia discourse there are two key elements in relation to what I have just mentioned. The first, which anticipates the spatial shift in the social sciences, is the shift of interest from time to space. The text begins by locating history as the great obsession of modernity, related to the themes of development, crisis, accumulation, etc. The use of political economy —even Marxist (“surplus of the dead”)— terminology, does not seem an accident. Hypothetically, Foucault lays out the world that is emerging from the tensions of the 1960s in the West and the exhaustion of the post-war economic and geopolitical models, as the space age, an era of simultaneity, in which localization problems supplant those of expansion and development. Time becomes relegated to the margins: “Time probably appears only as one of the various possible operations of distribution between the elements that are spread out in space” (Foucault 2008, 16). In a well-known interview a couple of decades later, Foucault (1984) mocked a Sartrean philosopher who presented history as revolutionary and space as reactionary. Of course, this type of approach was quickly going out of fashion in the 1980s. The rejection

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of the existence of one history is a key argument of the criticism of progressive politics development and its evolutionary content, whether coming from radical environmentalism or from de-coloniality. Universal history can only be understood today as an imposition of European modernity on the rest of the world through a variety of forms of violence. A totalitarian discourse that overshadows the multiple possible histories of the peoples, the women, the oppressed nations, etc., and the multiple possible modernities. At the level of urban planning, the criticism of utopianism also acquires a radical aspect. In the 20th century, utopianism had gone from Owen and Howard’s socialist and proto-ecological projects to Le Corbusier’s commitment to centralized power and the progress of industrialization. In this respect, a liberal urbanist like Jane Jacobs equated the horizontal garden city with a vertical garden city of functionalism, seen as models that infringed upon the spontaneity and heterogeneity of the urban, as well as against the very existence of the street and fortuitous encounters. Utopianism, increasingly linked to totalitarianism and barbarism, begins to be ousted, even within the left. Without a doubt, the post-modern claim to space is not necessarily reactionary. However, in the spatial turn that Foucault anticipates, one can also see the exhaustion of the revolutionary spirit of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the triumph of neoliberal capitalism. Disappointment with utopianism is disappointment with humanity’s own political capacity to radically transform its forms of sociality. Left-wing criticism of the revolution as an almost pernicious fetish would expand in left-wing political thought at this time (for example, Laclau and Mouffe 1984). The coincidence with the reactionary discourse about the end of history is not an accident. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, we entered an era of consensus on procedural democracy, the free market economy and liberal pluralism that has come to be called “post-political” (Wylson and Swyngedowu, 2014), and whose overcoming has become unimaginable. The other major theme within Foucault’s discourse on heterotopia is directed against uniformity and zoning, which can be identified with bureaucratic space planning in general. The call in his speech to “desacralize” space has something to do with the way in which monofunctional spaces separate and segregate: the difference between family space and social space, cultural space and useful space, work space and pleasure space, etc. The criticism of zoning is especially interesting for the feminist urbanism concerned with overcoming dualisms, particularly the one that opposes productive and reproductive spaces. From functional separation criticism we can jump to social role assignment criticism, which crystallizes in spatial practices. However, in the neoliberal organization of space, a commitment could also be found towards a certain overcoming of oppositions and separations (work-pleasure, productionreproduction). This could be true especially for the professional classes, for which it is increasingly difficult to establish a difference between spaces of pleasure and work, between consumption and production. Increasingly, we work anywhere: at home, in coffee shops, in parks. Starbucks with internet, power outlets, and jacket-clad folks working in

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front of their laptops have their counterpart in workspaces for creative professionals that let you quickly jump from more conventional work to playing a video game, hitting a speed bag, or playing the electric guitar. For Jodi Dean (2009), consumption and leisure on the networks becomes a job that we do constantly and free of charge, which generates many benefits for large communication multinationals. Lefebvre, on another hand, has important elements in common with Foucault’s discourse on space. Both are interested in a phenomenological view of space, in introducing lived spaces into politics, both speak of heterotopias and both live at the same time and in the same country, under the rigid bureaucratic planning of the French welfare state born under Gaullism’s shadow. However, Lefebvre retains some kind of Marxist intellectual militancy that makes a remarkable difference, at least still in his work The Urban Revolution. In both authors, the irruption of heterotopia is completely related to utopia. In Foucault’s case, the association of history with modernity and with a cultural period that has passed —or is about to— at the time of his talk also implies an overcoming of utopia which, in turn, could be one of the revolutionary policies overall. It is not by chance that utopias appear characterized in Foucault as essentially places with no real place —as “unreal spaces” (Foucault 2008, 17). Conversely, heterotopias are “real places, effective places” which are “effectively realized utopias in which the real emplacement, all the other real emplacements that can be found within culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (Foucault 2008, 17). The dominant heterotopias in our society would be what Foucault calls heterotopias of deviation: spaces that escape from rules and regulations at the same time that they are necessary in any type of society (it is a cultural universal). Heterotopias involve very different functions, include different types of spatiality and temporality, juxtapose many different apparently incompatible places and would escape the rigid normativization of space. I do not know if Lefebvre (2003) knew Foucault’s discourse when a few years later he introduced the notion of heterotopia in his analyses of the city. In Lefebvre the contestation of centralized city planning and zoning is much more explicit than in Foucault’s works. The urban society that he criticizes is that of bureaucratically organized consumption. The attacks on Le Corbusier and functionalism are explicit given that he sees it as a threat to urban life, that separates and segregates, transforming the city into a place designed simply for sleeping and ignoring the street (reduced to the use of cars). Le Corbusier’s “habitat machine” in response to the demands of industrialization starts from a type of hierarchical planning, from top to bottom, that creates a quantitative and homogeneous space, in which the lived space is confined to cubicles: “Habitat, ideology and practice, had even prepressed the elementary characteristics of urban life, as noted by a very short-sighted ecology. These included the diversity of ways of living, urban types, patterns, cultural models, and values associated with the modalities

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and modulations of everyday life. Habitat was imposed from above as the application of a homogenous global and quantitative space, a requirement that lived experience allow itself to be enclosed in boxes, cages, or dwelling machines” (Lefebvre 2008, 81).

Lefebvre introduces a third expression between utopia and heterotopia, isotropy. This latter notion brings up the homogenizing urban planning of zoning. Heterotopia makes sense mainly in relation to the imposition of isotropy as that which escapes the isotropic planning of the territory. On the other hand, utopia, although it is a non-place as its name suggests, is above all a search for a place, which he claims is not imaginary but very real: a political project and above all a possible space. Thus, Lefebvre’s commitment to utopia seems much more solid.

URBANISM AND IDEOLOGY The success of the notion of heterotopia has to do mainly with the way in which it responds to the uniformity supposedly produced by capitalist urbanism. However, the relationship between capitalist urban planning and the homogenization of space has become much more complicated since the 1970s. We could even say that neoliberal capitalism has much more to do today with the production of diversity than with uniformity, at least compared to the typical urbanism of the Fordist period. For Zizek (2004, 2010), the reason that radical ideas like those of Deleuze end up playing such an ambiguous role is because neoliberal capitalism “has already overcome the logic of totalizing normality and has adopted the logic of erratic excess” (22). The weakening of normality and regularities is part of the dynamic capitalism that emerged after the 1970s and reached total hegemony in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jodi Dean expresses herself in similar terms when saying that the left “won the culture wars fought throughout the universities, arts and media during the eighties” (2009, 7), at the same time that neoliberalism was winning on the economic policy front. But she seems unable to assume that many of the claims of “singularity, difference and the fluidity of modes of becoming” (2009, 7) have been appropriated by neoliberalism and are now part of the dominant ideology. According to Zizek, the neoliberal economy is not heading, as Naomi Klein said two decades ago, towards centralization, consolidation and homogenization by waging a war against diversity. This notion of capitalism had its days numbered, and it would be replaced by a contemporary capitalism that constantly seeks to diversify and exploit any symbolic cultural production niche that allows turning a vulgar merchandise into something new, as well as delegating power to achieve employee self-responsibility and self-management of the poor’s own misery. Therefore, to what extent is continuing to present capitalism as a

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centralized, homogenizing and bureaucratic power an anachronism, completely out of context? Even the multiplicity of modernities (there is not a single modernity with a fixed essence, but many modernities, each of which is irreducible to the others) is for Zizek (2004, 212) a fetishistic rejection. Multiplication works by freeing the universal notion of modernity from its antagonism in the way that it is inscribed in the capitalist system, relegating this dimension to that of one of its historical subspecies. Hence, the diversity of modernities, instead of being a criticism of capitalist modernity, would be the way to save and legitimize it in the post-modern cultural context. At the level of urbanism, critiques of functionalism offered by authors such as Lefebvre or Jacobs coincide with the emergence of what we properly call neoliberal urbanism. General planning is replaced by planning by parts, by projects, until reaching the current place-making. From the authoritarian plan, we move on to strategic and indicative plans for private agents, who are the real managers of creating the city. From the organization of space from above, it is possible to integrate multiple agents through governance formulas, mainly construction companies and companies with real estate interests. There is a point where the libertarianism of the critical philosophers of space in the 1970s would have the approval of the great neoliberal gurus of contemporary urbanism. Post-modern urbanism, like the neoliberal economy, feeds on creativity, difference and spontaneity in its need to constantly renew the spectacle so that the expanded circulation of capital continues. It is a policy that of course abandons utopia as something that inevitably leads to barbarian demolitions and massive displacement. That is why it connects with heteroropia: the idea of heterotopia fits much better with spaces that are always ready to transform, to change, to contain multiple functions, multiple spatialities, to radically differentiate themselves. Isn’t Disney World the best example of a heterotopic space? This is Bruchansky’s opinion (2010), following Baudrillard and his reference to Disneyland as a fantastic mirror that enables the illusion that the rest of the world is something real. Returning to the case of Mexico City, it is surprising how, despite the constant public and private investment in the historic center since the 1990s, the success in gentrifying the area has been highly questionable and limited to distinct subsectors. There are several reasons that explain this, but one of the most notorious is the high percentage of owners and public rents, which places the working classes in a good negotiating position before any renovation project. The 1985 earthquake was one of the greatest recent tragedies in the city. It mainly affected central areas and very significantly the historic center, built on clay soils and with poorly maintained buildings. Many structures collapsed. In 2013 you could still find lots that housed provisional camps, created as a result of this catastrophe. The tragedy was also the engine of a strong solidarity movement. The resulting association and neighborhood fabric forced authorities to dedicate large amounts of public funds to the relocation of those affected within their own neighborhoods. Today, under façades covered with products destined for street sales, large public developments are hidden, a kind of

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small functionalist neighborhoods built within the large blocks of the central grid, reminiscent of social housing anywhere in the world. Paradoxically, it is functionalist urbanism and the previous intervention of the bureaucratic state that have maintained the working-class population in the historic center, despite Carlos Slim’s heterotopic interventions. The case of the historic center of Seville, by contrast, could be an example of successful gentrification. Especially the northern part, traditionally residential, popular and highly degraded until the 1990s and structured on the baroque promenade of the Alameda de Hércules. During different periods the Alameda was a catalyst for difference, mixing, the forbidden... It was a promenade of lords and peasants, an enclave of prostitution, of illegal sale, and of flamenco art. It has never ceased to be the quintessential heterotopic space of the historic center. Even as it transformed into a professional middle-class sector and a large part of the illicit activities that it previously hosted disappeared, the Alameda environment has continued to be an eclave of gays, radical left-wing activism, Sevillian cultural bohemia or even squatted socials centers (for a time at least). Currently, and due to the impact of tourist accommodation platforms such as Airbnb, there is great alarm about the displacement of residents by tourists. The success of this space is such that it does not stop attracting new uses and users, increasingly cosmopolitan, at the same time that it expels those who can no longer afford it. The history of the Alameda is quite similar to that of many other historical centers, especially in Europe. In general, as cities have grown, these spaces have become the heterotopic deviation spaces par excellence. It is no coincidence that already in the last decades of the 20th century, in the neoliberal context, they were becoming the preferred playgrounds for experimentation of the middle classes and architects. And today, with the widespread impact of over-tourism in historical cities, do historical centers not also become another type of heterotopia? A chronic utopia, which abolishes time and its own history through cultural consumption? A Disney World on a 1:1 scale? In my opinion, in Lefebvrian theory the segregation and fragmentation of urban space that are attributed to isotropy do not respond entirely to simple zoning, but go much further. Isotropy is primarily the result of capitalist private ownership of land. The homogenization that accompanies the private appropriation of space is essential for its transformation into merchandise, so that it can be traded and its value become translatable into other merchandise. Lefebvre’s critique of urbanism is made in the context of bureaucratic Fordist capitalism, but it is a critique of the space of capitalism as a mode of production and that’s why it surpasses that particular period. For its part, post-modern urbanism speaks about diversity, creativity and participation. However, it hides the homogenization and injustice produced by the market. The isotropy of historical enclaves hides the displacement and segregation of those who cannot afford them. We could say that the current neoliberal urbanism is extremely ideological in a

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Lefebvrian sense, since it is the very appearance of diversity, participation and horizontality which hides its opposites.

REFERENCES Bruchansky, Christophe. 2010. “The Heterotopia of Disney World.” Philosophy Now 77. Accessed March 10, 2020. https://philosophynow.org/issues/77/The_Heterotopia_ of_Disney_World. Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Durham: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Space, Knowledge and Power”. In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 238-256. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 2008. “Of other spaces”. In Heterotopia and the city. Public space in a postcivil society, edited by MichieleDehaene andLieven De Cauter,13-31. New York: Routledge. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1984. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: Minnesota Universty Press. Slavoj, Zizek. 2004. Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge. Wilson, Japhy and Eric Swyngedouw. 2014. The Post-Political and its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 11

PALESTINIAN URBANITY: UTOPIA OR HETEROTOPIA? Rachel Kallus, Ronnen Ben-Arie† and Haya Zaatry‡ Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion – IIT, Haifa, Israel

ABSTRACT The present study revisits the meaning of heterotopia by examining the current trend of Palestinian urbanity in Haifa. In this study, we investigate a unique urban phenomenon that has been emerging in recent years in Haifa, where a variety of new Palestinian cultural venues are opening, providing different platforms for diverse forms of entertainment, commercial and artistic activities. These venues are located mainly in areas of the city that were partly destroyed during the 1948 war, have since remained neglected, and recently have become a target for urban renewal. These venues mould a local Palestinian identity through an “inward-directed” life stance, along with an outward dialogue with the world at large, the Arab world in general, the Palestinian people in particular and also with the Israeli public. Using the concept of heterotopia to explore the case of the revived Palestinian urbanity in Haifa, we examine the entanglement of ethno-nationalism and neoliberalism in the development and creation of urban space. We highlight the manner in which the independent Palestinian cultural scene interacts with, reflects and diverts the powers of both ethno-national citizenship and neoliberal urban development. However, the logics of these two paradigms, i.e., ethno-national citizenship and neoliberal urban development, are not fully concurrent, and there are contradictions in their operation, which might unfold possibilities for the creation of differences and changes, in ways that might refract and disturb both paradigms.

Keywords: ethno-nationalism, neoliberalism, urban citizenship, Israel/Palestine, Haifa Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected]. Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected]. ‡ Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].  †

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INTRODUCTION The initial formulation of the concept of heterotopia elucidates a spatial articulation of a discursive order, manifesting its own logics and categories, in ways that deflect and disrupt prevailing paradigms. Heterotopian spaces for Foucault are other spaces: countersites, of effectively realised utopias in which all the other real sites are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted (Foucault 2003, 1997). Heterotopia is often understood as a space of resistance, emancipation and freedom. However, as Johnson asserts, “heterotopias are not separate from society; they are distinct emplacements that are ‘embedded’ in all cultures and mirror, distort and react to the remaining space” (2013, 794). That is, heterotopias are concrete realised spaces, and through their relations with the social and political order of which they are part, we can learn about the qualities of that order. Thus, heterotopias are both an object and a method of inquiry. Researchers have adopted the concept of heterotopia as a way to approach the analysis of an incredibly varied range of urban phenomena, struggling with the validity of this notion in current cities. The concept was widely explored as part of the “reassertion of space” or the “spatial turn” that has gathered pace in humanities and social sciences, starting from the 1980s (Soja 1989; Warf and Arias 2009), and enjoyed broad critical appeal across literary studies, visual cultures and cultural geography (Dehaene and de Cauter 2008). Ferdinand, Souch and Wesselman (2020) highlight how heterotopia and globalisation intersect in the current culture. Their edited volume sets out a new typology for heterotopian spaces in the globalising present and argue that digital technologies, climate change, migration and other global phenomena give rise to a heterotopian multiplicity of discursive spaces, which overlap and clash with one another. Despite the divergence of positions adopted by researchers on the topic of heterotopia, a majority agree that most of the current processes of urban development in the neoliberal city can be described as heterotopias. Our project revisits space, identity and citizenship in the city of Haifa, with an aim to redefine heterotopia. We explore the formation of urban life and cityscapes of Haifa in the context of post-national urbanism, to see if and how urban citizenship can confront the state and its notion of citizenship. Our intention is to question the validity of the notion of heterotopia in the discussion of urban spaces that are shaped by the intersection of settlercolonialism and the neoliberal order, and specifically, to ask how the notion of heterotopia is related to communal life, belonging and identity of the Palestinian community of Haifa. What is the rationality of the notion of heterotopia in addressing current urban events in the social, economic and political context of Haifa within Israel/Palestine? Palestinian cultural sites currently thriving in Downtown Haifa resonate with Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, as they hold the potential and often the intention to enact

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a strategy of resistance, while being situated within the urban fabric and processes of development. They express a current revival of Palestinian urbanity in Haifa through a variety of new Palestinian venues that are of late opening in the city, providing different platforms for cultural activities, entertainment and commerce. These cultural nodes are located mainly in areas of the city that were partly destroyed in the 1948 war, neglected since then, and have recently undergone urban renewal processes. The activity they stimulate shapes a local identity through the process of turning inwards (Palestinian citizens of Israel), along with an outward global dialogue with the Arab world in general and the Palestinian people in particular, while also being in dialogue with the Israeli public. Can this negotiation of urban citizenship suggest the formation of urban life and cityscapes of post-national urbanism? Particularly, we wish to explore how heterotopia operates within, subvert or problematise the interrelations of settler-colonial logic and neoliberal urban development that are at work in the production of urban space in Haifa. How can the notion of heterotopia help to revisit and understand these processes as a struggle for the creation of commons? How can these processes add to the changing meaning of the notion of heterotopia? The contemporary political map of Israel is marked by a combination of the institutionalised ethnocratic regime (Yiftachel 2006) and an emerging neoliberal system (Mandelkern and Shalev 2018). According to Tzafdia and Yacobi (2011), in Israel, neoliberalism is an institutional force that is not in conflict with the state and the government but rather reinforces the ethno-national logic of spatial control and segregation. This interplay between centralist-national territorial management and neoliberal planning and land policies was further developed by Yacobi and Tzfadia (2017). However, its underlying urban processes and their effects on cities, especially on the formation of urban citizenship, have received minimal attention. We position our study within the historical context of the political currents of Haifa, aiming to present an analysis of urban identity, belonging and rights vis-à-vis the concept of heterotopia. We focus on the nature of urban citizenship, as it is enacted through everyday cultural practices of young Palestinians in Haifa, suggesting the informal and formal channels through which claims to urban space and resources are pursued. Using the recent revival of Palestinian culture in the city of Haifa as a case study, we examine the complex negotiations between the state and civil society in the (re)construction of Palestinian urbanity, paying particular attention to the role of entertainment and cultural institutions in this process. Drawing on the ethnography of young Palestinians’ cultural and entertainment practices in Downtown Haifa, we show that they simultaneously engage with multiple urban public spheres to reconstruct and express their identities and confront Palestinian and Israeli societies at multiple scales.

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BACKGROUND: URBAN CITIZENSHIP AND POST-NATIONAL HETEROTOPIA IN THE NEOLIBERAL CITY Citizenship is typically defined at the nation-state level; therefore, it is linked to national sovereignty, related to the possession of specific rights and the obligation to comply with certain duties within the state or political community. However, the complex articulations of state and civil society in the construction of citizenship, and the intricate local/urban, national and transnational interconnections shaping contemporary conceptions and social practices of citizenship highlight the significance of citizenship, particularly for the organisation of cities (Bauböck 2003; Staeheli 2003; García 1996). Many researchers have discussed the concept of urban citizenship in relation to the right to the city, although, as recently pointed out by Marcuse (2014), this is a catchy phrase, and has been used with quite a diversity of often contradictory meanings. Researchers also offer perspectives on the meanings and practices of citizenship and their geographies in the contemporary era of accelerated neoliberalism and the globalised movement of people across national boundaries (Ehrkamp and Leithner 2003; Sassen 2002). They have pointed to post-national urbanism and, thus, post-national citizenship. Formal decisions about citizenship are taken by the state, but the quality of citizenship is often the result of conflict and negotiation between social and political forces, mostly manifested at the urban level through notions of belonging and participation. Although cities lack autonomy and economic resources to enhance formal citizenship, the local scale offers opportunities to exercise social and cultural rights. Recent developments, enhanced by neoliberalism and immigration, confronted the political power of the state with demands for urban rights (Blokland et al. 2015; Cunningham 2011). These developments suggest a dynamic concept of post-national urban citizenship to be considered as a process rather than a stable societal feature (Cohen and Margalit 2015). However, as mentioned earlier, nationalism and neoliberalism are entwined in the creation and distribution of identities and rights. Although neoliberal logic might be conceived as weakening the ethno-national logic, which might lead to more inclusive and diverse cities, different cases in Israel show that these forces operate together and motivate each another in the creation of urban space (Tzfadia and Yacobi 2007; 2010). Thus, while much of urban development is realised through privatisation of land and planning procedures, new public management and private investment, the ethno-national logic continues to be apparent in spatial segregation, local and state distribution, and allocation of resources and rights. Notwithstanding the entanglement of ethno-nationalism and neoliberalism in the development and production of urban spaces, these logics do not fully concur and there are contradictions in their operation that might open possibilities for the creation of differences and changes in ways that might deflect and disturb both paradigms. By using the concept

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of heterotopia to explore the case of the revived Palestinian urbanity in Haifa, we seek to highlight the ways this phenomenon interacts with, reflects and diverts the powers of both ethno-national citizenship and neoliberal urban development.

CURRENT PALESTINIAN URBANITY IN HAIFA A Revived Palestinian Culture Haifa is the third largest city in Israel. It comprises diverse cultures, ethnicities and religious groups (Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and Bahai). Its multicultural population is often used by the Haifa Municipality to promote and brand Haifa as a place of coexistence, although in reality, the city is quite segregated. Through its development, Haifa has been shaped by geopolitical and historical events, resulting in a topographical separation by which the Palestinian communities are predominant in the Lower City, while Jewish communities prevail on Mount Carmel. Despite being labelled as a city of shared life and co-existence (Yazbak and Weiss 2011; Monterescu and Rabinowitz 2007), segregation between populations has been an important feature of inter-community dynamics in Haifa. The development of neighbourhoods according to religious affiliations, e.g., Muslims, Christians and Jews, was encouraged by the Ottoman rulers of Palestine, and this policy was later adopted by the British Mandate (Goren 2006). Although known at the time for its shared municipality (Goren 2006), starting from the 1930s, as the Judaization of the city increased (Goren 2004), an ethnic separation between Jews and Palestinians in housing, workplaces and daily life grew wider to become the deep logic of the urban space (Bernstein 2000; Kidron 2016; Yazbak 1998). During the 1948 war, 95% of the city’s Palestinians, half of the city’s total population at the time, were forced out of the city and became refugees in neighbouring countries and other localities, and the old city was demolished and razed to the ground (Ben-Arie 2016; Khalidi 2008; Goren 1994; Morris 1988). Following the war, the remaining minor Palestinian population was concentrated in the controlled neighbourhood of Wadi Nisnas (Goren 1999). Spatial segregation has increased after the establishment of the State of Israel (Kolodney and Kallus, 2008), and in the following decades, as the city’s Palestinian population grew and its spatial distribution expanded, it was by and large located in the lower parts of the city (Ben Arzi 1996). This topographical demographic pattern of segregation, intensified by designated neighbourhoods and divided education systems, is also expressed in socio-economic differences, with the Jewish community, in general, occupying the higher income brackets (CBS, 2018).

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Whether Haifa, with about 30,000 Palestinian residents, just under 10% of the city’s total population,1 is in fact a mixed city, is debatable. Rabinowitz and Monterescu (2008) argue that, to this day, Haifa continues to represent a socio-demographic reality in which there are shared elements of identity, symbolic traits and cultural markers. For many of Haifa’s Palestinian residents, the history of the city is a daily lived experience and an important aspect of their identity (Kanafani 2001; Habibi, 1993). Although the city of Haifa is not the largest conurbation of Palestinians within Israel, it is an important centre of Palestinian socio-political and cultural activity and a focus of urban life for the Palestinian population of Galilee. Since the 1990s, Haifa is home to an emerging middle-class Palestinian population, which is partly moving to the formerly Jewish-dominated neighbourhoods (Falah et al. 2000). Simultaneously, the lower part of the inner city of Haifa is turning into a hub for a variety of Palestinian cultural and leisure activities (Karkabi 2018; Kallus 2013; Jabareen 2008) and a centre for Palestinian social activism (Faier 1998). Monterescu (2011) attributes this cultural pluralism to a more equal distribution of socio-economic resources in Haifa, in comparison with other Israeli mixed cities. Karkabi (2018) elucidates the regression of Haifa’s centrality in Israeli geopolitics that has allowed educated and affluent Palestinians to (re)create a decidedly Palestinian civic sphere through cultural activities. Faier (2005) shows how the second generation of post-1948 politicised Palestinian urban middle class, contesting state suppression of Palestinian nationality, established independent social, political and cultural Palestinian institutions. Karkabi (2013) has shown how musicians and their audiences create a politicised counterculture that innovatively fuses local and international music expressions as a form of protest. Through the use of music, young Palestinians struggle against civil marginalisation in Israel, military occupation in the occupied territories as well as against social and religious controls within their own communities. With their counterparts in the West Bank, they emphasise a committed affiliation to a national Palestinian agenda and regional Arab culture as well as international subaltern groups. They also revolt against social and religious controls within their own communities, promoting sexual diversity, gender equality, individual liberties, secularity and a bohemian lifestyle. In describing these young Palestinians, Karkabi drafted the geographical flexibility of heterotopian spaces based on the fluid temporality of events in an alternative scene facilitated by the reconstruction and reclamation of space without having to abide to social, political, or legal responsibilities. The current cultural scene in Haifa differs since the Palestinian cultural venues are actual physical sites. Yet, as in the alternative musical scene described by Karkabi, young Palestinians accept and maintain the marginal location of the scene, which permits a 1

Although official estimates show that Palestinians account for 11% of the population of Haifa (City of Haifa 2011), unofficial figures state that is over 20%, since the residents, many of them students, who live in Haifa retain their official address in their Palestinian hometowns.

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subject-centred space open to national, ethnic, gender, sexuality difference and otherness. Similar to the alternative music scene described by Karkabi (2013), the current struggle of the cultural scene in Haifa is not simply to claim a space for Palestinian culture but to do so politically, that is, as Palestinians. The establishment of these activities in fixed and somewhat permanent sites, as opposed to temporary spaces, whether in “Jewish” locations or as non-permanent activities, requires engagement with city and state institutions in terms of planning, economics, regulation and the like. This requires a new approach that questions their ability to act as alternative, oppositional and contested sites. Hence, we consider these sites as heterotopias in the context presented earlier, as distinct emplacements, not separated from society and space but rather embedded within them while reacting, reflecting and distorting their order and arrangement.

The Palestinian Cultural Scene The current Palestinian cultural scene of Haifa is active in diverse physical locations in the Downtown area of Haifa and the German colony.

Figure 1. Haifa Downtown, The German Colony and Wadi Saleeb (in dark shade) with Palestinian cultural venues marked in white dots.

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The limits of their deployment are clear in terms of the topographic structure of the city, in areas developed in the 19th and 20th centuries during the Ottoman rule and the British Mandate over Palestine. These areas, stretched along the lower tier of the city, have traditionally delineated the inner city prior to the 1948 war, and have been neglected and deteriorated for decades. In the past 20 years, these parts of the city have undergone municipality-led urban regeneration projects, based on neoliberal practices such as the privatisation of properties and planning procedures, public-private partnership, rehabilitation and rebranding of urban space and the encouragement of private investment and gentrification. The new Palestinian cultural scene, which is being developed in these areas, consists of a series of Palestinian-owned entertainment and cultural venues, such as independent theatres, bars and clubs. These places attract young Palestinians who are part of an upcoming middle-class population, who are generally considered as the “creative class” (Florida 2002).

Figure 2. A map of Haifa Downtown area showing the venues discussed in this chapter.

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The independent Palestinian cultural venues that opened in Downtown Haifa are sites of cultural production, relatively different from the musical scene described by Karkabi (2013). As opposed to music productions that have been gaining popularity in the accessible deterritorialized space of the Internet, mainly through social media networks, the independent Palestinian cultural venues in Downtown Haifa are actual places, owned and run by Palestinians. Thus, rather than musical productions happening in places that are part of the Israeli establishment, be they bars owned and run by Israelis who are not Palestinian, or venues devoted to Palestinian culture but funded by the government, such as Al-Midan Theatre, for example, the new Palestinian cultural scene is independent. So, while the previous cultural production is transient, the new scene is more stable and the venues independency allows them to freely manifest their autonomy. The new places vary in their cultural prospects, artistic scenarios, creative approaches, organisational models and management methods. Despite their obvious differences, they all attempt to recuperate a Palestinian urban life, in light of the lack of spaces that would allow the Palestinian population in Haifa to revive and preserve its unique identity and heritage. As noted on the Internet site of Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Israel Office, one of the financers of the Khashabi Theatre: “In view of the lack of cultural spaces and activities that could allow the Palestinian population in Haifa to revive and preserve its unique identity and heritage, the theatre now offers a space where Palestinians can be free to create and experiment, to challenge existing norms, empower the local community and examine Palestinian identity.” (https://www.rosalux.org.il/en/partner/478/) A similar objective is expressed by the Haifa Independent Film Festival (HIFF) in its aspiration of “taking advantage of neglected independent Palestinian venues and spaces for the purpose of creating a cultural discourse.” (https://www.haifaiff.com)

This aim to recapture a Palestinian space in the city resonates through the choice of locations for the new venues in the urban areas that made the city before the 1948 war. According to the aforementioned Khashabi Theatre declaration, “[t]he theatre is located in an old Ottoman building in the historic Wadi Salib area of downtown Haifa.” This and other such locations provide for a Palestinian setting that is strengthening a Palestinian identity, along with a selection of representation practices, such as the use of language, décor and the ambience the places vibrate. Kabareet (‫)ﻙﺏﺍﺭﻱﺕ‬, for example, is an independent Palestinian bar and performance stage that offers a variety of cultural activities, such as concerts by local and overseas artists, workshops and art classes, lectures, parties and festivals. Its name, which means “matches,” in Arabic, is a play on the French term cabaret. Kabareet was launched in November 2015 by three members of the Jazar Crew collective, a group of DJs and organisers of Palestinian rave parties aiming to provide an independent Palestinian space that could accommodate

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cultural activities, parties and alternative performances. They attempted to bridge the Haifa and Ramallah Palestinian cultural and music scene, overcome the sanctions imposed by Palestinians and support international musicians in venues within Israel, in a manner that complies with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement guidelines.2 Kabareet is situated in an Ottoman stone structure, which, prior to 1948, served as the stable of a Palestinian family residence. The site appears concealed for the general public, but it exists in the lives of young Palestinians. It is located in a hidden alley, with no sign indicating its presence, so in most cases only people who already know about it will find it. Its décor plays on Palestinian and pan-Arab nostalgia. The original painted flooring was well preserved as were the six cross vaults and their massive columns that divide the space.3 On the walls are pictures from the 1960s and the 1970s of musicians and actors from the Arab world, and the furniture resembles a traditional Palestinian home. The outdoor seating area, with wooden chairs, herbs, citrus and climbing vine, echoes a khakura (‫)ﺡﺍﻙﻭﺭﺓ‬, a traditional Palestinian garden.

Figure 3. Kabareet, interior view. Photo by Wael Abu Jabal, 2018.

2 3

On the BDS movement, see: https://bdsmovement.net. The authenticity of the space often affects the quality of the performances and the experience of the audience, when the problematic acoustics caused by the structure and the materials adds to bad visibility as it is blocked by the massive pillar in the middle of the space.

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Figure 4. Kabareet, interior view detail. Photo by Maria Zreik, 2017.

Given that it is the first place to offer an alternative to Israeli bars and clubs, Kabareet has been an important generator of events in the current cultural scene in Haifa. In an effort to make connections between Haifa and Ramallah through a joint music scene, it created an actual collaboration of joint Palestinian cultural events. Over the years it has initiated local independent Palestinian festivals, such as KOOZ, HIFF and Mahrajazz, and hosted global festivals, such as the “Palest’IN & OUT” of the Franco-Palestinian Cultural Institute that had only taken place in Paris until then and in 2016 was held concurrently in Haifa, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Jericho, Nablus and Gaza. The Globalvision Festival, an alternative live performance calling for the boycott of the 2019 Eurovision contest, which took place in Tel-Aviv, was held simultaneously in London, Dublin and Haifa (Kabareet). The Khashabi Theatre (‫ )ﻡﺱﺭﺡﺥﺵﺏ ﺓ‬is a different example. It is an independent theatre ensemble established by five Palestinian theatre students at the University of Haifa, later registered as an association aiming for independence and cultural freedom. In their early days, they collaborated as a sovereign ensemble with various theatres. However, over the years they have realised that in order to be independent and to preserve their theatrical heritage, they need their own space. In 2015, they rented a building, renovated it, and started their own theatre. As a registered association, their main funding comes from international foundations,4 which offer them some financial freedom as well as independence in their repertoire selection.

4

Current funding is primarily from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Culture Recourse.

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Since its opening, Khashabi Theatre has become a thriving hub for Palestinian art and culture. Apart from the theatre, the building contains an exhibit space, a bookstore, library, café and offices. In addition to housing the Khashabi Ensemble, which produces a season of original theatre productions annually, the site curates and hosts art exhibits, poetry readings, film screenings, lectures, standup nights and visiting festivals and performances. All activities are in Arabic, some are translated into English, but never into Hebrew, which indicates the target audience. The Khashabi Theatre is part of a building cluster in an area slightly far from the heart of the city, and is thus somewhat quiescent during the evenings and at night. It is open mainly in the evenings for activities advertised through social media and Arabic and English posters put up throughout the Downtown area. Unlike Kabareet, which is open every night, people attend Khashabi only for specified events. Although it aims to reach a wider audience, its repertoire focusses on specific population strata. In its political program, it makes an attempt to re-educate middle-class Palestinians whose agendas might have blurred. As indicated in the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung introduction of the theatre: “As part of its ideology, the Khashabi Ensemble uses the ‘Theatre Lab’ method, a dynamic and holistic approach, which puts great emphasis on the process and on involving members of the community who typically do not participate in political artistic production. It combines interviews, research and improvisations into a unique theatre production and aims to generate cooperation with community members, stimulate critical dialogue and question preconceived ideas in the Israeli society.”

The building belonged until 1948 to the affluent Al-Khatib family (‫ )ﻉﺍﺉﻝﺓ ﺍﻝﺥﻁﻱﺏ‬who owned multitude of properties in Haifa (Yazbak, 1998). After the war, it was declared an “absentees’ property,” and was managed by the Custodianship Council for Absentees’ Property, and later transferred to the Development Authority.5 It is part of an urban block declared recently for conservation by the municipality, containing residences, workshops, offices, commercial complexes and a church (the Maronite Church). The building style, typical of the urban fabric constructed outside the Old City walls of Haifa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Fuchs, 2000/2001), is characterised by massive vaults and pillars that divide the space rigidly, and is not always suitable for theatrical performances. However, its political agendas have caused Khashabi to prefer this site, which they consider to be in the historic Wadi Salib, partly as a political declaration.6 As in the case of Kabareet, the architecture is a direct and intuitive mediator of the urban Palestinian past, where the building becomes memorabilia through which the The Absentees’ Property Law (1950) was the main legal instrument used by the State of Israel to take possession of the land and properties belonging to Palestinians who were expelled, or had fled from the country during the war, from 29 November 1947 onwards. The Development Authority, a legal body established in 1951, enabled the State to use these properties for development purposes, through the management of the Israel Land Authority. 6 In a recent conversation they have expressed a second thought over their choice of building. 5

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missing Palestinian city can be relived. As the only traces left from the Palestinian city, the building serves as a memorial to the lives of its citizens. A wooden badge at the entrance of the Khashabi Theatre is designed as though it is a private house and states, “The alKhatib family, 10 Al-Khatib Street.” This is a clear statement indicating that it is still the home of a Palestinian family despite their absence. Fattoush (‫ﻑﺕﻭﺵ‬ ) offers a different model of a Palestinian venue. As a private business, it navigates between different audiences with the primary attempt of increasing its profit. Established in 1997, it is the oldest culinary institution on the Ben Gurion Boulevard in the German Colony of Haifa. In addition to being a Palestinian-owned restaurant, it is also a cultural site, with a small gallery located on the ground floor, which features alternating works by local artists and small performances and poetry evenings, readings and discussions. Fattoush Mettagger (‫)ﻡﺕﺝﺭﻑﺕّﻭﺵ‬, a store opened in 2016 on the top floor of the building, sells handworks of local Palestinian artists, Arabic books by local writers as well as books imported from Arab countries, along with music albums by Palestinian musicians on both sides of the Green Line.

Figure 5. A wooden plate at the entrance to the Khashabi Theatre designed as a sign to a private house.

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Figure 6. Fattoush café interior view.

Figure 7. Fattoush café interior view (note the depiction of the famous Lebanese singer Fairuz).

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Fattoush is located in a Templar building that once belonged to the German Colony of Haifa, in an area that recently underwent a massive urban renewal. Being a major tourist location, it attracts a wide range of visitors, such as families, couples, youth, tourists, Israelis and Palestinians. Its Palestinian décor, menu and atmosphere are attractive to locals and visitors, Palestinian and non-Palestinians, and its popularity has been resting on the interaction it offers between these diverse populations (Jabareen, 2008). However, most of the visitors are unaware of the existence of the Fattoush Mettagger, which for Palestinians is one of the most important cultural sites in Haifa. According to Natour and Giladi (2011), over the years, many Palestinian artists and intellectuals have been attracted, supported and their identities shaped by Fattoush. After its launch, Fattoush Mettagger became one of the most important bookstores in Palestinian society, active mainly during its annual book fairs, each of which is claimed to have been visited by about 4,000 people. The fair brings thousands of Arabic titles published by Arab publishing houses located in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Italy, the Gulf countries and Egypt. Its significance is marked by the access it allows to the Arabiclanguage culture, previously not accessible to the Palestinian society in Israel. Its 2018 marketing poster claimed that “20,000 books have crossed borders.” The fair also features musical events, concerts, seminars and special events for the marketing of selected books.

DISCUSSION: PALESTINIAN CULTURAL SCENE IN HAIFA: UTOPIA OR HETEROTOPIA? Are the independent Palestinian cultural venues alternative places that oppose the existing order, or are they operating within the existing system; realising it and exploiting whatever the neoliberal reality of economic prosperity of the free market offers and allows, taking advantage of development opportunities, the media and social networks? None of the venues discussed enjoy state patronage, conspicuously by choice. While entertainment institutions such as restaurants, bars and clubs rarely receive government funding, theatres in Israel are usually heavily funded, and to some extent literary and music production houses, especially of minority groups, but that is not the case with these Palestinian initiatives. Therefore, even when their aim is to promote culture, these ventures decline any association with the official Israeli institution. This independence allows them a considerable artistic autonomy in the selection of their repertoire (the Khashabi Theatre), book selection (Fattoush Mettagger), or music choice (Kabareet). Their artistic freedom often makes them Palestinian sites, despite being located within Israel, such as several cases of performers in Kabareet, being exempt by the BDS movement on number of occasions.

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However, despite this freedom, all these venues are Israeli businesses, operated on properties rented from private Israeli owners. The ownership is based on processes of dispossession and privatisation that tangle settler colonial ethno-national logic and neoliberalism.7 All venues are obliged to the Israeli business system in terms of licensing, permits, taxing, municipal by laws and regulations. This distinction between cultural and artistic freedom vis-a-vis the economic and legal embeddedness in the Israeli system highlights a specific aspect of considering these Palestinian establishments as heterotopias. The possibility for them to create and manifest their liminal existence and critique of the Israeli state reality rests on the banal acceptance of the state’s registration and economic system. Moreover, the specific conditions that allowed for establishing these cultural venues throughout the lower tier of the city during this time are very much related to the municipalled urban regeneration processes that the area is undergoing. Only a few years ago, this area was considered “out of limits” for youngsters, and the Palestinian cultural revival is very much connected to many other businesses, restaurants, bars, galleries and other venues that have opened in recent years, as part of the renewal project. Are these urban renewal processes supported by Palestinian cultural venues? Are these venues co-opted into the urban renewal process? On its official website, the HIFF proclaims that it is held “in the heart of Haifa’s Alternative cultural space…stretching over several Palestinian venues in Haifa.” It further aspires for “the creation of an independent cultural autonomy by taking advantage of neglected independent Palestinian venues and spaces” (https://www.haifaiff.com/). Similarly, in an invitation to a lecture titled “Theatre as Urban Institution,” Bashar Murkus and Wadie Shahbarat attempt to discuss “the theatre space as an arrowhead in urban revitalisation and an essential component of a vibrant urban fabric.”8 They obviously refer to the revival of the Palestinian urbanity that in many ways has been absent from Haifa for decades. However, can this revival be disconnected from the concrete urban space in which it takes place and the current processes of urban transformation that are at work? These independent Palestinian cultural venues have been produced through the appropriation of urban spaces and a claim for a right to the city. Through practices of belonging and participation, they are manifestations of urban citizenship that might replace the flawed national citizenship of Palestinians in Israel. However, can we consider them only as spaces of resistance and freedom, as they are embedded in networks of official planning, statedriven land privatisation and private capital?

Some of the sites, previously considered an “absentees’ property,” are currently rented from owners who acquired their properties from the Development Authority. 8 Bashar Murkus is a founding member of the Khashabi Theatre. Wadie Shahbarat is the creative consultant, and also the owner of Fattoush Café and Bookstore, and Fattoush Bar-Gallery. The lecture was given in Cornell University on 4 May 2017 (see: https://pma.cornell.edu/content/theatre-urban-institution-khashabi-theatrehaifa-511). 7

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Following Johnson’s assertion that “heterotopia disturbs and unsettles wherever it sheds its light: cultural spaces, disciplinary borders and notions of subjectivity” (2013, 800), we can conclude by saying that the concrete physical sites of the revived Palestinian urbanity in Haifa unsettles the existing socio-political order, which is founded on the basis of ethno-national and neoliberal entanglement. These spaces question prevailing subjectivities, social borders and power relations. However, they do so while relying on that same order they critique.

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Soja, Eduard. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Warf, Barney, and Arias, Santa (eds.). 2009. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspective.s London: Routledge. Yacobi, Haim, and Erez Tzfadia. 2017 “Neo-settler colonialism and the re-formation of territory: Privatization and nationalization in Israel.” Mediterranean Politics 24(1): 119. Yazbak, Mahmoud. 1998. Haifa in the Late Ottoman Period, 1864-1914: A Muslim Town in Transition. Leiden: Brill. Yazbak, Mahmoud, and Yfaat, Weiss (eds.). 2011. Haifa before & after 1948: Narratives of a mixed city. Dordrecht: Republic of Letters Publications.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 12

HETEROTOPIAS AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY: THE STRUGGLES FOR THE CREATION AND COLLECTIVE USE OF THE URBAN COMMONS Orlando Alves dos Santos Junior Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, Federal University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

ABSTRACT In the context of the spread of neoliberalism in different countries and cities of all continents, the objective of this essay is to address an aspect that has received little attention in the political analyses of this phenomenon. The chapter will reflect on the relationship between broader societal projects (universalist dimension) and people experience of concrete territories in daily life (particularistic dimension). Based on the works of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey on the production of space, heterotopia and the right to the city, this essay suggests some ideas about the relationship between universal projects and territorial particularisms, based on: (i) a dialectical conception of space, territory and place able to problematize the production and appropriation of common urban spaces in the city; (ii) common urban spaces and the city as a common; (iii) the right to the city as a necessity and as a political project. The reflection seeks to contribute to opening up paths toward understanding the processes by which the forms of public support and adhesion to conservative and ultra-liberal ideas are constructed, and at the same time to establish the possibilities of heterotopias, contestation and dispute as alternative projects.

Keywords: production of space, grassroots territories, heterotopia, right to the city

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Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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INTRODUCTION In any continent, in different countries and cities, we have witnessed the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant ideology and model of public administration (Harvey 2005). This process has been marked by the impressive capacity of the political forces that support them to convince, through actions combining different strategies of persuasion and coercion, consensus and imposition, that the neoliberal agendas are the best, and that there are no alternatives— in societal projects terms— beyond that which is based on the free market utopia. At the same time, the spread of neoliberalism as a dominant ideology occurs in parallel with the strengthening and growing spread of conservative values in the most different territories, through acts of intolerance, racial prejudice, return to the defense of male chauvinism, homophobia, xenophobia, among many other reactionary manifestations. The creative destruction of neoliberalism (Theodore et al. 2009) affects not only urban spaces, administrative institutions, social regulations, and symbolic representations, but also patterns of social cohesion, associative forms, identities and collective action repertoires. This scenario, present in several countries in the world, and which seemed distant from the Brazilian reality until very recently, has become part of the contemporary Brazilian political context, with the ultra-liberal inflection and Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in being elected president in 2018, strongly impacting both the pattern of the relationship between government and society and the dynamics of social movements and their action repertoires. The Brazilian case, although surprising, is not unique, considering that many other countries that have undergone experiences of progressive or developmental governments have been succeeded by conservative and neoliberal ones. The purpose of this essay is not to discuss the reasons for the ultraconservative inflection in Brazil, but to indicate theoretical contributions to address an aspect that has received little attention in the political analyses, which concerns the relationship between broader societal projects (universalist dimension) and the concrete territories people experience in daily life (particularistic dimension). The reflection seeks to contribute to opening up paths leading to understanding of the processes by which the forms of popular public support and adhesion to conservative and ultra-liberal ideas are constructed, and at the same time to excavate the possibilities of heterotopias, contestation and dispute over the territories for alternative projects. In this direction, based on the formulations of Henri Lefebvre (1967) and David Harvey (2012) regarding the production of space, heterotopia and the right to cities, the essay suggests some ideas about the relationship between universal projects and territorial particularities, based on: (i) a dialectical conception of space, territory and place to problematize the production and appropriation of the city’s common urban spaces; (ii) urban common spaces and the city as an urban common; (iii) the right to the city as a

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necessity and as a political project. Finally, in the concluding remarks, it is argued that it is necessary to return the dispute over popular public territories to the agenda for urban research and practice, based on the recognition of heterotopias that pervade their daily lives, from the perspective of the right to the city.

A DIALECTIC CONCEPTION OF SPACE, TERRITORY AND PLACE The concept of heterotopia, as formulated by Lefebvre (2008), allows us to establish a fruitful dialogue with other approaches concerned with interpreting social challenges to different forms of subordination and/or excavating societal alternatives to capitalism, such as the repertoire of concepts of action (Tilly 2010), insurgent citizenship (Holston 2013), insurgency (Miraftab 2009), dialectical utopianism (Harvey 2000), among others. Heterotopia emerges in different locations and circumstances as an expression of the various forms of appropriation/reappropriation of space and time by people in the search for the reproduction of their lives, as de-mercantilized spaces, an expression of use value. Heterotopia potentially involves conflict with established dominant forms and concerns everyday spatial practices that emerge from the contradictions of space (Lefebvre 1991a). In this sense, understanding and disputing the meaning of these diverse utopias, from the perspective of a transformative project, requires paying attention to the daily life of grassroots territories. Grassroots territories and communities are places characterized by sociability marked by social bonds that can be interpreted as patterns of local solidarity that promote a certain social cohesion in the broadest sense as defined by Durkheim (1999), such as that which unites and integrates the society in some way. In general, these patterns of local solidarity and their forms of social cohesion involve contradictory and conflicting, conservative or progressive elements in terms of values, closed or open to other socio-spatial, reproductive or contesting aspects of the current social order, elements that are constantly in dispute. In one way or another, these values experienced in the territory, in the form of several sociopolitical praxis, are related to some modality of a broader, more universalist societal project. These territorially-based socio-political activisms involve the mobilization and engagement of social groups in the maintenance or transformation of the reality and the diffusion or support, explicitly or implicitly, of certain patterns of solidarity and social cohesion. Territorially-based political activism can be interpreted as forms of militant particularism, as developed by Harvey from Raymond Williams’ original formulation (Harvey 2007). To understand the socio-political activism based on territory, it would seem appropriate to start by reflecting on the territory itself. Problematizing the territory is important because “concepts of space and time affect the way we understand the world to be. And they also

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provide a reference system by means of which we locate ourselves with respect to that world.” (Harvey 2004, 208). The territory can be defined in diverse ways and there is a long bibliography, especially on critical geography, dealing with this theme (Soja 1993; Souza 1995; Haesbaert 2016). Starting from these approaches and without intending to deepen this debate, we can say that the territory is an appropriate space, marked by power relations. As Souza states, territory is “a space defined and delimited by and based on power relations” (2000, 78). In this sense, “every space defined and delimited by and from power relations is a territory, from the neighborhood terrorized by a gang of young people to the bloc made up of NATO member countries” (Souza 2000, 111). The words territory, space and place have different meanings in different cultures and societies. As Harvey points out, “there are all sorts of words such as milieu, locality, location, locale, neighborhood, region, territory, and the like, which refer to generic qualities of place” (Harvey 2004, 208). The different meanings of space, territory and place (as well as time) refer not only to the objective location, but also encompass a diversity of metaphorical meanings, as Harvey argues, and may refer to the “place of art in social life, the place of men in society, our place in the cosmos, and we internalize such notions psychologically in terms of knowing our place or feeling we have a place in the affections or esteem of others.” (Harvey 2004, 208). As Harvey suggests, the objective and symbolic changes in space associated with contemporary globalization (falling space barriers, time-space compression, the emergence of cyberspace, among others) are linked to changes in the symbolic and metaphorical meanings of space. One of the most important aspects in this context is the growing sense of insecurity and fear, which justifies the spread of models of self-regulation, authoritarian social control and exclusive social and territorial behavior. In this direction, it is possible to see a clear link between the spread of neoliberal policies and the new military urbanism. As a result, as Graham points out, “the city’s poor are often faced with a reduction in public services, on the one hand, and a palpable demonization and criminalization on the other” (2016, 53). Fear of the other associated with excluding territorial behavior can weaken feelings of otherness and tolerance for difference, “because territorial place-based identity, particularly when conflated with race, ethnic, gender, religious and class differentiation, is one of the most pervasive bases for both progressive political mobilizations (militant particularism) as well as for reactionary exclusionary politics” (Harvey 2004, 209). Without disregarding the multiple territorial dimensions that exist, in this essay our interest is situated especially on the scale of the city and its multiple grassroots territories, many of which are marked by strong communitarian feelings. The question would be to discuss the conditions for people to perceive and feel the city as the place produced in common, albeit in a conflictual and constantly changing way (Harvey 2012).

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To affirm that a territory is produced collectively as a common does not mean, however, that it is appropriated collectively, lived in and perceived as an urban common space. But it is very difficult to imagine that everyone can appropriate the spaces in the city in the same way and that they can feel the city as an urban common. In fact, common space is not just physical space. In addition to its materiality, from a political point of view, the concept of public space or public sphere is distinguished from the private sphere and refers to the space of public interest (Bobbio 2006), the constitution of identities and collective action (Sader 1988), the representation and collective expression of society (Dahl 1997), political freedom (O’Donnell 1999), the condition of equality (Arendt 1981), the democratic formation of opinion and public will (Habermas 1997). It is this public space, involving different forms of appropriation, that enables making the city a common one. In fact, there are several ways in which one can think about urban common spaces, as much from the point of view of their material appropriation as symbolically. In this sense, reflecting on the space itself can lead to interesting clues to discuss the possibilities of constructing the common. Within the dialectical tradition, Lefebvre (1991b) proposes a conception of space based on a triplicity: spatial practice (the space of perception arising from everyday reality); the representations of space (the conceived space, the represented space), and the representation spaces (the space experienced through images and symbols, the spaces of passion and action). For the author, “spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces contribute in different ways to the production of space according to their qualities and attributes, according to the society or mode of production in question, and according to the historical period” (Lefebvre 1991b, 46). Lefebvre, therefore, “denies space as a priori data, whether of thought (Kant) or of the world (positivism)” (2008, 55). The author argues “that every society —and hence every mode of production with its subvariants […] produces a space, its own space” (Lefebvre 1991, 31). Harvey also proposes a concept of tripartite space, but based on the concept of absolute space —the space as a “thing in itself,” used to individuate phenomena—, relative space —the space as “a relationship between objects which exists only because objects exist and report to each other” (1973, 2006)— and relational —founded on Leibniz’s philosophy, in which the space is “regarded as being contained in objects in the sense that an object can be said to exist only insofar as it contains and represents within itself relationships to other objects”(Harvey 1973, 13). The author argues that in a dialectical conception, “space is neither absolute, relative or relational in itself, but it can become one or all simultaneously depending on the circumstances” and human praxis (Harvey 1973, 13). Harvey seeks to articulate his own conceptualization to that of Lefebvre, also incorporating the Marxist concepts of use value, exchange value and value, generating a new analytical approach. From this perspective, the author highlights that “everything that pertains to use value lies in the province of absolute space and time,” while “everything

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that pertains to exchange value lies in relative space-time because exchange entails movements of commodities, money, capital, labor power and people over time and space” (2006, 133). Finally, as value is a relational concept, “its referent is, therefore, relational space-time,” underlining, that “value, Marx states, is immaterial but objective” (Harvey 2006, 141). Here it would be pertinent to return to the question of urban common spaces. Taking Harvey and Lefebvre’s approach as a reference, we could say that the urban common space is not an attribute of place, but is defined by praxis, it not being absolute, relative, or relational in itself, but characterized by these three dimensions in permanent dialectical tension.

THE URBAN COMMON SPACES AND THE CITY AS A COMMON From this approach, one can see how the different urban spaces are experienced and appropriated as spaces of experience and perception associated with everyday life (spaces experienced by people, who uses the different spaces and how they use them); how they are represented as space (spaces conceptualized in different ways, as open or closed, distant or close, spaces for business or leisure, etc.), and as spaces of representation (space of sensations, imagination, memories, and also the emotions and meanings associated with the public space). Urban spaces are therefore experienced materially, intellectually and emotionally. What is important to retain from this discussion is that human praxis is producing, appropriating and resignifying urban common spaces. Harvey (2012), Hardt and Negri (2016) and Dardot and Laval (2017), despite their theoretical differences, share a dialectical view regarding the common. For these authors, common is not a specific good or thing, and therefore it does not exist in itself. In principle, an object could not be defined as common, not even air, sea and land, but it would depend on the type of social relationship that characterizes it. They all reject an essentialist view, a definition of the common as an attribute of place, and conceive of the common as a political principle, a form of social relationship. Dardot and Laval reconceptualize “the common as a political principle” (2017, 481), anti-capitalist, which involves the activity of deliberation, judgment, decision and the application of collective and radically democratic decisions in the perspective of a selfgoverned society. In this sense, the common would not be the result of a spontaneous sharing of activities, such as collectively breathing the same air, or participating in the social division of labor under capitalism, but an instituting practice. As the authors claim that, unlike production, “it must be spontaneous, the institution is necessarily a conscious activity” (Dardot and Laval 2016, 4). The authors emphasize the differentiation of the common as a political principle “which is not instituted, but applied” from the common ones instituted by the practices

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guided by this principle (Dardot and Laval 2016, 4). For them, “only the practical activity of men can make things common” (Dardot and Laval 2017, 53). In short, “the common is a political principle from which we must construct common and to which we must report in order to preserve, expand and give them life” (Dardot and Laval 2017, 54). As stated earlier, Harvey also shares a non-essentialist view of the common. But unlike Dardot and Laval, their definition of common is not necessarily linked to a transformative project. There would be communal practices that can produce and reproduce inequalities. According to Harvey: “The common is not to be construed, therefore, as a particular kind of thing, asset or even social process, but as an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood. There is, in effect, a social practice of commoning. This practice produces or establishes a social relation with a common whose uses are either exclusive to a social group or partially or fully open to all and sundry. At the heart of the practice of commoning lies the principle that the relation between the social group and that aspect of the environment being treated as a common shall be both collective and non-commodified —off-limits to the logic of market exchange and market valuations” (Harvey 2012, 73).

Thus, for the author, two principles would characterize the practices of communalization, collectivization and non-commodification. However, communalization practices can be restricted to certain social groups —we can think of the common spaces of high-income closed condominiums— and produce territorial exclusions and sociospatial inequalities. The city, for example, is a collective product of its citizens, the result of their daily activities and struggles, leading to an environment constructed and constituted of material and symbolic goods where people live and reproduce. However, this produced common “is just as continuously being enclosed and appropriated by capital in its commodified and monetized form” (Harvey 2012, 77). In short, in contemporary society we find several practices of communalization, which can coexist or conflict with capitalist dynamics. But even if they conflict with capital, these practices of communalization only become challenging and revolutionary insofar as they are guided by a political project. From this perspective, the passage from the city as an urban common space produced collectively, subordinated to the logic of capital, to the city as an urban common is the result of a political project, which can be expressed in the idea of the right to the city, as originally formulated by Lefebvre (1967) and later updated by David Harvey (2012).

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THE RIGHT TO THE CITY AS A NECESSITY AND AS A POLITICAL PROJECT In capitalism, certain urban common spaces, as physical spaces produced by the State, are fundamental for the reproduction of capital: highways, roads, streets, squares, public buildings, towns, ports, airports, which results in a specific type of urbanization and spatial configuration. Likewise, certain public spaces, such as political ones, are also crucial: the parliament, the executive power, agencies of the State and public institutions, etc. Urbanization, therefore, involves the creation of urban common spaces that guarantee the conditions of capital production and reproduction. However, urban space is more than the creation of conditions for the reproduction of capital, considering that “any space implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships —and this despite the fact that a space is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things (objects and products)” (Lefebvre 1991b, 82-83). Indeed, the production of urban space must be understood, at the same time, with the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations. In fact, for Lefebvre (1991b, 31), “every society —and hence every mode of production with its subvariants (i.e., all those societies which exemplify the general concept— produces a space, its own space” (1991b, 31). From this perspective, Lefebvre highlights that “capitalism is only maintained by being extended to the entire space” (2008, 117), which implies the need for capital to produce and reproduce its own space. Thus, as Lefebvre argues, it can be seen that, throughout history, capitalism has modified cities according to their requirements, be they economic, political or social. And in this city production process, “an immense workforce is employed, as productive as the workforce employed in the maintenance and feeding of machinery” (Lefebvre 2008, 175). From the same analytical perspective, Harvey argues that “urbanization is itself produced. Thousands of workers are engaged in its production, and their work is productive of value and of surplus value. Why not focus, therefore, on the city rather than the factory as the prime site of surplus value production?” (Harvey 2012, 129-130). From this perspective, it is necessary to consider the city’s production as a more valuable production process. From this approach, it can be said that the production of a capitalist city is inevitably associated with the class struggle. In capitalism, as recorded by Lefebvre, “as for the class struggle, its role in the production of space is a cardinal one in that this production is performed solely by classes, fractions of classes and groups representative of classes. Today more than ever, the class struggle is inscribed in space” (1991b, 55). In the same direction, Harvey maintains that: “If urbanization is so crucial in the history of capital accumulation, and if the forces of capital and its innumerable allies must relentlessly mobilize to periodically revolutionize

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urban life, then class struggles of some sort, no matter whether they are explicitly recognized as such, are inevitably involved” (2012, 115).

Considering the production of space, there is yet another important aspect raised by Lefebvre (2008), related to what we could call the space fetish. Lefebvre, recalling Marx, states that merchandise, produced and exchanged by means of money, contain and conceal social relations, and argues that, in the same way, one can speak of space. According to Lefebvre, “social space per se is at once work and product —a materialization of ‘social being.’ In specific sets of circumstances, however, it may take on fetishized and autonomous characteristics of things (of commodities and money)” (1991b, 101-102). From this perspective, the space of cities, physically realized, despite being the expression of social space, will appear as something given, as natural and naturalized, obscuring the social relations that are behind its production and reproduction. In this sense, it can be said, like Bourdieu (1997), that physical space is nothing more than reified social space. The city space would tend to express, therefore, the “great social opposition objectified in the physical space” (Bourdieu 1997, 161), in the form, for example, of the division between the center and the periphery, and would tend to be reproduced in the forms of representation “and in language in the form of opposition constituting a principle of vision and division, that is, as categories of perception and appreciation or mental structures” (Bourdieu 1997, 162). In this way, the city space would translate into the expressions that oppose the residents of these different areas (for example, in the case of Rio de Janeiro, in the opposition between the “asphalt dwellers” [residents in upper class districts] and those in the shantytowns). Bourdieu highlights that, “since social space is inscribed at the same time in spatial and mental structures that are, on the one hand, the product of the incorporation of these structures, space is one of the places where power is asserted and exercised, and, undoubtedly, in the most subtle form, that of symbolic violence as unnoticed violence” (1997, 163). Thus, it can be said that the private appropriation of land, the subordination of space to capital, and the institutionality mediated by the State are at the base of the fetish of the capitalist production of space, concealing the social relations contained in common spaces and promoting symbolic violence. It is from this approach that the idea of the right to the city, as formulated by Henri Lefebvre, makes sense: “the right to the city is like a cry and a demand” (1967, 158). As Marcuse (2102) observes, in Lefebvre, the idea of the right to the city triggers two dimensions: on the one hand, a requirement, a demand for the needs of social reproduction in the city; on the other, a project, a collective demand for a new city, expressing the right to claim something that does not yet exist, the right to another city. As a requirement, the right to the city would express a demand for the needs of social reproduction in the city, and would be linked to the struggles against dispossession —we are referring to the claims regarding housing, sanitation, mobility, education, health,

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culture, democratic participation, etc. Thus, “the cry is for the material necessities of life, the aspiration is for a broader right to what is necessary beyond the material to lead a satisfying life” (Marcuse 2012, 31). From this perspective, the right to the city as a requirement (the right to the city as a cry) could be translated into the diversity of agendas of urban social movements that emerge in different countries, especially in Latin America: movements in aid of the homeless, for urban reform, environmental sanitation, a just city, environmental justice, free public transportation, immigrants’ rights, cultural movements, against eviction, among others. This heterogeneity of agendas is also noticeable in institutional battles for change in urban legislation, involving the creation of areas of special social interest, social interest housing programs, land tenure regularization programs in shantytowns and low-income districts, in addition to the expansion of spaces for political participation, such as participatory budgets and municipal councils with the participation of society. All of these struggles can be considered part of the right to the city as they affect de-mercantilization and expansion of access to urban land, housing and public services. In short, this set of mobilizations has repercussions on fundamental aspects of social reproduction in the city. However, it is necessary to consider that these struggles concern only this first dimension of the right to the city. In fact, in all its fullness, the right to the city cannot be realized within the scope of capitalist urbanization. As a collective demand for a new city project, the right to the city is linked to the creation of a less alienated alternative urban life that promotes human emancipation. It is the right to rebuild the city from the perspective of social justice and happiness. Thus, the right to the city expresses the right to claim another city. As Marcuse stated: “The demand for the right to the city is a demand for a broad sweeping right, a right not only in the legal sense of a right to specific benefits, but a right in a political sense, a claim not only to a right or a set of rights to justice within the existing legal system, but a right on a higher moral plane that demands a better system in which the potential benefits of an urban life can be fully and entirely realized” (2012, 34).

As stated by Lefebvre, “taking in all its breadth,” the right to the city would appear as a utopian project, or in the terms of the author himself, a “utopian” project in the sense of something that “is not possible today, but it could be tomorrow” (2008, 162). Thus, “to claim the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists” (Harvey 2012, xv). Thus, “the definition of the right to the city is itself an object of struggle, and this struggle proceeds concomitantly with the struggle to materialize it” (Harvey 2012, xv). In this sense, instead of opposing one perspective to another (necessity versus the utopian project), it seems more fertile to articulate these two dimensions dialectically. The challenge would thus be in the articulation of struggles linked to the demands for

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fundamental needs for social reproduction in the city and the agenda regarding a utopian project for a new, just, democratic and emancipatory city. Historically, the industrial city has been subordinated to capitalist development and its incessant movement of production of surplus value and over-accumulation, which implies uninterrupted urban growth, with all its perverse social, environmental and political effects. For Harvey, “capitalist urbanization perpetually tends to destroy the city as a social political and livable commons” (2012, 80). In fact, the capital accumulation process, argues Harvey, “threatens to destroy the two basic common property resources that undergird all forms of production: the laborer and the land,” stressing that the inhabited land “is a product of collective human labor” (2012, 80). Thus, in capitalism, “urbanization is about the perpetual production of an urban common (or its shadow-form of public spaces and public goods) and its perpetual appropriation and destruction by private interests” (Harvey 2012, 80). In synthesis, from the perspective of the right to the city, it is essential to articulate the struggles aimed at the needs of social reproduction and the utopian project for a new city in the strategies of appropriation of urban common spaces. From this perspective, strategies for the appropriation of common spaces must directly affect both the conditions of social reproduction in the city —in the sense of de-commodification and the expansion of access to housing, improved sustainable environment, urban mobility, culture and leisure, health and education, etc. —as in political practices of collective administration and deliberation, creating new standards of solidarity and social cohesion, deepening and radicalizing direct democracy. This is because the praxis of appropriation of space and time express values and ideas about who we want to be and the city in which we desire to live. Thus, Harvey sustains that “our political task, Lefebvre suggests, is to imagine and reconstitute a totally different kind of city out of the disgusting mess of a globalizing, urbanizing capital run amok” (2012, xvi), which involves new forms of appropriation of public spaces as urban common spaces. However, “that cannot occur without the creation of a vigorous anticapitalistic movement that focuses on the transformation of daily urban life as its goal” (Harvey 2012, xvi).

CONCLUSION: HETEROTOPIAS, INSURGENCY AND DISPUTE OF GRASSROOTS TERRITORIES The reflections developed throughout this essay point toward the need to address and reinterpret the relationship between the territorial appropriation praxis and the broader political projects or, in the terms proposed by Harvey, the relationship between territorially-based militant particularisms and universal projects, to understand the

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processes of ultraconservative inflection experienced by different countries and to formulate strategies of resistance and promotion of other societal projects. In other words, it is necessary to reflect on how activisms in grassroots territories can function as agents of radical transformation, promoting practices of communalization founded on political principles articulated to new, radically just and democratic societal alternatives. But, as Harvey warns, “grassroots movements only acquire interest for the theoretician and for social transformation insofar as they transcend [their] particularities” (2007, 25), which reinforces the importance of understanding the conditions that make this transformative movement possible. Any alternative project of society is challenged to put the issue of dispute over territories on its agenda, especially the grassroots territories. The response to this challenge must start from recognition of the presence of a wide range of practices and activisms, organizations and struggles located in the territories. In this sense, it is worth recovering the heterotopia concept, formulated by Lefebvre, as spaces characterized by the difference in relation to spaces homologous to the logic of capital, founded on exchange value (the isotopic spaces), sometimes of conflicts, appropriated by agents as reproduction spaces of life, triggering some form of de-mercantilization, thus representing use value. Such spaces refer to the multiplicity of new uses of urban common spaces in the city’s daily life. For Harvey, the concept of heterotopia concerns the practices that create new possibilities, which do not “necessarily arise out of a conscious plan, but more simply out of what people do, feel, sense, and come to articulate as they seek meaning in their daily lives. Such practices create heterotopic spaces all over the place” (2012, xvii). Thus, heterotopia can be identified in the innumerable communitarian practices, social movements, cultural manifestations and collective action for the de-mercantilization of the city, which promote new forms of appropriation of urban common spaces. The city’s spaces take on new meanings through these practices: squares, streets, collectively occupied buildings, museums, theaters, parks, rivers, beaches, abandoned warehouses, trains, buses, subways, staircases, bridges, schools, among others. No public space escapes the new possibilities created, so that all of these can be creatively reappropriated through collective action. However, the territory and daily practices have not always been privileged in political analyses and projects, often centered on electoral disputes and control of the State apparatus. In this sense, once again inspired by Harvey (2007), we can say that a fundamental task for urban theory and practice is to understand and act in the articulation of the territory, contributing to construction of local solidarity patterns within a broader political framework, which implies keeping territorially-based movements well fed by processes of local solidarity formation and reaffirmation, and, at the same time, keeping these movements integrated in broader projects of social transformation. Thereafter, it is necessary to think about the possibilities and conditions to transcend the particularities and reach a broader conception of politics, some universal modality.

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In this sense, we are challenged to understand the conditions that make the emergence of insurgency and creative rebellion possible, identifying the mediation that allows the construction of the urban common, that is, social practices of communalization from the perspective of the right to the city. In other words, the symbolic practical dispute over grassroots territories ought to be put back onto the agenda.

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Harvey, David. 2005. O Neoliberalismo: história e implicações. [Neoliberalism: History and consequences]. São Paulo: Edições Loyola. Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism. Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London: Verso. Harvey, David. 2007. Espacios del capital: hacia una geografia critica. [The spaces of capital: towards a critical Geography]. Madrid: Ediciones Akal. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution. London; New York: Verso. Holston, James. 2013. Cidadania Insurgente: disjunções da democracia e da modernidade no Brasil. [Insurgent citizenship: dilemmas of the democracy and modernity in Brasil]. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Lefebvre, Henri. 1967. “The Right To The City.” In Writings on Cities, edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, 63-184. London: Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991a. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991b. A Vida Cotidiana no Mundo Moderno. [Daily life in the modern world]. São Paulo: Ed. Ática. Lefebvre, Henri. 2008. Espaço e Política. [Space and politics]. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG. Marcuse, Peter. 2012. “Whose Right(s) To What City?” In Cities For People, Not For Profit, edited by Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, Margit Mayer, 24-41. London: Routledge. Miraftab, Faranak. 2009. “Insurgent planning: situating radical planning in the global south.” Planning Theory 8: 32-50. https://westerncapeantieviction.files. wordpress.com/2011/02/miraftab-2009-insurgent-planning-situating-radicalplanning-in-the-global-south.pdf. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1999. “Teoria Democrática e Política Comparada.” [“Democratic theory and comparative politics”]. Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais 42(4): 577– 654. Sader, Eder. 1988. Quando Novos Personagens Entraram em Cena: experiências, falas e lutas dos trabalhadores da Grande São Paulo, 1970-1980. [When new characters enter the scene: experiencies, talks and struggles of Greater São Paulo workers, 19701980]. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Singer, André. 2015. “Cutucando Onças com Varas Curtas: o ensaio desenvolvimentista no primeiro mandato de Dilma Rousseff (2011-2014).” [“Taking decisions with short sticks: an essay about the first government of Dilma Rousseff (2011-2014)”]. Novos Estudos 102: 43-71. Singer, André. 2018. “Do Sonho Rooseveltiano ao Pesadelo Golpista: a ascensão e o declínio do Lulismo.” [“From the Rooseveltian Dream to the Coup Nightmare: the rise and decline of Lulism”]. Revista Piauí 140: 1-20 http://piaui.folha.uol. com.br/materia/do-sonho-rooseveltiano-ao-pesadelo-golpista/.

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Singer, André, and Isabel Loureiro (org.). 2016. As Contradições do Lulismo: a que ponto chegamos? [The contradictions of Lulism: where do we go?]. São Paulo: Boitempo. Soja, Edward W. 1993. Geografias Pós-Modernas: a raformação do espaço na teoria social crítica. [Postmodern geographies: the transformation of space in critical social theory]. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed. Souza, Marcelo Lopes de. 2000. “O Território: sobre espaço e poder, autonomia e desenvolvimento.” [The territory: about space and power, autonomy and development]. In Geografia: conceitos e temas, edited by, Iná E. de Castro, Paulo Cesar da C. Gomes, and Roberto L. Corrêas, 77-116. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil. Theodore, Nik, Jamie Peck, and Neil Brenner. 2010. “Urbanismo neoliberal: la ciudad y el imperio de los mercados.” [“Neoliberal urbanism: the city and the empire of the markets”]. Temas Sociales 66: 1-11. Tilly, Charles. 2010. “Movimentos sociais como política.” [“Social movements as politics”]. Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política 3: 133-160.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 13

THE DEVIL’S MANSION OF SURABAYA: A HETEROTOPIA Robbie Peters*

Anthropology Department, Sydney University, Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT This chapter illustrates the concept of heterotopia through the example of Surabaya’s Devil’s Mansion, a 200-year old haunted building and former morgue that housed nearly 1000 ethnic Chinese refugees who fled persecution in the countrysde during the Indonesian revolution and whose descendents remain there to this day as the city’s “internal others.” The paper reveals how Devil’s Mansion serves as a window into the city as one of its benign “other spaces” that puts the city into perspective. The paper concludes by considering whether the spatialised heterotopic city will be displaced by a despatialised biopolitical city that governs abstract populations rather than actual spaces.

Keywords: heterotopia, biopolitics, topogeny, Surabaya, cities, kampung

INTRODUCTION: HETEROTOPIA As someone who studies the history of Indonesia’s low-income urban neighbourhoods (kampung), I have always found Foucault’s spatial metaphors helpful. Simply, they help me present the kampung in relation to the city of which it is a part. Foucault offered a relational theory of space through his “Of other spaces” (1984, 1986), a brief article * Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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published the year he died. It articulates a concept he developed almost twenty years earlier in short lectures and radio interviews but that he refrained from publishing. In it, he makes the simple point that “[o]ur epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sties,” and that “we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another” (Foucault 1986, 23). He captures this relational understanding of space through the concept of the mirror as a spatial medium that enables a mixed experience that conveys both the space beyond it that one imagines, and the space before it in which one stands. Through the mirror, we reconstitute ourselves where we stand by way of the virtual space beyond it where we imagine ourselves to be. The mirror is the space between two spaces. It is the space that captures an elsewhere through which we can reflect upon the space we are in. It can be both “a space of illusion that exposes every real space… [o]r another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill-constructed, and jumbled” (Foucault 1986, 27). The mirror is the relational space between two ireducible spaces that altogether scaffold what Foucault calls a heterotopia [from the Greek heteros: another, and topos: place (Johnson 2006, 77). He defines heterotopias as “counter-spaces” that are “absolutely different” to and set apart from all other spaces (Vidler, Foucault and Johnston 2014, 20). Yet, they make sense only in relation to those spaces from which they are set apart. Heterotopias include museums, colonies, brothels, prisons, and asylums, they put all other spaces into perspective, and they reveal the dilemmas of the historical period from which they emerge. More simply perhaps, heterotopias put that spatial agglomeration we call a city into perspective, enabling us to grasp it as a totality. For Henri Lefebvre (2003, 128), heterotopias are excluded or set apart spaces like ghettos that have the revolutionary capacity to interconnect, irrupt across the city and capture it as a whole. Lefebvre’s understanding of heterotopia could be simplified as the city as a totality that is always elsewhere but captured at moments of interconnection, such as when its submerged masses “rise-up” during a moment of revolution to take it over (Lefebvre 2003, 39, 129, 186). The key point in both Foucault and Lefebvre’s accounts is that heterotopias are not maps, spatial grids, satellite images or miniatures of the city; nor are they its actually existing “other spaces” like prisons, colonies and so on. Instead, in Foucault’s words, “they are the counter-reaction [those spaces create] on the position that I occupy” (1986, 24). In the urban context for example, heterotopias enable people to see outside the space they occupy to the city as a whole, putting their space into perspective and making another totally different space thinkable and sometimes even possible. Below I explore one such example —the case of a derelict building called the Devil’s Mansion and the community it houses in the large Indonesian city of Surabaya.

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DEVIL’S MANSION At a major intersection in Surabaya, an early-19th century Dutch colonial mansion towers above a market and sprawling low-income neighbourhood. Kown widely as Devil’s Mansion (Rumah Setan), it is a place that most people in the city have heard about but never noticed. The stories about it vary: it was owned by a Chinese doctor who used it as a morgue; it houses persecuted ethnic Chinese who sought refuge in it during the revolution; it was abandoned by people and inhabited by a ghost; its top floor was mostly empty except for the hundreds of black swallows that nested there. The building’s dark name came about during the authoritarian New Order regime (1966-98), when the term “devil” (setan) was used to designate Chinese and communists. Indeed, the term setan kota (city devil) appeared often in the press during this time to designate these groups as a latent (laten) force that could one day irrupt from the kampungs and destroy the nation (Peters 2013). The historian Purnawan Basundoro (2009, 70; 2020), reveals that Devil’s Mansion was built in 1809 by J. A. van Middelkoop, the region’s chief magistrate, on land that the Governor of Java had released to raise revenue for the colonial administration. J. A van Middelkoop was transferred to a colonial outpost soon after, leaving Devil’s Mansion unoccupied for decades until it was purchased by Dr Teng Sioe Hie. Before long, Dr Sioe Hie was spooked-out of the building by the ghost of an attractive Western woman believed to be van Middelkoop’s maid, who died there from suicide (Basundoro 2020). Known thereafter by the city’s Dutch community as Spookhuise (haunted house) or by Indonesians as rumah hantu, the building was left by the Teng family to undertakers who used it to run funeral services (Surya 2019; Fajar 2019; Basundoro 2020). It was not purchased again until just before the outrbreak of revolution at the end of WWII when Dr Teng Khoen Gwan —a member of the extended Teng family— bought it from them. He continued to allow the building to operate as a morgue, until war-ravaged peasants from the hinterland began taking over the adjacent Chinese graveyard and persecuted ethnic Chinese from the rural towns began entering Surabaya to seek shelter in the building (Basundoro 2009, 2013; Surya 2019). Dr Khoen Gwan allowed them to stay and tasked one of them by the name of Handoko to manage its burgeoning community of over 1000 refugees (Surya 2019; Fajar 2019; Basundoro 2020). Like many places in the city at the time, Devil’s Mansion was what the Dutch and later the Indonesians termed “wild ground” —an abandoned space prone to rehhabitation by ferrel animals, ghosts, social outcasts, squatters and enemies of the state. Devil’s Mansion stands about 70 metres back from a large intersection that takes traffic from the CBD to Surabaya’s sprawling western district. The mansion is difficult to miss. To enter, one must cross a rickety footbridge over a creek that forms the boundary to one of the city’s largest low-income areas, the Banyu Urip kampung. The once dirty alleys of this kampung have been improved and above them hangs municipal government placards

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commending their cleanliness and order. They lead to a kampung market that is empty by the afternoon except for boarded-up stalls, broken crates and vegetable scraps. Devil’s Mansion sits on the other side of this market and towers above it. Its ground floor opens out to the market through 20-foot-tall double doors. The paint on the doors has flaked away and the hallway that leads from them to the rear courtyard is covered by the earth that has been trampled in by those who live inside. Emaciated old ethnic Chinese people, dogs and cats sit at the entrance. Unlike the peole who sit around the entry points to the city’s many kampungs, these people never ask what business one has there. The only indication that the building is a home to people are the words “not a thoroughfare” on a wall near the hallway. I entered Devil’s Mansion for the first time in 2015 while on my way to vist a friend who lived nearby. After spotting the mansion from the roadside and wondering whether it was the place I had heard about, I walked over to it and observed its old façade for but a moment before one of its residents gestured me through its entrance. I climbed its creaky stairs while looking into the chamber-like rooms to the bunkbeds that lined the walls and the old ethnic Chinese resting, half sick, as if in a hospital. As I stood at the top of the stairs wondering how I could walk around unbothered, I was met by a middle-aged man named Soetikno, a resident born in the building and now head of the official neighbourhood unit it forms within the surrounding kampung. He was the son of Handoko, to whom Dr Khoen Gwan had passed authority in 1957 (Surya 2019). A gatekkeper into the history of Devil’s Mansion, he tells visitors that it houses 53 families, each spanning three generatons to its first settlers and each paying a tax that covers its upkeep and its electricity and water supply (Surya 2019; Fajar 2019). In the building’s rear courtyard, four latrines and a water trough serve these families, while some open space provides them room to hang their laundry, park their bicycles, store bottled water, stack bamboo rigging and hang bird cages that hold their beloved pigeons (Surya 2019; Fajar, 2019). Hidden beneath the clutter, an old Confucian alter echoes a past era of ancestor worship before they converted to Christianity —one of five endorsed religions under the New Order regime (1966-1998).

WILD SPACE Devil’s Mansion was first settled during the Indonesian revolution (1945-49). Surabaya was about 2 hours away by road or rail from the front line at the time, back under Dutch control and made free of fighting by internationally mediated peace talks (Basundoro 2013, 9, 184). By mid-1947, hundreds of people entered Surabaya each day in search of food, shelter and safety, not least the many ethnic Chinese accused of siding with the Dutch and forced to surrender their food and assets to embattled Indonesian militia units (Basondoro 2013, 45, 184-185, 240-254; Frederick 1989, 281; Peters 2013, 6-9). The poorest of them were repatriated in Dutch army trucks to Devil’s Mansion, where they occupied areas not occupied by the corpses about to be buried in the adjacent Chinese

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graveyard. For the building’s absentee landlord, Dr Teng Khoen Gwan, its occupation by ethnic Chinese created a line of descent from founding landlord to settled community that secured it against the landless Indonesians who were flooding into Surabaya and squatting along the nearby creek and hillside. These squatters took over the adjacent Chinese graveyard, dug out the corpses and used the coffins and gravestones as building material for their shacks, which numbered around 500 by the mid-1950s and formed the beginnings of what is now known as Banyu Urip, one of the city’s largest kampungs (Jawa Pos 1952; Basundoro 2013, 246-54; Peters 2013, 35). Chinese graveyards were usually located near hillsides where the feng shui was good and the ornate graves could face the horizon. To landless Indonesians, these graveyards symbolized the takeover of parts of the city by a foreign ethnic minority, whose population had doubled to more than 110,000 over the 1940s and who claimed Chinese citizenship, enjoyed the privileged status of “foreign Orientals” under the Dutch, and were suspected of supporting Dutch reoccupation of the city during the revolution and occupying the homes of fleeing Indonesians (Basundoro 2013, 35, 45, 184-5, 176-254; Frederick 1989, 281; Husain 2015). Unlike the adjacent graveyard however, Devil’s Mansion was spared expropriation by squatters because it was occupied by almost 1000 people who claimed a culturally significant line of descent to its owner, Dr Teng Khoen Gwan. Such claims of descent were common in Surabaya by the 1940s, where much land lay in abeyance and open to occupation (Perdamaian 26 Feb 1952; Jawa Pos 1953; Basundoro 2013, 182-197; Dick 2003, 360-374). The claim to Devil’s Mansion became disputable, however, after Dr Teng Khoen Gwan left Indonesia in 1965 during the violent purge of suspected communists. He returned to China, taking the title deeds with him and leaving Devil’s Mansion residents with nothing but their link to him as trustees of his building (Surya 2019). The army did not recognise claims based on occupation or trusteeship and deemed them a form of “wild ground,” or land left in a state of abeyance by absentee landlords and taken over by squatters. It vowed to eliminate wild ground by evicting squatters but found little opportunity to do so in a city with a communist dominated municipal parliament that drew mass support from the squatter settlements (Jawa Pos 1953; Jawa Pos 1953; Peters 2013, 36-71).

TOPOGENIC SPACE During the violent communist purge of late-1965 that brought the New Order government to power, the Surabaya district military command of Lieutenant-colonel Sukojo began razing squatter settlements (Peters 2013, 35-72). Sukojo promptly installed himself as mayor and appointed a young urban planner named Johan Silas to devise a master plan for the city. Upon appointment, Silas challenged the new mayor with the pointed question: “Do you want to continue displacing the living or do you want to displace

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the dead?” Silas was referring to the thousands of pro-communist squatters in and around the graveyard at Devil’s Mansion, suggesting that they should be settled rather than displaced and their tenure formalised (Colombijn 2016). The mayor agreed and allowed the settlement around and including Devil’s Mansion to become a formally tenured kampung. Known as kampung Banyu Urip, it became one of Surabaya’s largest kampungs and a model for how to handle the city’s informal settlements. Silas began a city-wide survey that identified the founding fathers of each settlement, their gravesites and the traditions they established (Colombijn 2016). The survey produced a cultural cartography of the city that presented it as a matrix of “topogenies” (Fox 1997, 13), or spatially located genealogies that recognise one’s right to a particular kampung through the ancestral tie they have to its founding settlers and that they pass to newcomers through marriage. This topogenic right to the city was a right to a part of the city, or one of its kampungs or kampung neighbourhoods, rather than a right to the whole city. Devil’s Mansion was no different. In the 1990s for example, the topogenic right of its residents to their building was on display when their kampung neighbours helped fend-off a man and his thugs who tried to take it over. This well-connected man took Devil’s Mansion residents to court, but neither he nor them had title documents that proved ownership. The court ruled in favour of the residents, despite their lack of a title deed. They had some things that he did not: proof of continued occupation and maintenance of the building, a culturally significant link to its owner and official incorporation into the surrounding kampung as one of its formally recognised neighbourhoods or rukun warga (Surya 2019). Devil’s Mansion residents had a topogenic right to the city, but that right did not extend beyond the building. Up until the 1980s, Devil’s Mansion had no electricity. Residents lit its windowless chamber-like inner rooms at night with candlelight, while electric light from the streetlights and kampung homes below flooded into its outer rooms through large exterior windows. This disconnection from the city extended to its schools and churches. Instead of facing discrimination as ethnically other at the Javanese dominated kampung schools, and as poor and unachieved at the city’s middle-class Chinese dominated churches, Devil’s Mansion residents used the top floor of the building to school their children and run their own church service (Surya 2019; Fajar 2019). They were denizens rather than citizens of the city because they lacked the birth certificates or proof of identity needed to obtain either Indonesian or Chinese citizenship. Unlike Indonesia’s autochthonous ethnic groups, who also often lacked such documents, Devil’s Mansion residents were classified as foreigners, albeit ones born in Indonesia and unable to claim citizenship of any other country. Yet, despite being non-citizens, they could survive in Indonesia by residing in Devil’s Mansion because it fit an established spatial logic of darkness and light and part and whole that configured Indonesian cities.

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INSIDE AND OUTSIDE SPACE On the top floor of the building, banners drape large windows that look out over the city and let light flood in across the floor. Each banner reveals a sentence from the bible that evokes images of darkness and light, the world within and the world beyond. One depicts a shepherd releasing a pigeon and the words, “those who walk in the darkness can already see the light.” The windows convey light and spiritual enlightenment into the room, but also a view of the city outside. The pigeon is a particularly powerful cultural metaphor of this inside world of the neighbourhood and outside world of the city. During the colonial period, it was a heroic figure that enabled the kampung dwelling majority to discretely pass messages to distant kampungs. Kampung men have always kept pigeons —typically in coops that tower above the rooftops and provide a view across the city. They spend most of their day up in these coops, tending to their pigeons and awaiting the return of others that had been released to race or deliver messages. Up in the coop, these men feel at one with their pigeon as it makes its way across the city, capturing a bird’s-eye-view of it, connecting one kampung to another, bringing the city together and overcoming its parts. The pigeon’s power to connect the city made it a hero of the war of independence when it crossed the battle lines with messages. One such pigeon sits preserved with its medal of honour in the war museum as testament to this power. This ability to connect the kampungs and capture the city in whole is tied to the metaphors of darkness and light conveyed through the Devil’s Mansion windows. They give expression to what Basundoro calls “the initial act of independence” (2009, 100) when Indonesians took over Surabaya’s hydroelectric generators, rewired worn-out streetlamps and extended light to the darkened kampungs, ending wartime blackout and signalling the end of colonialism. In Lefebvre’s (2003, 128-9) terms, the windows give its excluded underclasses a total and revolutionary view of the city —a view like that of the dying guerillia in one of Rendra’s (1974) poems who looks out from the hilltops on a clear day that exposes the city from which he had been expelled and utters, “we will seed it and it will sprout.”

DARKNESS AND LIGHT Using metaphors of “space,” “light” and “darkness,” Foucault writes: “A fear haunted the latter half of the Eighteenth Century: the fear of darkened spaces, of the pall of gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and truths. It sought to break up the patches of darkness that blocked the light, eliminate the shadowy areas of society, demolish the unlit chambers … The new political and moral order could not be established until these places were eradicated.” (1980, 153)

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Under the anti-communist New Order regime of president Suharto that took power in 1965, such logics of darkness and light were institutionalised through a reinstatement of the colonial urban spatial dimensions that a leftist Indonesian writer characterised in the 1920s as Surabaya’s broad boulevards and glass-plated shop fronts that were lit-up like daylight by electric lights, and its darkened kampung alleyways and shacks that were lit by the flicker of an oil lamp (Kartodikromo 1924, 19). Like the colonial city, the New Order city relied on the kampung’s ability to both conceal the massa (masses) and sustain the spectre of the half-built unoccupied homes and clandestine formless groups and personages that sustained the horror of the underground communist (Kusno 2015; Peters, 2013). The street by contrast was what one observer called Suharto’s Panopticon —a place where police and army patrols, bans on large congregations, containment of prostitution areas and short doses of public violence kept it in order (Lim 2002; Peters 2013, 87-96). In the kampungs, only a rudimentary and indirect control existed: communists who were meant to be monitored were not; much of the population lacked identity cards and birth certificates; few paid taxes, but all mobilised for neighbourhood clean-up and guard duty and all could access the subsidised foodstuffs in the markets and the healthcare in the community clinics. It was good enough for the state, which wanted the kampungs to absorb the poor, keep them off the street and deliver them subsidies (Kusno 2015; Peters 2013). Spies and police informants would ensure that the spectre of violent persecution remained —someone could end up with a hefty fine or jail sentence for gambling, drug dealing or moonshining or for clandestine political activity. When the New Order regime collapsed during the Asian Financial Crisis, the spies and informants that had helped it clandestinely penetrate and surveil the kampung were the first victims of the retaliatory violence that took place across the country.

BIOPOLITICAL SPACE In the post-New Order period, the old spatial logics of darkness and light are being replaced by a despatialised biopolitical logic of governing. Old forms of generalised welfare like subsidised food and healthcare to all kampung residents, regardless of who they are, have been replaced with targeted welfare in the form of cash and healthcare subsidies to objectively perceptible poor people: those who can muster documentary evidence of their existence (birth certificates, residency permits, vaccination records). Kampung residents must now be legible to the state through the virtual window of data it uses to see society and deliver welfare. This virtual window is epitomised first by the CCTV screens that cover the walls of the mayor’s office and give her a real-time view of Surabaya’s streets and, second, by the iPad she wields while away from her office to monitor welfare payments, birth registrations, school enrolments, garbage disposal and traffic congestion (Jawa Pos 2015; Colombijn 2016, 22). This illumination of society

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through the virtual window of data has won her accolaids as the mayor of Indonesia’s “smart city” (Jakarta Post 2019). It marks a shift over the past two decades from a cultural cartography of the city based on culturally distinct neighbourhoods to a statistical cartography based on refined population data that attempts to make the kampungs legible and bring the whole city into view. This statistical cartography is what Foucault termed a biopolitical project that originated in Western European cities in the late 19th century with birth, mortality and poverty statistics as its “first objects of knowledge” (2003, 243). This new statistical view of life identifies demographic trends and regulates population, excluding those who do not count as part of that population (Foucault 2008, 205-207; 2003, 249-254). Foucault uses the example of statisticaly defined poverty, noting that “the only problem is ‘absolute’ poverty, that is to say the threshold [or poverty line] below which people are deemed not to have an adequate income” (Foucault 2008, 205, 203). The poverty line forms the objective foundation for the biopolitical project by “distinguishing between the poor and those who are not poor, between those who are receiving assistance and those who are not” (Foucault 2008, 206). Life under biopolitical regimes no longer exists as a person or a people located and dealt with in a particular space, but as a multiplicity of persons regulated across space through statistically based interventions like targeted poor relief (Foucault 2003, 242-53). In simple terms, biopolitical projects are interested in populations rather than spaces.

CONCLUSION Devil’s Mansion may well succumb to biopolitics. Until it does, it will continue to enable an entire view of city and even the nation. It will continue to be a heterotopia —or as one perceptive journalist wrote— “‘a’ hidden Indonesia in miniature” (Fajar 2019). For those who live elsewhere in the city, Devil’s Mansion is a place that “[e]veryone can enter,” but “enter excluded,” or only to a point within it (Foucault 1986, 26). As such, it enables everyone a glimpse of the city from the inside out and the outside in, but it can only do so by retaining the boundaries of exclusion that make heterotopia possible in the first place. This explains why Devil’s Mansion is so much in place in Surabaya and so benign within it. Devil’s Mansion survives because it is but one of the city’s topogenic spaces. Like the kampung that surrounds it, Devil’s Mansion was taken over and occupied, it contains its own school and places of worship, it contains many people who lack the documents needed to verify their existence to the state, it was built from abandoned ruins, it exists on private land and it has a founding father. What it is unlike is the Chinese temple in the old quarter that no longer has Chinese patrons and needs Javanese puppet players to sustain its 200-year-old Chinese puppet theatre, burn its incense and show patrons around. Its patrons have left the society of the

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kampung and entered the society of the gated community, many of which now sprawl on Surabaya’s urban finge. Devil’s Mansion residents call these people the rich Chinese: those who enjoy connections with the powerful but are rendered vulnerable when those connections are threatened, such as in 1998, when New Order backed thugs ransacked the homes of ethnic Chinese business people and raped their daughters to remind them that they still needed the protection of powerful patrons (Strassler 2004). Many fled the country or built gated communities. By contrast, the residents of Devil’s Mansion stayed put. They had a legitimate place in the city as the inhabitants of one of its heterotopic spaces. Their story reveals how a candle lit ruin inhabited by urban outcasts —that Abidin Kusno (2015) aptly terms the city’s “internal others”— can exist with little interference since the revolutionary beginnings of the city itself. What remains to be seen is whether Devil’s Mansion and all the other heterotopic spaces in Surabaya can survive in the smart city.

REFERENCES Basundoro, Purnawan. 2009. Two Cities, Three Periods: Surabaya and Malang from colonialism to independence. Yogyakarta: Ombak. Basundoro, Purnawan. 2013. Taking over the city: a poor people’s movement in Surabaya 1900-1960. Tangerang: Marjin Kiri. Basundoro, Purnawan. 2020. January 18. Pers. Comm. Colombijn, Freek. 2016. “‘I Am a Singer’: A Conversation with Johan Silas, architect and urban planner in Surabaya, Indonesia.” Indonesia, 102 (Oct.): 7-30. Dick, Howard. 2003. Surabaya, City of Work: A socioeconomic history, 1900-2000. Singapore: Singapore University Press. Fajar, Ardiansyah. 2019. “Devil’s mansion Surabaya, the hidden minature Indonesia.” IDN Times Jatim, 20 July. Accessed on 20 Jan 2020 from: https://jatim.idntimes.com/news/jatim/ardiansyah-fajar/gedung-setan-surabayaminiatur-indonesia-yang-tersembunyi. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 19721977, edited by C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Of other spaces, heterotopias.” Architecture, Mouvement, Cointinuite 5: 46-9. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of other spaces.” Diacritics 16, 1: 22-27. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must be Defended: lectures at the College de France 197576. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: lectures at the College de France 19781979. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Fox, James. 1997. Place and landscape in comparative Austronesian perspective. In The poetic power of place: Comparative perspectives on Austronesian ideas of locality, edited by James Fox. Canberra: ANU-Epress. Frederick, William. 1989. Visions and heat: The making of the Indonesian revolution. Athens: Ohio University Press. Husain, Sarkawi. 2015. “Chinese cemeteries as symbols of sacred space, control, conflict and negotiation in Surabaya.” In Cars, conduits, and kampongs: The modernization of the Indonesian city, 1920–1960, edited by Freek. Colombijn and Coté Joost. Leiden: Brill. Jakarta Post. 2019. January 11. https://www.thejakartapost.com/. Jawa Pos. 1952. December 11. https://www.jawapos.com/. Jawa Pos. 1953. January 16. https://www.jawapos.com/. Jawa Pos. 2015. January 21.https://www.jawapos.com/. Johnson, Peter. 2006. “Unravelling Foucault’s ‘different spaces’.” History of the Human Sciences 19:4: 75–90. Kartodikromo, Marco. 1924. “The Corrupted Life of a Big City.” In Paul Tickell. 1981. In Three Early Indonesian Short Stories. Centre for South East Asian Studies, Working Papers (no. 23), Clayton: Monash University: 19-23. Kusno, Abidin. 2015. “Power and time turning: the capital, the state and the kampung in Jakarta.” International Journal of Urban Sciences 19, 1: 53-63. Lefebvre, Henri. 2003 [1970]. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lim, Merlyna. 2002. “Civic space in Indonesia: from panopticon to pandamoneum.” International Development Planning Review 24, 4: 383-400. Peters, Robbie. 2013. Surabaya, 1945–2010: Neighbourhood, state and economy in Indonesia’s city of struggle. Singapore: NUS. Rendra, Willibrordus. 1974. “Fallen.” In Ballads and Blues: Poems, edited by W.S. Rendra. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Strassler, Karen. 2004. “Gendered visibilities and the dream of transparency: The ChineseIndonesian rape debate in post-Suharto Indonesia.” Gender & History 16, 3: 689–725. Surya, Reno. 2019. “Meet the residents of Devil’s Mansion Surabaya: monument to traumas past of the ethnic Chinese.” Vice Media LLC, 2 March 2019. Accessed 20 January 2020 from https://www.vice.com/id_id/article/7xndbq/bertemu-penghunigedung-setan-surabaya-monumen-trauma-etnis-tionghoa-di-masa-lalu. Vidler, Anthony, Michel Foucault, and Pamela Johnston. 2014. “Heterotopias.” AA Files 69: 18-22.

SECTION 4: HETEROTOPIA AND GENDER SPACE

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 14

FROM PARISIAN PROSTITUTES TO ROBOT SEX WORKERS: THE MUTATIONS OF THE HETEROTOPIAN BROTHEL Peter Johnson* Independent Researcher, Heterotopian Studies, Isle of Arran, Scotland

ABSTRACT In this chapter, I chart how heterotopias can change, decline and become absorbed into the everyday. As an example, I demonstrate how the space of the traditional brothel has been transformed through various social and economic factors, as well as changing attitudes to gender and sexuality. First, I show how the space of the Parisian brothel was far more complex than envisaged by Foucault. I then concentrate on the role of communication technology in the mutation of the geography of commercial sex. In particular, I analyse the impact of mobile digital devices in the twenty-first century. Finally, I reflect on likely future developments and whether opportunities might arise for new forms of immersive heterotopia for exploring sexual pleasure.

Keywords: brothel, technology, internet, sex worker, sexuality

INTRODUCTION The idea for this chapter stems from reading two very different passages from the work of the philosopher Michel Serres, who was Foucault’s colleague at the time the latter *

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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presented his thoughts on heterotopia. Although first published some twenty years later, Serres’ portrayal in Statues of the emergent modern cemeteries in Paris has remarkable similarities to Foucault’s explanation of these extraordinary spaces: “You think you die alone, whereas you come quickly back, as in the good old days, to the boarding school and the barracks, to the hospital or brothel, where even to go to sleep you’re crushed.” (Serres 2005, 62)

The cemetery, boarding school, hospital and brothel are all important examples of heterotopia that Foucault highlights. Serres emphasises how all these spaces involve intense concentrations of people in a confined enclosure. Much later, in reflecting on the impact of digital communication technology (DCT), Serres emphasises the loosening and disruption of “the old space of concentrations” (2015, 12). This time he has in mind such places as libraries, hospitals, schools and universities. He argues that instant access to the internet via laptops and mobile devices has dispersed information away from specific institutional enclosures. The first passage from Serres highlights the close association between Foucault’s seemingly divergent examples of heterotopia. The second raises questions that will be explored in this chapter: how have these diverse heterotopias evolved and mutated in our present era of advanced digital technologies and the internet? Have they grown in intensity, weakened or disappeared altogether? Finally, do emerging DCT innovations open up opportunities for creating new heterotopias? Dehaene and De Cauter (2008, 4) suggest that the contemporary epoch that Foucault outlines at the start of his lecture on heterotopia in 1967 has striking resemblance to what would much later be defined as the “network society” (Castells 2000) dominated by digital technology. Foucault uses the term “emplacement” in his very brief history of space to distinguish the contemporary era from the medieval hierarchical space of “localization” and the following conception opened up by Galileo which Foucault describes as a space of “extension.” In remarkably prescient remarks, emplacement is defined by Foucault as the “relations of proximity between points or elements” (1986, 22), involving storage, memory, circulation, distribution and codes. However, as Dehaene and De Cauter (2008, 3) also note, Foucault does not go on to provide any examples of heterotopia from this era. His examples of heterotopia are all historical, mainly anchored in the nineteenth century. He does not return to explore this opening proposition at all. Is this absence a feature of what is often described as a text that is confusing and incomplete, or could it be that heterotopias were becoming dispersed and less prominent in the epoch of the network? To explore these questions, this article concentrates on the space of the brothel, one of Foucault’s original examples of heterotopia. These “spaces of illusion” take a far more prominent place in Foucault’s (2009, 27-28) radio broadcast on heterotopia than in his slightly later and much more well-known text based on his lecture to a group of architects. Significantly for my argument, Foucault refers to them in claiming that societies can

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reorganise and transform heterotopias, even to the extent that they can disappear [résorber et faire disparaître]. He refers specifically to how a “spider’s web” [un reseau arachnéen] produced by the technology of the telephone might contribute to such a mutation of the traditional brothel. I begin the chapter by showing how the brothels of nineteenth and early twentieth century France that are evoked by Foucault were far more complex, varied and contested than he suggests. I then explore how the mutation of this space has continued and accelerated with advanced forms of technologically mediated sexual services. I demonstrate how the geography of sites for selling sex has mutated and become increasingly mundane, dispersed and diluted. In conclusion, I consider future heterotopias that might develop through advances in immersive virtual technologies, offering new forms of sexual pleasure whilst further marginalising and dislocating traditional spaces for commercial sexual services. In his radio broadcast on heterotopia, Foucault (2009, 25-26) refers to an extract from Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1994) where the writer describes the experience of entering a brothel. Aragon conveys the mystery of another time, a “refuge” where he is released from conventional concepts, “basking in anarchy as one would say basking in sunshine” (Aragon 1994, 51). Foucault then goes on to say that such heterotopias create a “space of illusion” that exposes or contests all the rest of human life, which tends to be ordered and partitioned, as even more of an illusion. In contrast to these spaces of illusion, Foucault compares them to “spaces of compensation” that also contest the rest of space, but this time through “realising” rather than inventing an illusion. As an example of the latter, he refers to Puritan and Jesuit colonies where everything is laid out in perfect order, a type of utopia, with a strict timetable for work, meals, prayer and even procreation. Foucault therefore paints a dualistic picture of a space of creative anarchy and a space of meticulous stability. However, the historian Alain Corbin’s (1990) scrupulous study of prostitution and sexuality in France after 1850 provides a very different perspective. As we will see in the next section, Corbin demonstrates that brothels were in many ways far more complex and even heterotopian than envisaged by Foucault.

THE COMPLEXITY OF FOUCAULT’S PARISIAN BROTHELS Before moving on, it is worth acknowledging that prostitution is a highly disputed subject that can be studied from a complex range of perspectives (Sanders et al. 2009, 8384). The buying and selling of sex involve questions of morality, patriarchy, gender, sexuality, class, the state, legality, race, colonialism, slavery, culture, poverty and inequality. For some, the practice represents the definitive embodiment of patriarchal male privilege, an unequivocal example of male domination and violence against women (Scoular 2004, 345-346). However, the subject of prostitution is also hotly contested by some feminists. Diverse interpretations question the binary nature of the domination theory

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by exploring sex workers’ narratives and recognising their own agency. Some feminists have also challenged the notion of “appropriate” and “deviant” sexual behaviour and campaigned against legal constraints on the behaviour of sex workers (Doezema, and Kempadoo 1998). Female and male prostitution can be deeply exploitative, but as we will see, contemporary sex workers also offer contrasting affirmative accounts of their experiences. Corbin (1990) shows that from 1850 prostitution in Paris was seen as a major concern in relation to public health, morality, administration and legality. A strong “regulationist” discourse arose to address these issues in which the role of the maisons de tolérance was viewed as indispensable as long as they remained bounded, marginalised, invisible, particularly to children, and supervised closely by police and doctors. As Corbin explicitly acknowledges, the maisons de tolérance were part of Foucault’s disciplinary institutions “created to destroy confusions of category, whether in school, the theatre, the hospital, or the cemetery” (1990, 9). In other words, they were spaces that were part of Foucault’s crucial axes of heterotopia in terms of crisis and deviance. They contributed to social order, a way of countering a moral, social and sanitary threat. Brothels were tolerated as long as they were strictly supervised, hierarchised and compartmentalised, having close ties with prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Corbin tellingly details how some argued that the prison, dispensary and hospital intended for prostitutes should be concentrated together as “a sort of asylum” where they could be supervised and studied more closely (Corbin 1990, 26). These enclosures were not opposed but were in many ways a mirror of the puritan spaces of compensation. Tellingly, Corbin uses the analogy of an enclosed order of nuns. Brothels in Paris up to the time of Foucault’s account served multiple functions. They were commercial enterprises, operating to make profit for the primarily female brothelkeepers, but mostly for the male owners of the buildings. They provided a “seminal drain”, an initiation for youths, a meeting place, a space of eroticism, fantasy and escape, as well as a segregated disciplinary institution. They also existed in many forms. In the Opéra district of Paris, a centre of aristocratic and bourgeois pleasure, they possessed fantastic furnishings and decorations, with a particular fondness for mirrors. Here “silence and discretion reigned” (Corbin 1990, 56). But other establishments catered for different classes and at the bottom of the scale were maisons d’abattage, or ‘quickies’ where clients such as soldiers would wait in line (Corbin 1990, 58-59). Above all, Corbin’s detailed account displays how Foucault’s formal categorisation of heterotopias thoroughly breaks down. For example, it was in the police cells at Marseilles and Paris where women lived “without any rules whatsoever”, playing cards, sharing food, writing obscene graffiti and giving each other sexual pleasure (Corbin 1990, 108). Heterotopian sites are transformed over time, or even disappear, but they also have multiple and contradictory purposes concurrently. Corbin’s study demonstrates a transformation of brothels after the high point in the mid-nineteenth century due to changes in socio-economic structures and accompanying

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factors such as: a diversification of sexual tastes; a growing permissiveness; a widening of clientele from different classes; a broadening of prostitutes to include married women; an increasing variation of establishments for buying sex, including bars and cafes; and the expansion of open, lighter and cleaner city spaces, including but not solely through Haussmannisation (Corbin 1990, 204). For some prostitutes there was more room for independence and for clients a greater choice. All this loosened the role of the maison de tolérance as a means of regulating and marginalising prostitution. Earning money for sex became more visible and widespread, bringing new techniques of surveillance, particularly in the name of hygiene, but with an overall trend of disenclosure, a certain freeing up of where and how commercial sex was exchanged.

THE DISENCLOSURE OF BROTHELS IN THE NETWORK ERA Foucault’s depiction of brothels is anchored in the experience conveyed by Aragon, but what if we return to Foucault’s prescient remarks on the era of networks or emplacement? “We are in the epoch of the simultaneous; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed … like a network that connects points and interconnects with its own skein.” (Foucault 1986, 22)

How has the geography of heterotopias such as brothels mutated since Foucault’s account? If as Deleuze later anticipated, we are “undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network” (1992, 6), where does this leave heterotopias? In the 1969s, Foucault mentions that the “web” of telephone communication was altering the enclosure of brothels, so what is happening now with the ubiquitous mobile device connected to the network of networks: the internet? In exploring the transformation of the brothel in the digital environment, it is important to acknowledge that as Castells argues, we not only live, work and play but also “process our creation of meaning” through technology. In terms of urban life, this is not the futurologists “end of cities’, but the development of a new urban space of mobility and flows of information (Castells 2002, 235). Geographers such as Kellerman (2016) and Rose (2017) have uncovered a plethora of studies that explore how advanced digital technologies are re-shaping both the production and experience of space, place, mobility, environment and human agency. Where and how sexual services have changed need to be viewed in relation to these wider transformations. It is also important to recognise the broader milieu of economic, social and cultural transformations of late global capitalism. Urban expansion, the proliferation of entertainment industries, the growth of migrants and a range of state interventions influence the ever-changing geography of sexual commerce. Moreover, as Corbin insisted in his

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study, such wider factors subtly intertwine with transformations in expressions of sexuality and gender and intimate levels of sexual desire and practice (Bernstein 2007). In the second half of the twentieth century, the interweaving of all these factors can be clearly seen in how the growth in the availability and diversity of pornography, reflected changing social and moral attitudes, sexual expression, technological developments as well as the diversification of spaces for the consumption of sex (Lane 2001). Paul B. Preciado’s (2014) study of the development of Hugh Hefner’s ‘playboy’ empire from the decades following the 1950s illustrates the close association between pornography and prostitution and the influence of media technologies. Prior to the internet, both televisions and video cameras started to blur the distinction between the private and public realm, creating new opportunities for voyeurism (Preciado 2014, 176). Hefner’s famous playboy mansion screened porn films every day and there were constant parties and sex games, but it had cameras in every room, so the magazine could publish images and stories of events inside the house. The private interior was made public. Preciado describes this in terms of a mutation of the brothel as the space becomes a multimedia “Pornotopia”, a laboratory for new forms of production, distribution and consumption of sex. Although Preciado sees this transition explicitly in terms of the invention of a new multimedia “heterotopia” (Preciado 2014, 220), I contend that it can actually be read as manifesting the actual decline of the brothel in its concentrated, heterotopian form. The space is broadcasted, redistributed and dispersed as a spectacle, and loosened from a specific location. Privacy is transformed into “multiple forms of publicity” (Preciado 2014, 176). It continues a trend that Corbin already noted, the opening up and diversifying of the maisons close, a mutation that accelerated with the emergence of multi-media technologies and intensifies with recent developments in mobile DCTs. As I go on to argue, how and where producers and consumers exchange sex become less heterotopic. The prevalence of the internet and related digital technologies has had a major impact on patterns of consumption, including the process of buying and selling sexual services. Indeed, sex workers were one of the first groups to embrace the possibilities of digital technological innovations (Mclean 2013). Amongst the diversifying spaces for paid sex, there has arisen the proliferation of a variety of technologically mediated sexual practices that have been driven by workers who want independence, security and economic benefit. In Bernstein’s words, sexual labour has become more “diffuse and expansive rather than delimited and expedient” (2007, 96). Although for some, the results of globalisation such as deindustrialisation, unemployment, poverty, homelessness and marginalisation, have driven men and women into the exploitive world of paid sex, a diverse group has been drawn to often safer sex work managed from home. Many sex workers have embraced the initiative culture and entrepreneurship which early on Foucault identified as the heart of neoliberalism: the “multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises” (Foucault 2008, 149). Marketing strategies, business models and professional networking are all utilised to sell sex (Sanders et al. 2018). In particular, sex workers are finding different ways of

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advertising their services and creating new forms of sexual practice to sell, opening up various specialised niche markets. Webcamming, for instance, help sex workers to market and perform shows that are streamed to customers watching on their own personal devices. As in the wider retail market, the internet also lets clients “shop from home”. Prostitution has become immersed amongst a range of pervasive internet-based sex markets involving email, chat rooms, social media forums, dating apps and pornography platforms, with associated customer reviews, and client support and safety networks. All of these developments loosen geographical boundaries. Cunningham et al. (2017) provide a comprehensive summary of the growing scholarly literature on the way in which the internet has affected the question of who is involved in sex work, as well as where it takes place. The research describes how a global sex industry has arisen, but one that is stratified and multi-layered, involving shifting demographics of both the buyer and the seller. Bernstein demonstrates how the internet helps to encourage middle-class sex workers who could operate without relying on third-party management, avoid interaction with the criminal justice system and help target specific clientele (2007, 93). The mobile phone also allows some sex workers to arrange work around childcare responsibilities, with the freedom of choice via prior screening of potential clients and the facility of online transfer of payments. Above all, a specific ‘site’ for the sexual transaction becomes spread out and diluted. As summed up by interviewees in Mclean’s study of young gay sex workers: “you can do it from your sofa” or “from home, or wherever I take my laptop” (2013, 887). Overall, the internet has allowed sex workers to work more independently and flexibly, maximize their profits and reduce the risks of exposure, exploitation and violence, although it should also be noted that there are new risks and dangers that emerge online (Brents and Sanders 2010, 40, and Sanders and Scoular 2018, 57). This is not to say that brothels have totally disappeared. Mclean (2013) finds that some clients simply appreciate the convenient facilities offered by a traditional brothel. Some establishments also operate as exclusive and discreet venues for the wealthy as well as squalid, exploitative and abusive places for workers. But although such a substantial shift in the geography of sexual exchanges for money does not mean the complete demise of the brothel, it does mark a radical mutation that disperses traditional forms of enclosure. The space of illusion that Aragon entered with trepidation, a distinct other place and time has, with new forms of digital communication become close, accessible, easy and instant. So far, I have concentrated on interconnected technological, spatial, economic and social factors that have shifted the overall geography of the traditional brothel. But there is also evidence of related subjective transformations. As Bernstein investigates, the emergence of new DCTs alter the meaning and experience of the sexual encounter for both sex workers and clients. In particular, she shows how technological innovations have intensified shifts that were already occurring in the “sexual geography” of post-industrial cities (2007, 74). In the growing private sphere of sexual commerce, she uses the term “bounded authenticity” to refer to sex workers offering “more profound and more intimate

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forms of erotic connection” (Bernstein 2007, 69). Bernstein’s observed trend towards a bounded authenticity is not an entirely new phenomenon. Corbin found in the last decades of the nineteenth century that clients started to demand “some semblance of seduction, of feeling, even of attachment” with a certain continuity in the relationship (1990, 200). Such a new kind of demand continued through into the early twentieth century and was part of a movement to more open and “conspicuous forms of consumption” (Corbin 1990, 203). For Bernstein, advanced DCT opens up fresh opportunities for the sharing of an “authentic episode”. What she finds unique is that male clients often explicitly stated a preference for a type of delimited intimate engagement over other relational forms. In these cases, turning to a prostitute is not a substitute for something they cannot find elsewhere, but “desirable in its own right” (2007, 120-122). This suggests a blurring of the distinction between “recreational” and “relational” sexual behaviour which rose through the playboy era of the 1960s (Laumman et al. 1994). Overall, the spaces for exchanging commercial sex become increasingly less distinct, merging with online pornography, webcamming and dating apps. A diverse, pervasive, accessible and individualized network of spaces emerge as a lucrative part of our burgeoning online consumption, with ever greater choice offered from small local enterprises to global media industries. As Bernstein’s study shows, commercial sex becomes in many ways a part of the mainstream options for sexual pleasure. But there are counter trends. At the same time as the growth of technologically mediated sexual services, diverse and fluid conceptions and experiences of gender and sexuality have emerged. In this respect, a few researchers have reframed heterotopia in the technologically mediated spaces that encourage a playful broadening of, and experimenting with, sexual expression, bodily qualities and identities, or in short, the “queering of sex” (Pereira 2018). Studies indicate growing online opportunities for reciprocal sexual pleasure outside customary relationships and outside commercial exchange. For example, Bury’s (2005) ethnography of two elite female online fandoms highlights spaces that reveal fundamental heterotopic qualities. In one case, fans rewrite the script from a television series so that heterosexual male characters form intimate and sexual relationships with each other. For Bury, such practices subvert and queer identity through “linguistically (re)constituted interaction”. Participants can also become enactors or resisters of particular genders, negotiating their own identities and expectations. Such interaction produces a blurring of spaces, or spaces emerge in the “wrong place” (166-170). Problematically, Bury describes the concept of heterotopia as “alternative spatial orderings” with reference to Hetherington’s (1997) influential study, but she also argues that the online fandoms are sites of “resistance, inversion, and subversion” (177) which is exactly the stance Hetherington convincingly dismisses. Bury’s research also implies that the regulation of spaces makes them less heterotopic. As indicated above in relation to Corbin’s study of brothels, heterotopias as Foucault envisaged, are often over-regulated spaces —prisons, asylums, cemeteries, utopian Jesuit colonies— and do not fit simple

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dualistic notions of either/or (Johnson 2013, 801-802). However, the study does reveal opportunities for experimentation with gender and sexuality and, importantly, the development of a community of women who find pleasure in sharing with each other their queer inventions that contrast with their work and home routines. In contrast, Jacobs explores “virtual” spaces for exchanging the sexual pleasure of pornography, arguing that they demonstrate heterotopias in the way they form new “subjectivities and communities” (2004, 67-68). As we have seen, pornography, like prostitution, has become decentralised and diversified in terms of both producers and consumers across globalised markets. Through digital technological communication, it becomes easily available from homes or any location. For Jacobs, certain online community sites for exchanging pornography cannot be seen as purely disembodied spaces, but rather as mediated spaces where users explore phenomena and intersect with each other’s “mental, physical and emotional journeys” (79). Consumers are “spacing” or traveling between sites, actual and virtual places, multi-tasking activities and reversing the goals of pornography as well as creating new “public freedoms” (83). As with Bury’s study, there are certain difficulties with Jacob’s framing of heterotopia. She confuses Foucault’s explanation of textual spaces in the preface to The Order of Things (1970) with his outline of social and cultural spaces, and in turn reduces the notion of heterotopia to the simple expression of “disorder and chaos in spatio-temporal units” (Jacobs 2004, 76). However, she does pinpoint an important passage from Defert, Foucault’s long-term partner, who describes heterotopias as: “where I am and yet I am not, as in the mirror or the cemetery, or where I am another, as in the brothel, the vacation resort, or the festival [...] transformations of ordinary existence, which ritualize splits, thresholds, and deviations, and localize them as well. “ (Defert 1997, 275)

In the online sites explored by Jacobs, multifaceted relationships emerge in a space that has the potential to split off from the ordinary. I interpret this as a sense of being outside the everyday, not in any separate virtual realm but inside an enclosed zone where for a while you are changed. becoming patient, prisoner, passenger, fantasist, pleasure seeker and so on. A form of enclosed alterity is the essential, literally defining feature of heterotopias, which any interpretation or re-working cannot escape. A change occurs once you enter a prison, psychiatric unit, fair, library, brothel, ship, Turkish bath or cemetery. Despite the confusions and simplifications in their accounts, the sites highlighted by Bury and Jacob reveal some of the potential for advanced technologies to create new community forms of sexual exchange that if not transform, at least challenge the boundaries, of “ordinary existence”. These emerging spaces do not simply replace the more traditional enclosures for commercial sex; they help to further displace them.

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THE FUTURE Many communication technologies have been used to represent and express human sexuality, including magazines, videos and more recently, the internet. In the twenty-first century, DCTs have utterly transformed sexual behaviour, including commercial sex. We have come a long way since Foucault’s prescient remark about how the impact of the telephone would transform the practice of prostitution. This article has traced some of the major changes in the geography of sex work that have occurred through advances in mobile devices linked to the internet. In conclusion, I want to suggest that in the next few decades the transformation of sex work itself is likely to see the demise not only of the traditional brothel, but also sex work itself. At the same time, this development may open up radically alternative heterotopias. In many ways, the demise of the brothel is mirrored in the dramatic decline of the pornography industry in recent years (Levy 2008, 312-313). Free sites on the internet for sharing live and recorded explicit sexual content have burgeoned and the revenue from selling DVDs, for example, have plummeted. The demand for technologically advanced sex aids and toys has increased, incorporating web-based interfaces, sex dolls and interactive artificial intelligence. With these interconnected developments, diverse forms of intimacy and sexual practice can be shared across any geographical distance. Technological advances are likely to lead in unanticipated directions, but a small but growing field of academic research has started to investigate the prospect of the availability of sophisticated robotic and virtual immersive technology for simulating and sharing sexual arousal (Levy 2008; Whitby 2012). Kiroo is an example that combines a video chat platform, a phone app and teledildonics, or ‘real world’ sex toys that allow “tactile data sharing”. In contrast, Occulus Rift has devised virtually based immersive experiences, with tactile interactive devices such as haptic masturbatory aids (Carpenter 2018, 262-263). A specific body of research has also investigated the development, opportunities and potential dangers of “sex robots” (Danaher 2018, 12). Defined as robots with “humanlike touch, movement, and intelligence that are designed and used for sexual purposes”, these devices take much further popular sex toys such as vibrators and Fleshlights, providing a sexual experience that attempts to be realistic and intense. Levy (2008) is often described as a leading proponent of the development of sex robots. His books are deeply flawed, with for example, hardly any reference to gay, lesbian or transgender relationships, despite this group being at the forefront of diversifying sexual practices and experience. However, Levy has investigated the latest advances in sex robots and some of their social and ethical implications. Significantly for this article, he notes clear parallels between paying human sex workers and purchasing sex robots (2008, 210). Levy refers to research that has investigated the range of motivations that attract men and women to purchasing sexual services, which include variety, lack of complications and constraints, anonymity, brevity, and difficulty forming relationships, and concludes that the same motivations may well

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transfer to acquiring a sex robot. Whitby confirms the range of motivations for wanting to purchase a sex robot as a “lover” (2012, 234). Carpenter goes as far as to coin the term “Robot Sex Worker” (2018, 247). Although the technology is still very rudimentary, sex workers are already predicting the complete transformation of their industry, if not the termination (Levy 2008, 215). But is it possible to predict new forms of heterotopia emerging as robotic technology and immersive virtual reality become more advanced? With robot sex workers, however human-like, the trend seems to be towards individual consumption, taking the idea of “the comfort of your own home” yet further into the everyday milieu and away from any sense of stepping out of the ordinary. The direction of travel is the opposite of the fundamental traits of heterotopia. On the other hand, with immersive technology, opportunities may emerge over the next few decades for moving towards an experience that is transformative, not so much as being both in reality and the virtual at the same time (Foucault’s mirror exercise), but in terms of entering a world that reverses or disrupts what is outside. It has been suggested that virtual “gaming” worlds that are persistently redefined and reimagined by game producers have a heterotopian quality (Burlacu 2019, 116), but I am thinking of something far more technologically advanced and radical. As discussed, the forums studied as heterotopia by Bury and Jacobs in the context of nascent DCT, might be taken to a new level for experimenting with sexuality as well as gender identities. As their studies intimate, these virtual enclosures might also have the potential to create communities of women and men for sharing bodily pleasures and undertaking unsettling sensual journeys. Taking a much darker route, it is not impossible to imagine a virtual world that brought to life the many bleak heterotopias detailed by Foucault in his History of Madness which in the late eighteenth century were evoked by Sade: forbidden places of secret pleasures, an imaginary landscape pervaded by images of “the Fortress, the Dungeon, the Cellar, the Convent, the inaccessible Island” (Foucault 2006, 362). Each of these images listed by Foucault could be envisaged as the name of a virtual world. Such places would test the limits of desire in extraordinary ways, but clearly raise many serious moral and legal questions, not least around the potential of including virtual portrayals of children as sex objects. Alternatively, avoiding the possibility of such abuse, perhaps Foucault’s own personal explorations of the limits of sexual pleasure may offer a better example. It is conceivable to imagine a virtual immersive experience similar to the gay “bathhouses” that Foucault is said to have frequented in the Castro neighbourhood in San Francisco. Faubion in his “ecology of heterotopia” described the bathhouses as a “fusion of brothel and theatre and cheap motel” where men mingled and explored the delights and perils of each other’s bodies (2008, 32). Unlike many bathhouses that were closed during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s, this would be a place to explore sexual pleasures freely without the risk of transmitting disease. If as Foucault we consider heterotopia as a “reservoir of imagination” the possibilities are endlessly alarming and exhilarating (1986, 27).

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As the history of brothels reveal, they can be dark, dangerous and abusive places, a mere seminal drain, an enclosure of fantasy and illusion and a disciplinary institution. The space has fluctuated and mutated; it has been dispersed and absorbed. Many factors are involved but technological innovations from the telephone to the ubiquitous internet have been key players in these transformations. In the twenty-first century, the prevalence of brothels has further declined as commercial sex has in many cases become more mundane and geographically dispersed, a small but symbolic development of the consumption pattern and enterprise culture of late capitalism. At the same time, many sex workers have recognised and utilised their independence and formed groups of support and solidarity. With the rapid pace of change of DCT devices, the future is hard to predict but one possibility is the replacement of sex workers with robots and immersive virtual spaces. The latter, for good or bad, may see the rise of yet inconceivable heterotopias.

REFERENCES Aragon, Louis. (1994). Paris Peasant. Boston: Exact Change. Bernstein, Elizabeth. (2007). Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity and the Commerce of Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brents, Barbara T., and Teela Sanders. (2010). “The mainstreaming of the sex industry: economic inclusion and social ambivalence.” Journal of Law and Society, 37 (1), 4060. Burlacu, Michai. (2019). “Towards a ‘heterotopology’ of gaming: from Azeroth to Sanctuary.” Anthropological Researches and Studies, 9, 116-122. Bury, Rhiannon. (2005). Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online. New York: Peter Lang. Carpenter, Julie. (2018). “Deus Sex Machine: Loving Robot Sex Workers and the Allure of an Insincere Kiss.” In Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, edited by John Danaher and Neil McArthur, 247-260. Cambridge: MIT Press. Castells, Manuel. (2000). The Rise of the Network Society: Economy, Society and Culture: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, volume 1. London: Wiley Blackwell. Castells, Manuel. (2002). The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corbin, Alain. (1990). Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cunningham, Stewart, Teela Sanders, Jane Scoular, Rosie Campbell, Jane Pitcher, Kathleen Hill, Matt Valentine-Chase, Camille Melissa, Yigit Aydin and Rebecca Hamer. (2017). “Behind the Screen: Commercial Sex, Digital Spaces and Working Online.” Technology in Society, 53, 47-54.

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Danaher, John. (2018). “Should We Be Thinking of Robot Sex.” In Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, edited by John Danaher and Neil McArthur, 3-14. Cambridge: MIT Press. Defert, Daniel. (1997). “Foucault, Space, and the Architects.” In Politics/Poetics: Documenta X —The Book. Edited by Catherine David, Jean-François Chevrier, and Museum Fridericianum. 274-283. Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag. Dehaene, Michiel, and Lieven De Cauter. (2008). Heterotopia and the City. London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. (1992). “Postscript on the Societies of Control.,” October, 59, 3-7. Doezema, Jo, and Kamala Kempadoo. (1998). Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition. London: Routledge. Faubion, James D. (2008) “Heterotopia: an ecology.” In Heterotopia and the City, edited by Michiel Dehaene, and Lieven De Cauter, 31-40. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. (1970). The Order of Things. Andover, Hants: Tavistock Publications. Foucault, Michel. (1986). “Of other spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, 16, 22-27. Foucault, Michel. (2006). History of Madness. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 19781979. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. (2009). Les Corps Utopique, Les Hétérotopies. Clamercy: Éditions Lignes. Hetherington, Kevin. (1997). The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge. Jacobs, Katrien. (2004). “Pornography in Small Places and Other Spaces.” Cultural Studies, 8, 67-83. Johnson, Peter. (2013). “The Geographies of Heterotopia.” Geography Compass, 7 (11), 790-803. Jones, Angela. (2015). “Sex work in a digital era.” Social Compass, 9 (7), 558-570. Kellerman, Aharon. (2016). Geographic Interpretations of the Internet. New York: Springer. Lane, Frederick. (2001). Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age: New York: Routledge. Laumann, Edward O., John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels. (1994). The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levy, David. (2008). Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. London: Duckworth.

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Mclean, Andrew. (2013). “You can do it from your sofa: The increasing popularity of the internet as a working site among male sex workers in Melbourne.” Journal of Sociology, 51 (4), 887-912. Pereira, Micaela. (2018). “Outliving the Matrix: Online Community and the [Re]Making of a Gendered Identity.” Senior Thesis 1238, Bard College. Preciado, [Paul B.]. (2014). Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics. New York: Zone Books. Rose, Gillian. (2017). “Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City: Exteriorization, Individuation, Reinvention.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107 (4), 779-793. Sanders, Teela, Maggie O’Neill, and Jane Pitcher. (2009). Prostitution: Sex Work, Policy and Politics. London: Sage. Sanders, Teela, Rosie Campbell, Jane Pitcher and Stewart Cunningham. (2018). Internet Sex Work: Beyond the Gaze. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Scoular, Jane. (2004). “The subject of prostitution: Interpreting the discursive, symbolic and material position of sex/work in feminist theory.” Feminist Theory, 5, 343-355. Whitby, Blay. (2012). “Do you Want a Robot Lover? The Ethics of Caring Technologies.” In Robot Ethics, edited by Patrick Lin, Keith Abney and George Bekey, 234-248. Cambridge: MIT Press.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 15

THE DECLINE OF THE EMANCIPATORY POWER OF UTOPIAS AND HETEROTOPIAS: AN ANALYSIS OF LIBERTARIANISM AND QUEER THEORY Felipe Schwember*

Faculty of Government, Adolfo Ibáñez University, Chile

ABSTRACT In this chapter the theoretical compatibility between libertarian utopia and what I call “queer utopia” is examined. I argue that both utopias are compatible and that the libertarian utopia of non-coercion offers an opportunity to broaden possibilities, as far as the expression of sexual identity is concerned. The discussion explores the patriarchal character of capitalism and argues that, despite what Judith Butler affirms, capitalism does not need compulsory heterosexuality to function; on the contrary, capitalism has enough versatility to assimilate the recognition demands of LGBTQI+ people. Adjustments to both utopias allow me to explain this versatility while mutual assimilation and rectification of both utopias explains, on the other hand, the loss of the emancipatory power of utopias and of heterotopias.

Keywords: utopia, heterotopia, nozick, butler, queer theory, libertarianism

*

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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INTRODUCTION Academic libertarianism has lavished little to no attention to feminist and queer theory, both in its theoretical and practical dimensions. For example, the relevance of gender as a determining factor of the individual freedom of women and LGBTQI+ people has hardly been mentioned. This occurs, in part, because the concerns of this libertarianism focus on the theory of property, the theory of money and credit, free banking, the possibility of dispensing with the State or setting the limits of its admissible powers, and other related issues. Sometimes, although much less frequently, it is interested in problems such as migration or the environment. Aside from some scattered observations, it has practically not been involved at all in feminism and queer theory. This disinterest is curious because, to the extent that feminism and queer theory are emancipatory movements, libertarianism could have been interested in them or, at least, take part more or less explicitly and systematically in their claims. Furthermore, libertarianism embodies an aspiration —the eradication of coercion— which, prima facie at least, seems compatible, if not with all versions of feminism, at least with some possible version of it. This disinterest is not, however, one-sided. Feminist and queer authors rarely even mention libertarianism, and when they do, it is to dismiss it.1 So far, no one has wanted to see libertarianism as an ally or, even less, as a possible conceptual framework in which to circumscribe or from which to think about queer emancipation; nor have they intended or wanted to rescue the normative principles of libertarianism in order to base queer demands and claims on them even though, incidentally, their normative principles could be attractive or promising to that end. In other words, and despite its possibilities, not even the ill-matched marriage between libertarianism and queer theory has taken place that has been observed between, for example, Marxism and feminism.2 There has been no synthesis between such theories, even though one might think of its possibility. In this chapter I intend to explore the possibilities of a queer libertarianism. Since queer theory is an offspring of feminism, its purpose can be captured by the motto under which different forms of feminism can be grouped: “biology isn’t destiny.” This maxim reflects feminism’s general purpose to liberate women from the different forms of oppression which they may be subjected to due to their sex. In a different sense, that same maxim reflects the idea that biological sex does not unequivocally determine gender3 and that, consequently, LGBTQI+ people must be freed from the imposition of gender identities with which they do not identify. For example, (Pateman 1988, 71). I’m referring here to the famous article by (Hartmann 1981). 3 For the development of “gender” as a category of analysis, see the pioneering works of Kate Millett (2016) and Gayle Rubin The Traffic in Woman (Rubin 2011). 1 2

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In the following pages I will explore the possibilities of the mentioned marriage between libertarianism and queer theory based on the possibilities offered by utopia. For this I will understand utopia in a broad sense, as the set of aspirations and ideals that define and guide the praxis of a certain political conception. To this effect utopia offers a regulatory, in the Kantian sense, ideal that can be approached indefinitely, without ever reaching it. Thus, it is understood that, although it is not entirely and fully achievable, utopia offers a constant horizon of social improvement. To test the compatibility of libertarian utopia with queer utopia, I will use, on the one hand, Robert Nozick’s libertarian metautopia. The reason for this choice is simple: Nozick is the only author from the large liberalism family who has claimed utopia as a framework for understanding and justifying the liberal State. On the other hand, I will use Judith Butler’s thought to formulate a queer utopia. This choice is controversial, since Butler does not conceive her own thought as utopian. However, in the broad meaning indicated above, Butler’s own program can be considered as a utopia. With that in mind, the juxtaposition of both utopias allows us to pose the following question: Is libertarian society one where the feminist and queer motto “biology/gender is not destiny” can be realized? What possibilities to flourish does queer utopia have in a libertarian utopia? Or, in other words, is libertarian utopia compatible with queer utopia? If the answer is yes, then queer libertarianism is possible, even if it has not yet been realized. Though I will answer this question in the affirmative, it will be a qualified statement. On the one hand, the merely formal character of libertarian utopia ensures the partial realization of queer utopia: in a libertarian world, coercion is not allowed, so there is no physical violence against LGBTQI+ people. However, in that world the State does not concern itself with eradicating or going after the intelligibility schemes that proscribe the existence of those who do not conform to compulsory heterosexuality. In this sense, libertarian utopia maintains the possibility of normative violence against LGBTQI+ people at the community level. What it does safeguard, however, is the possibility of challenging the definitions on which what Butler calls “normative violence” is sustained and, therefore, advocating the redescription of the normative schemes of intelligibility which “establish what will and will not be human, what will be a livable life, what will be a grievable death” (Butler 2006, 146). This point raises another difficulty, namely, the relationship between capitalism (as an economic system that naturally marries libertarianism) and queer utopia. In Merely Cultural, Butler has rejected the possibility of separating identity problems and demands from the economic problems inherent in capitalism as well as from the demands to which these problems give rise. Both are, in her opinion, inextricably linked. Butler’s idea is that certain forms of sexual and gender exploitation or discrimination are functional to capitalism and, to the same extent, its product. The plausibility of this thesis lies on the idea that the regulation of sexuality and the regulation of political economy are interwoven with each other. However, whether it is understood as wanting to establish a conceptual

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definition, or understood as verifying an empirical correlation, this argument is highly implausible. As Nozick’s own utopia reveals, libertarianism (and capitalism as its by-product) is much more versatile than Butler believes. Accordingly, queer utopia errs in directing its darts against capitalism, which does not need a particular notion of gender. With this, we finally reach the last point of this effort. Although libertarian utopia guarantees inviolability to LGBTQI+ people, the possibility of challenging heterosexism and the opportunity to leave oppressive communities does not guarantee the triumph of the queer cause. Furthermore, insofar as it adopts a purely formal materialization of willingness, it does not deactivate important informal mechanisms of oppression. For this reason, the fact that queer utopia can be disengaged from socialism does not warrant its marriage with libertarianism. The admission of the relevance of the material conditions under which people act is one of the points of conflict. Faced with queer utopia, libertarianism must decide between tolerance (i.e., the complete and indiscriminate tolerance of sexist, homophobic groups, etc.) and autonomy (i.e., the adoption of measures that guarantee that the members of those groups can effectively leave them). These sources of disagreement lead to a reciprocal correction of both utopias. On the side of libertarianism, this correction brings it closer to classical liberalism. On the queer utopia side, it translates into the recognition that capitalism successfully adapts to the gender destabilization that Butler promotes. This results in a possible, albeit lackluster, marriage, especially for those who believe that the queer agenda can be truly revolutionary. It also results in a friction marriage, like all marriages. The one that fares badly, on the one hand, however, is utopia, which compromises take a lot away from. And on the other, queer theories, which become increasingly superfluous as LGBTQI+ claims are assimilated by capitalist societies.

GENDER UTOPIA AND LIBERTARIAN UTOPIA Of all the forms of liberalism, libertarianism is the only one that has explicitly claimed the utopian form. With this, Nozick, the champion of this political form, swims against the tide of liberalism, a theory usually suspicious of utopian imagery (Popper 2013, 147-ss; Berlin 2013, 21-ss)This suspicion could be explained as a result of the alleged incompatibility that would exist between liberalism and utopia. While the first is a minimalist political project, which simply tries to find the principles of peaceful social coexistence, the second would be a maximalist project inspired by a substantive conception of happiness. If utopia is necessarily based on a certain notion of the good, 4 then this incompatibility could still be explained by saying that, while utopia identifies the good 4

This is how Aristotle understands it for example in Pol. VII, 1323a14-20.

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with the just, liberalism differentiates them and defends the supremacy of the latter over the former. Nozick’s strategy seeks to make virtue of necessity. He is well able to see that liberalism imports a privatization of the good: the libertarian society is one in which everyone can live according to their own notion of happiness, while allowing others to do the same. For this reason, in the libertarian society —as in the simpliciter liberal society— the most different notions of good that are compatible with the possibility of others that are equivalent “according to a universal law” can thrive. And it is precisely in the possibility of the coexistence of different notions of good that Nozick finds the key to elaborate the libertarian utopia: the libertarian utopia is one in which the most different imaginable communities can flourish, each one congregated around a particular notion of good. In this sense it is a metautopia, the place where all utopias can be realized and take place. The only communities or the only utopian projects that are excluded are the “imperialist” projects, which seek to impose their own notion of good by force. In the libertarian metautopia, therefore, adherence to the different communities is voluntary: none of them can coerce its members to remain in it. For this reason, communities are born and preserved as long as their members are adhering freely to them. Given this condition and the institutionality of the metautopic State, which allows the continuous experimentation of different forms of community, the libertarian utopia has, Nozick argues, a heuristic potential that no other utopia has: it offers the best imaginable conditions to discover the best possible society, through the trial and error mechanism that it offers to its members. Therefore, if there is an objectively better way of life for everyone (Utopia with a capital U), the libertarian utopia would allow us to discover it. It is not difficult to notice that the libertarian metautopia is based on the values traditionally associated with liberalism: primacy of individual freedom, tolerance, freedom of association and freedom of conscience. This coincidence explains, on the one hand, that it is merely formal —that is, that it does not anticipate any content for the statutes of the particular communities nor does it indicate the way in which each person or group should live their life or understand happiness. On the contrary, it limits itself to establishing a negative criterion: whatever the way of life adopted by a person or community, it cannot be imposed coercively on others. Different communities —the different particular utopias or “microutopias”5— must be simultaneously possible. On the other hand, the aforementioned coincidence also explains the pluralism and diversity that Nozick supposes would take place in the libertarian metautopia: different utopian projects would be tried within it, also from non-liberal or illiberal communities, even. The framework’s liberalism needs not inform the statutes of particular communities. Therefore, in the libertarian metautopia there could be conservative, socialist, patriarchal communities, etc. It could even happen that none of the microutopias that populate the libertarian metautopia was 5

I’m borrowing the concept from (Misseri 2011).

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libertarian or liberal. Could there be queer communities? Is the affirmative answer enough to sustain the compatibility between both forms of utopia? With regard to the question that serves as a guiding line for the present work, the scholastic problem of whether the libertarian metautopia described by Nozick constitutes or not a successful test in favor of the minimal state does not matter here. It is enough to know that the libertarian metautopia aspires to a kind of utopian ecumenism and that this aspiration is based on the idea of freedom as non-coercion. In fact, and although it would obviously lose important details of its form, the libertarian utopia can also be defined as the utopia of a world in which there is no coercion and in which no one exercises violence against others, other than to defend themselves. The libertarian utopia, therefore, could be described as the utopia of the minimal exercise of force. Similarly, it is not decisive for the failure or success of the effort undertaken here that libertarianism and queer theory are compatible as comprehensive, to use the Rawlsian expression, doctrines. It is enough that queer theory can carry out its program, even if, on the other hand, it does not share or even deplores the libertarian metautopia (for example, its theory of individual rights, property, etc.) This being the case, could there be queer communities in the libertarian utopia? A promising line of research is offered by what we can call Judith Butler’s queer utopia, which we take from the following passage from Gender Trouble: “I grew up understanding something of the violence of gender norms: an uncle incarcerated for his anatomically anomalous body, deprived of family and friends, living out his days in an ‘institute’ in the Kansas prairies; gay cousins forced to leave their homes because of their sexuality, real and imagined; my own tempestuous coming out at the age of 16; and a subsequent adult landscape of lost jobs, lovers, and homes […] The dogged effort to ‘denaturalize’ gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of a desire to play with language or pre- scribe theatrical antics in the place of ‘real’ politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such. What would the world have to be like for my uncle to live in the company of family, friends, or extended kinship of some other kind? How must we rethink the ideal morphological constraints upon the human such that those who fail to approximate the norm are not condemned to a death within life? (Butler 2010, xx-xxi)

Butler does not conceive her own project as a utopia, but I suppose that she is not done an injustice if it is presented as such, not in the sense that this project represents an “impossible and vain utopian” (Butler 2010, 152) but in that of embodying an aspiration,

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a political desideratum of difficult (or perhaps impossible) realization, to which we can nevertheless come close, as Kant would say, asymptotically. So, to what extent does Butler’s utopia of “making life possible” have a place in the libertarian utopia? The motive of “making life possible” is recurring in Butler’s thinking. 6 Part of her strategy to make such a possibility effective is to expose the implicit negations in the construction of the supposedly universal categories that finally produce the legal subjects. Such categories are not harmless and have a character which is not descriptive, as some claim, but constructive: “the citizen,” “the man,” “the woman,” etc., are not types that exist before the legal or political discourse that defines them. More precisely, “juridical power inevitably ‘produces’ what it claims merely to represent” (Butler 2010, 3). There are no politically aseptic or neutral constructions of such categories. Neutrality is the illusion that results from the validity of a certain discourse. Furthermore, it could well be argued that the effectiveness of a discourse consists of and is measured by its ability to normalize the arbitrariness of the definitions with which it operates. Thus, for example, what and who is a “woman” or what it means to be one (i.e., what roles should she play, in what way, what things can she wish for, at what moments, etc.) are definitions that result from countless, more or less articulated, discourses (legal, religious, etc.) that overlap but which, finally, produce a more or less coherent subject (for example, the heterosexual woman who can alternately act as mother and lover, who is responsible for carrying out certain tasks and not others, etc.) whose features and determinations must be recreated constantly.7 These definitions inevitably exclude someone—namely, all those who do not fit the definition stipulated in the discourse. That original exclusion, which precedes physical violence and also makes it possible, is what Butler calls “normative violence”8. For this reason, “making life possible” means subverting the categories under which subjects are produced, showing their instability, inaccuracy and, ultimately, arbitrariness, with the aim of expanding the boundaries of what is possible. The genealogical exercise thus fulfills a defiant and liberating role, because it challenges and calls into question the normative intelligibility schemes that decide who will be a person and who will not, which life is worth living and which not, etc. For Butler, liberalism falls victim to the illusion that subjects pre-exist their discursive construction (Butler 2010, 4). This reproach, which places liberalism at the opposite end of Butler’s position, naturally extends to libertarianism. Whether it is the individuals who choose the principles of justice under an ideal choice situation (as in Rawls), whether it is the rules of coexistence of individuals endowed with natural rights (as in Nozick) or, finally, individuals who discover the conditions of mutual cooperation under universal, general and abstract rules (as in Hayek), in all cases a subject is assumed beforehand An examination of the concepts of “livability” and “life” in Butler’s work, their continuity and implications, can be found in (Zaharijević and Milutinović Bojanić 2017). 7 Butler describes this constant recreation through the concept of “repetition”. This, on the other hand, enables us to speak of the performativity of gender. 8 For the concept of “normative violence” in Butler (Chambers and Carver 2008, 77-ss). 6

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(reasonable and rational subjects, capable of a certain notion of good, self-owned, etc.), with all which that implies. However, this mistrust of the universality and definitions of the subject does not have to be fatal. In commenting on Adorno’s critique of abstract universality, Butler asserts that: “[T]he problem is not with universality as such but with an operation of universality that fails to be responsive to cultural particularity and fails to undergo a reformulation of itself in response to the social and cultural conditions it includes within its scope of applicability.” (Butler 2005, 6)

This observation, which alludes to the obvious, but no less forgotten, difference between the affirmation of a principle and the identification of its application conditions, is important for two reasons. First, because it allows admission of libertarianism’s definition of a subject: a self that has formal freedom and abstract rights, especially the right to its own integrity, and especially physical. The subject of libertarianism is normally conceived and explained through the image of ownership: each person is “owner of him or herself,” that is, of their body and of their life, so that no one but they have the right to use or affect their body or to decide on their life. Self-ownership is a normative principle and not the description of a state of affairs. As such, it indicates how individuals should be considered and treated.9 If we think about it, the libertarian subject is nothing other than the person of Hegelian abstract law. Butler’s queer utopia need not deny or contest that definition. But, also, Butler’s latter statement quoted enables us to anticipate the limits, the defects of libertarian utopia and the extent to which it must be dismissed. Although universality is not “by definition violent,” it can be under certain conditions. Specifically, when “a universal precept cannot, for social reasons, be appropriated or when —indeed, for social reasons— it must be refused” (Butler 2005, 6). Certainly, libertarianism is exposed to many objections with regard to this second point, especially because of its strictly formal concept of “willingness” and not, as one might think, because it must necessarily compromise with heterosexist definitions of subject. Some readers might object, perhaps, that Butler’s distinction between universality and its application of a principle is not enough to suppose the admission, not even prima facie, of the libertarian subject. However, even if true, that objection does not have to be fatal. It could still happen that the framework described by Nozick allows to “make life possible” and “rethink what is possible” for those whose morphology, desire or gender identities is normally a death sentence in life. And for that to take place it is not necessary that there be some coincidence, let us say, doctrinal that brings the philosophies of Nozick and Butler closer. A purely accidental coincidence is enough. Nozick himself assumed in his own 9

That is why Nozick affirms that libertarian restrictions (i.e., libertarian natural rights) reflect “the underlying Kantian principle” that mandates treating people as ends and not as mere means (Nozick 1974, 30-31).

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utopia that “the framework” could be supported by individuals or groups for reasons and motivations very different from those of libertarianism. However, surely there is more than just an accidental coincidence between the two utopias. Nozick states that the libertarian restrictions that prevent coercion are justified because they are a condition (necessary but not sufficient) of possibility for the meaning of life itself. He says more precisely: “I conjecture that the answer is connected with that elusive and difficult notion: the meaning of life. A person’s shaping his life in accordance with some overall plan is his way of giving meaning to his life; only a being with the capacity to so shape his life can have or strive for meaningful life.” (Nozick 1974, 50)

From this perspective, the libertarian utopia of non-coercion aims to ensure the possibility that the life of each and every one of the individuals who inhabit it has meaning (i.e., that each one is free to give it to it). For this, the life of each individual must be able to be the full, complete result of what each one chose for him or herself (by themselves or with others). The possibility of a meaningful life lies in the fact that everyone can identify with their own life and with the choices that constitute it, and not that another chooses for us the course of our own lives. It is clear that Nozick expects the universality of the libertarian subject to lie on this and not on any other consideration. It is tempting to answer the question about the possibility of queer libertarianism simply from Nozick’s earlier reflections (although surely, they should suffice to affirm that possibility). This temptation is greater when you keep in mind that, for her part, Butler claims that: “The normative aspiration at work here has to do with the ability to live and breathe and move and would no doubt belong somewhere in what is called a philosophy of freedom.” (Butler 2004, 31)

Beyond these coincidences —which after all might be rather rhetorical— at least two further reasons can be offered in favor of the possibility of queer libertarianism: i) the formal nature of the libertarian metautopia and ii) the impossibility in it of the so-called “victimless crimes.” These two reasons also allow us to tackle the first part of the problem of the application of universal principles.

The Formal Nature of the Libertarian Metautopia A good example of the difficulty of applying universal principles is provided by Fichte when he observes what Kant says: “act so that the maxim of your will can be the principle

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of a universal legislation. But then who is to be included in the kingdom governed by such legislation and thus share in the protection if affords?” (Fichte 2000, 75). This problem — perhaps the one that concerns Butler the most— has to do with the problem of defining the human or, also, as Fichte called it, with the problem of acknowledgment. Physical violence begins and is made possible by the denial of that acknowledgment, by the “derealization” of the other person (Butler 2006, 33-34). Once that dehumanization has occurred, there is no evil that cannot be inflicted on those who have been relegated to the space of nonhumanity and outside the limits of the law. As far as queer utopia is concerned, the problem is that of defining the genders that will be considered properly human and those that will be classified as “abnormal” or “perverse”, with all that this implies. For its part, the libertarian metautopia —its constitutional framework— does not prejudge or adopt or promote a certain notion of sexuality or gender.10 And it does not do so because it leaves to each individual the definition of their own identity. Furthermore, it embraces the broadest gender ecumenism that can be imagined. Similarly, in libertarian utopia there is no “official” conception of family or marriage. There are as many as its members want to rehearse. Now, for the same reason, the libertarian metautopia also admits communities with substantialist notions of gender: patriarchal, homophobic, sexist, etc. This raises two problems: first, guaranteeing the dissatisfied members of that community the real possibility of leaving it and, second, avoiding the indoctrination of children, with the aim of guaranteeing their autonomy. Like Nozick points out, “children present yet more difficult problems. In some way it must be ensured that they are informed of the range of alternatives in the world” (Nozick 1974, 330). These difficulties are not at all easy for a libertarian utopia. On the one hand, they would surely require greater state interference than is suggested by the idea of “minimal State.” On the other hand, these difficulties put libertarianism in the dilemma of having to choose between two liberal values: tolerance (of different cultures, ways of life, etc.) and autonomy (i.e., the real capacity of a person to exercise their freedom). In this context, Nozick cautiously leans towards the second.

Impossibility of Victimless Crimes Libertarian utopia guarantees ex ante the possibility of lives that fall outside the norm of compulsory heterosexuality, since such lives do not offend or harm anyone. Speeches that criminalize queer identities justify such criminalization, presumably, in the supposed transgression or offense that such people commit against the social order.

10

For example, libertarian utopia does not require or presuppose the ideological interpretation of evolutionary psychology that Susan Mckinnon analyzes (McKinnon 2005).

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Unlike such speeches, libertarianism does not admit the possibility of offenses or crimes against society as a whole. Without concrete victims (with a name, a story, a life) there is simply no crime. Communities that have a substantialist vision could, to some extent (the reader be reminded of the need to ensure children’s autonomy), discipline their members, but they could not punish them. Much less could they “punish” those who do not belong to their own community.11 At this point, the compatibility of both utopias could be accepted, at the same time admitting that the result of their intersection is lackluster. Such intersection ensures legal protection but, on the other hand, it does not seem to take us very far. It does not directly combat, for example, the “tyranny of opinion” that John Stuart Mill spoke about or what Foucault calls “disciplinary power”, that is, the normalization that society imposes. In the libertarian metautopia, beatings are banned, but various forms of discrimination and social ostracism would remain unpunished. Although Butler’s gay cousins probably would not have to leave their homes, they would have to live under the pressure of a hostile environment. This reproach is true, but also exaggerated. We should not forget the fact that the deactivation of criminal punishment and the recognition of freedom of expression guarantees spaces for discussion in public debate, plurality of opinions and the replacement of the ideological monopoly by simple hegemony. Although there is no guarantee that this will in fact happen, substantialist discourses are exposed to the loss of influence and power when they cannot rely on state coercion and are forced to recruit supporters from public opinion. Any libertarian, for their part, can only celebrate that fact. After all, although the framework (constitution) of libertarian utopia is “neutral,” the ethos of libertarianism is not and is in favor of any expansion of liberties.

LIBERTARIAN UTOPIA, CAPITALISM AND QUEER UTOPIA The exercise carried out thus far is exposed to the obvious objection that Butler believes that heterosexism is part of the structure of capitalism and that, consequently, this heterosexism cannot be so freely detached from libertarian utopia, as I have done so hitherto (Butler 1998). The reason is that libertarianism is capitalism’s advocate par excellence and, although its utopia does not need to be imagined as a capitalist utopia, it is a utopia —perhaps the only one— that does offer a space for capitalism. This being the case, where does that leave the (partial) compatibility thesis defended here? Merely Cultural intends to refute “conservative neo-Marxism” which reproaches the political left for making identity struggles the main object of their demands and, with it — 11

Medicine and psychiatry have tried to fill the place vacated by law with the rationalization of criminal law. For a libertarian criticism against the police power that psychiatry has appropriated (Szasz 1997).

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in addition to introducing sectarian divisions within itself— abandoning the problems related to inequality, production and, in a word, political economy. Butler counters that “there is no reason to assume that such social movements are reducible to their identitarian formation” (Butler 1997, 268) and that the division between the “merely cultural” plane and the material plane is misleading. To demonstrate the porosity of both spheres, Butler takes up Engels’s argument about the determining character that the conditions of production and reproduction have for the social order as a whole. The feminism of the ‘70s and ‘80s of the last century, she recalls, tried to establish the connection between the two, trying to demonstrate, among other things, how sexual reproduction was part of the material conditions of existence and how, ultimately, the standard gender norms (the monogamous heterosexual family, etc.) “was systematically tied to the mode of production of proper to the functioning of political economy” (Butler 1997, 272). With this reminder, Butler wants to demonstrate the continuity that exists between the demands for cultural recognition and the demands for social justice. Her idea is to establish that “the economic, tied to the reproductive, is necessarily linked to the reproduction of heterosexuality” (1997, 274). Butler offers a number of examples in support of that claim. So, for example, to prove that gays form a “differential ‘class’” she draws attention to the way healthcare is distributed, the burdens on those living with HIV and AIDS, and the fact that they become permanently indebted. However, Butler’s argument that compulsory heterosexuality is necessary for the reproduction of the conditions that make socialism possible is unlikely. For the time being, as Nancy Fraser observes, that argument “has an air of olympian indifference to history” (1997, 284). The examples in favor of the market’s capacity to assimilate and, even more, to take advantage of the multiplication of genders are equally numerous. Fraser herself, who disagrees with Butler “about the nature of contemporary capitalism” (1997, 279), offers the example of some multinationals. And although neither Butler nor Fraser take note of this point, the very fact that the preferences of LGBTQI+ people become a niche market means, whether or not they profit from those preferences, that an acknowledgment of those identities has taken place. A shy or very elementary form of recognition, but recognition, after all. The fundamental problem with Butler’s argument on this point is that she greatly overestimates the dependence of capitalism on heterosexual regulation of life. At the same time, and for the same reason, it underestimates the capacity of capitalism to adapt to the conditions of —to put it on her terms— the production of people. In fact, capitalism (and libertarian utopia) does not have a preferred paradigm of production in this sense. It could even be argued that capitalism has learned to be indifferent to these conditions, to the point that it is possible to imagine dystopias in which the people of future capitalist societies are genetically created, “tailored” according to the preferences of one of their parents or, why not, from a client eager to adopt/buy a child.

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Furthermore, this versatility can be explained by the same logic of supply and demand that serves to explain the functioning of the market: from the moment the monopoly of heterosexuality breaks, the forms of love and gender will multiply depending on their “demand.”12 In this context, heterosexuality will surely continue to be a massive product, but it will have lost its aura of sacredness. It will simply be one more preference among others.

CONCLUSION The reflection carried out so far shows that libertarian utopia and queer utopia are much more compatible than what one could suppose prima facie. In libertarian utopia it is feasible to extend the limits of what is possible, as far as gender identities are concerned. Perhaps this possibility does not deny the connection that Butler wants to make between the conditions of production and the conditions of reproduction. However, it does deny the meaning she attributes to it. But what does it mean for queer utopia that capitalism does not require compulsory heterosexuality for its success? On the one hand, and for the purposes of this investigation, it assumes that queer utopia is compatible with libertarian utopia. Perhaps even to an unsuspected point. On the other, that queer utopia does not need to strive for the disappearance of capitalism, even when it can denounce specific aspects of it. Furthermore, the claims that it can make, as a queer utopia, of the functioning of capitalism really lack revolutionary potential, even if they are not totally devoid of critical potential. In other words, the relationship of queer utopia with socialism or Marxism is purely accidental and its subversive potential seems to be effective beyond political economy. In this sense, the possibilities of a happy marriage between libertarianism (or liberalism) and queer theory do not seem to be worse than the possibilities between a marriage between the latter and socialism. In any case, it is possible to identify a certain continuity in some of the most popular objections against capitalism or, more precisely, against libertarianism as its theoretical basis: the merely negative notion of freedom or willingness that it implies. Thus, for example, the criticisms that point to the lack of “real” freedom of workers in adverse circumstances to negotiate their wages or of women to reject a boss’s sexual offer, are intended to denounce the limits and deficiencies of that notion of freedom. The weight of criticisms like those can be a reason for disagreement between libertarianism and queer utopia. Therefore, if the wedding is to be celebrated, libertarianism must take into account the material circumstances that condition the exercise of freedom. That will, of course, involve moving from libertarianism to classical liberalism. The details of that transit are of 12

Schumpeter believed that feminism was “an essentially capitalist phenomenon” (2013, 127). Perhaps the same is true —and with greater reason— of the queer movement.

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no interest here. What matters is drawing attention to the fate of queer theory in libertarian utopia: given that the resistance that makes heterotopias possible is not abstract, but is linked to the specific conditions in which power is exercised and the type of power that creates that space in which one lives, the assimilation that liberal societies make of the LGBTQI+ claims imply the constant deactivation or obsolescence of queer utopias. Such deactivation means that queer emancipatory power (heterotopia) has become or is in the process of becoming yet another liberal utopia.

REFERENCES Berlin, Isaiah. 2013. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Butler, Judith. 1997. “Merely cultural.” Social text 52/53:265-277. Butler, Judith. 1998. “Merely cultural.” New left review: 33-44. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York & London: Routdlege. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. New York/London: Verso. Butler, Judith. 2010. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Taylor & Francis. Chambers, Samuel A., and Terrell Carver. 2008. Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics. New York: Taylor & Francis. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 2000. Foundations of Natural Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1997. “Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler.” Social Text 52/53: 279-289. Hartmann, Heidi I. 1981. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” In Women and revolution: A discussion of the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism, edited by Lydia Sargent, 1-41. Montréal: South End Press. McKinnon, Susan. 2005. Neo-liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Misseri, Lucas. 2011. “Microutopismo y fragmentación social: Nozick, Iraburu y Kumar.” [“Microutopism and social fragmentation; Nozick, Iraburu and Kumar”]. En-claves del pensamiento 5(10):75-88. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Oxford: Basic books. Reprint, 2013. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Standford: Stanford University Press. Popper, Karl. 2013. The Open Society and its Enemies, edited by Ernst H Gombrich. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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Rubin, Gayle S. 2011. Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Schumpeter, Joseph Alois 2013. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London & New York: Taylor & Francis. Szasz, Thomas. 1997. Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement. New York: Syracuse University Press. Zaharijević, Adriana, and Sanja Milutinović Bojanić. 2017. “The Trajectories of the Concept of Life in Judith Butler's Tthought.” Isegoria. Revista de filosofia moral y politica 56: 169-185.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 16

FROM THE PROCESSES OF SUBJECTIVATION TO THE WAYS OF DWELLING: THE RIGHTS OF A BECOMING ONTOTOPOLOGY Eduardo Álvarez Pedrosian* Information and Communication Faculty, University of the Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay

ABSTRACT We propose a double-entry approach to the subject as a strategy between thinking and knowing. Firstly, we will pose a conceptual problem based on various connections of Foucault’s work with lines of thought that allow us to thicken his approach to heterotopias in order to draw ontological considerations regarding processes of subjectivation and contemporary city dwelling. We will then focus on an ethnographic case involving a recent urban intervention in the city of Montevideo, exploring the senses and practices involved in its formulation which emerged from the very event of its opening. We will conclude by reflecting on the challenges resulting from the proposed transformation and the rights involved in it.

Keywords: Montevideo, urban intervention, feminist urbanism, activism, way of dwelling, processes of subjectivation

*

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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HETEROTOPOLOGY AS A WAY OF THINKING ABOUT OURSELVES A post-metropolis status encompasses, as noted by Soja, a multiplicity of coexisting realities based on structuring forces that sometimes act in opposite directions and are sometimes complementary, usually combining both extremes on different levels and in different directions. He pointed out the following: flexible specialization according to postFordist logic, the globalization of a homogenizing urban region, megacities of endless sums, massive inequalities with polarized zoning, fragmentation of controlled territories closed on themselves, and spaces that act as support for increasingly hyperreal smart cities (Soja 2000). This open set of urban realities and discourses is increased by new ones, and, indeed, the further away we move from western registers of production of civilizing models and imaginary, the more complex the issue becomes. This happens both outwardly and inwardly: both when we move away from the regions historically urbanized by the classic urban development and industrial society models and when we delve into their entrails, into the effervescent micro-scales of emergence of other anthropological forms at the very core of the traditional cosmopolitan centres, currently dwelled in by populations from all over the world and involved on networks of planetary interconnection (Hannerz 1996). In this context, heterotopic spaces are a tool in the antagonistic dynamics over the commons, although they are always stressed by the capture of the logic of capital, for instance through the increased value of areas and the gentrification that may come in tow as a result of improvements in the design and standards of living consistent with socially dominant parameters. It is the classic dynamics of turningall use value into exchange value as discussed by Marx and present in the evolution of space as a commodity to element of speculation and then a product of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003). The concept of heterotopia is likely to be considered loose or inaccurate, given the context of its gestation and its widespread use in the most varied disciplinary fields much later on. We should not forget —inaddition to the posthumous publication of the Of Other Spaces talk (Foucault 1986), where the point is made— that this is based on one of two previous radio talks on the links between utopia and literature aired in late 1966, the year when two of his books which are instrumental in helping to understand his work were published: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Foucault 2005) and The Thought from Outside (Foucault 1990), dedicated to Blanchot’s literary perspective. The extensive use of heterotopia as a category in recent decades has highlighted, first of all, those conditions of existence related to exclusion, precariousness and abandonment, that is, those most closely related to the forgotten margins of the establishment. Those considered othernesses were located in the worst of conditions in the logic of the social inequality prevailing in the contemporary world, in particular those materialized on the metropolitan peripheries (Hetherington 1997). Indeed, by following a trend already present in the anthropological field and very close to Foucault’s descent approach, an attempt was

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made to think about and explore the realities of those others defined by their unsuitability to the space and time regarded as normal, civilized and the most developed of all. The colonialism implied there is analyzed not only as an exercise in discrediting cultural values, customs and habits but also as a deeper denial of the world dwelled in by these other beings; wrong and erroneous times and spaces that have even been denied as such (Fabian 1983). More recently we have found evidence of neoliberal contempt for forms of human and non-human subjectivation that are not beneficial to its preservation and reproduction. This is how “bare life” (Agamben 1998) appears as a central category, on the same Foucauldian path of a bio-political analysis of the production of subjectivity (Foucault 2008). Here we can consider cases of spatialities, territorialities and ways of dwelling related to these forms in even more radical conditions in terms of their otherness, in a permanent “state of emergency” as noted early on by Benjamin (2007a) in his philosophy of history. We are talking about the life of migrants in contemporary Europe and the United States, the “hyper-border” on the edges regarded as civilizing limits, refugee camps and ways of dwelling even in both communities and the cosmopolitan mass in their large cities and other territories (Agier 2016). As regards the performing arts and architecture, they began to consider heterotopias in their other sense, also present in the conceptualization by Foucault (1986): spaces for the production of difference, alternatives, components that can trigger our experiences along with new forms of subjectivation. This is not about shortage and contempt, but on the contrary, about the richness of creativity and the affirmation of instituting practices (Tompkins 2014). From our point of view, both issues are equally significant, and the specific situations that we can find expose this antagonistic character of heterotopic spaces. But what is certainly the case is the fact that any alternative for the generation of new spaces for the contemporary exercise of citizenship requires this compositional gesture, which is not limited to designing forms that are ground-breaking in themselves, but also forms that will start a dialogue between what exists and what is new in a way that will challenge the prevailing order and open up an opportunity for the generation of new scenarios of social equity and equality. The logic of transnational capitalism and its homogenizing axioms (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) will sooner or later capture the values generated there and turn them into commodities, in this case in model forms of a standard commercial architecture, of politically correct socialization norms for the media discourse in the name of “civism” (Delgado 2007). But no battle is lost until it has been fought, and it does not all come down to this capture. Otherwise there would be no hope. This is a central point for the subject matter of this book and for this section in particular, and it is important to dwell on it: we are talking about Foucault’s view of human rights. He is known to have been critical of the idea of their existence on several occasions. However, as he magnificently makes explicit in the dialogue and debate with Chomsky (Chomsky and Foucault 2006), the point is the essentialization implicit in the classic

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conception of human being that is involved there. This is about the features of a civilization, a history and a social class that ranges over everything else. Following the Heideggerian path in this regard, and despite all the all too valid questions about the dangers an ontological relativism of this kind can lead us to, the fact remains that absolutely terrible and atrocious events have been justified in the name of humanisms that have emerged since the Renaissance. The point is not, therefore, to deny the existence of human rights but to deny the invariability and consistency of a kind of nature that rests on an essence outside time and space, according to moral attributes that are good in themselves. In this respect, democracy, the city and subjectivity itself, as Greek inventions, are contingent. They are concrete events, and as such, they must be valued, cared for and maximized, because they are open to transformation. Otherwise —and paradoxically enough— they end up being denied and driven to disappearance. This is mainly borne out by mechanisms such as fascism and capitalism: an exaltation that denies everything else, or an absolute emptying in the name of pure change, as Benjamin (2007b) understood early on not only for the work of art. For this reason, in the decades following Foucault’s death, the impact of his work was fundamental in all social movements fighting for the recognition and acceptance of new rights, whether in the field of feminism or that of queer or LGBTI identities, indigenous identities in America, people of African descent and any possible hybridization (Gandy 2012; Souvatzi 2012). We are currently witnessing a reactive moment in this regard, with the conservative forces threatened by all of this crying out for the restoration of old forms of order that seem to be in crisis. For all these reasons, it is essential to bear in mind the philosophical scope of the point made so as not to lose conceptual depth in the form of open problem posing —its hould not rest on essences. An “ontology of the present” or “of ourselves”, as last articulated by Foucault (1984), must go hand in hand with a “heterotopological” view of both urban and other spaces, whether existing now or yet to be projected and constructed. It is not just about deviations from the norm and challenges to the established order. The very idea of normalcy has blown up in a scenario where fissures and cracks have opened up that are accommodating new configurations, just as these and the old forms are subject to capture, emptying and commodification operations in a new order more complex than that of disciplinary societies, namely the order of “control societies” (Deleuze 1995). We can recognize here how some ideas that can contribute in many respects can be restrictive once they begin to be automatically reiterated, losing their philosophical implications, the survey [survol] of the concept, the problematization that it seeks to trigger with each implementation. When we talk about the “right to the city”, such a popular expression in urban studies and the struggles of social groups in contemporary cities (Lefebvre 2000; Harvey 2012), are we not forgetting that this is a much more profound and comprehensive right, the right to exist according to ways of dwelling and spatiotemporalities that accommodate and dimension it? The fight is not only over a certain public space, established architectural typologies or forms of socialization out of context,

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but over spatialities that can give rise to creative experiences where life can be affirmed, respected, dignified and cared for; a life that is no longer determined once and for all, a life thatis transforming into the becoming of events; a life which is human but always with crosscutting links to things and other non-human ways of life (Latour 1993). This can occur in compositions that we associate more with traditional models of western urban life or not, with rural forms and their hybridizations, with an ecology of the media for which cyberspace is extremely important when it comes to considering the new identities (Handlykken 2011). For this reason, the subject of dwelling emerges as a primary ontological condition for thinking and for thinking about ourselves in the present and prospectively in the near future. Environmental crises, housing problems, exhaustion in the megacities, conflicts in domestic relationships, privacy turned into a show, and much more, make reference, as noted by Guattari (1995), to the consideration of processes of subjectivation, and we can add, to our ways of dwelling as beings existentially in need of a spatio-temporal texture with its mediations. Sloterdijk (2016) uses the term “ontotopology” to retrieve Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein (Heidegger 2010; 2007), understanding that there is a breakthrough that is hard to ignore: the discussion of the composition of the very way we are, based on how we are designed, in a world-building exercise that includes us as part of the process. This dynamic involves the same relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, the objective and the subjective, the inside and the outside, in multiple and topologically complex ways (Guattari 2013). An existential design is therefore generated by all the operations that act on our living conditions, determining and conditioning the margins of freedom for the creation of ways of being, in processes of subjectivation always in tension between what is there and what is yet to be created. The perspective introduced by Foucault by thinking about those “other spaces” at a time when he was levelling radical criticism at the human and social sciences (Foucault 2005) and making progress in rationalizing a thought from outside (Foucault 1990), as we have seen, provides us with fundamental tools to explore and intervene in the fate of our surroundings in the space-times of contemporary dwelling. That, we believe, is the best use we can make of his approach. A number of composition operations and components are then distinguished that act as a reference for thinking about spaces, spatialities and ourselves as both products and producers at the same time. We are as we dwell (ÁlvarezPedrosian 2016): we find ourselves caught up in plots that make or fail to make ways of life possible —always in a process of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Ingold 2000) — in more or less violent efforts to shape the world, materializing the conditions of existence between what prevails and what always escapes its determinations (Deleuze 1988).

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ETHNOGRAPHIC NOTES ON A HETEROTOPIC EXERCISE: THE NEW PIONEERING WOMEN SQUARE On March 8, 2020, Montevideo was given a new public space that will be groundbreaking in many ways. The exponential street demonstration on the day that marks the struggle of women and feminized bodies —the large mobilization by alternative means for the rights that are at stake and highlighting the need to overcome patriarchal structures, planned days and weeks before the main avenue in the city was seized— was preceded the day before by the opening of Plaza de las Pioneras (Pioneering Women Square). From now on we are going to focus on this ethnographic case to delve into the scope of the philosophical points made in this chapter, seeking to advance in conceptualization thanks to the dialogue with the human and non-human “actants” (Latour 1993) present in this new space, that is, the entities and forces that comprise it, amid the “controversies” exposed by a new materiality and its semiotics (Latour and Yaneva 2008). The first interesting thing is the kind of administrative public policy behind it: an initiative by the local government to create a multi-purpose other-space, focusing on feminist movements following an open, multi-functional design that unequivocally breaks with the paradigm of a socially relevant place on the basis of collaborative management involving different social groups. As we will see, it is important to keep in mind that these are unfolding situations, dynamic processes where nothing is solved in one go and where current and potential controversies can be regarded as keys to analyze the urbanistic strategies and tactics to be constructed on the basis of the daily practices of dwellers (De Certeau 2002). Secondly, the architectural and urban proposal that won and was materialized, as well as the number of projects submitted to the public call, is the result of a number of other extremely interesting considerations related to reflecting on heterotopology as a contemporary perspective for the design and planning of the contemporary city. This is not just another square: the proposal emphasized a different dialogue with a pre-existing materiality and its uses, relying on a semiotic operation that builds meaning and significance that disrupts the more or less dominant urban imaginary at the local and regional level. And thirdly, it is very important to consider the challenges going forward in the evolution of daily dwelling in this new space on its different qualitatively variable scales, especially in the intermediate dimension related to the immediate environment, its ownership as an element of the landscape in the neighborhood (Álvarez Pedrosian 2018). This involves the spatialities to be built by the locals too, in dialogue with the feminist groups that will have their headquarters there, where they will implement activities on a global scale, both through out the city and on national and international networks.

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The proposal that won the open contest organized by the municipality,1 with the participation of academia and the local Association of Architects, stated that the guiding idea was to: “deconstruct the existing building, reconfigure the old structure and generate a platform on which to draw new diagrams, new uses and coexistence. We propose clearing the space in order to rethink it from a new beginning, where the lack of a programme appears as an opportunity to create a new social territory, a new city scape, and a point of reference to think about the debate about space policy. The proposal is conceived with an open temporal dimension, not expecting to be an aggregator of the different possible activities, but proposing a form rather than a kind of urban intervention. It is a space that seeks to give its own users the opportunity to shape it, rather than the other way round. This is a break with our preconceptions of public squares that opens up to other modalities of dwelling in the common space.” (FADU 2018).

Indeed, the jury’s decision highlights the search for a lively, busy space for the production of new events in an effort to reassert and gain rights, as opposed to a memorial dedicated to the figures in the original idea of the proposal: pioneering women —identified as belonging to Uruguayan society— for their “symbolic legacy” (IM 2018b, 1). One of the mos relevant thing is the particular status as the core of the city block where the preexisting property stood, measuring more than five thousand square metres, occupied by a number of old sheds of an erstwhile famous tram company (originally La Transatlántica), its main entrance with two large houses on either side, where its offices operated. The municipality had been using all this for decades for the storage of materials and the administrative activities of several services (IM 2018a, 8-9). It was the possibility of generating public spatiality consistent with such characteristics that gave the winning project an edge. All of this points to a deeply heterotopic conception of urban space: the need to open up to new concrete alternatives in the face of the deep-set imaginary without falling into imposture due to a lack of decisions (Gorelik 2004), prioritize multifunctionality so that the dwellers can go about their business as freely as possible (Sennett 2018) and the conversion of old industrial premises into highly built-up areas for other social uses and in pursuit of the common good. The winner of the shortlisted preliminary projects was undoubtedly the most daring in rethinking the concept of public and pragmatic when it comes to reusing existing materials and engaging in a dialogue with the old sheds (by reusing the old metal sheets to cover the parting walls), as well as enabling achallenging game of visibilities thanks to the metal mirror arranged at the back that reflect people’s silhouettes (IM 2018b, 3); a successful display of communicative expressiveness based on innovative recycled materials in the Developed by those architects: Rodrigo Méndez, Valentina Cardellino, Paola Monzillo, Juan Andrés Púrpura, Andrés Arizaga and Rodrigo Zargarzazú.

1

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combination of rust that throws the spotlight on the passage of time and a mirrored surface with its temperate luminosity, where another temporality operates on a more intimate and personal scale. These combinations, especially the mirrors as paradigmatic cases, are those that Foucault (1986) pointed out as typical of a heterotopic space. But beyond identifications with specific operations, what is really important is the compositional gesture, the recognized value and the materialization of all this, which from now on will be dwelled in and will bring about new processes to be taken into account. Our team has been investigating realities of this kind and trying to intervene as far as possible, particularly through a project whose field of research is the historical second enlargement of the city of Montevideo, technically known in the last third of the 19th century as Ciudad Novísima (Baracchini and Altezor 2010). In particular, we have explored the activity of reconverting the old industrial belt, with ties to the coast of the bay and its harbour, the central railway station and its central branch lines, warehouses and manufacturing facilities, where we found an evident heterotopic vocation, similar to what happens in other areas of cities on other latitudes. There are very valuable social ventures for the construction of new forms of socialization, promotion of citizenship and rights related to the consistent work of historical unions present in the area through the facilities where their members traditionally used to work, the proximity of their headquarters and other spaces for the promotion of their joint activities, and new civil association ventures of a recreational-educational nature (ÁlvarezPedrosian and FagundezD’Anello 2019).

Figure 1. Perspective of the project. Architectural Team: Rodrigo Méndez, Valentina Cardellino, Paola Monzillo, Juan Andrés Púrpura, Andrés Arizagaand Rodrigo Zargarzazú 2018.

This intervention is located in a neighborhood known as Arroyo Seco, which seems to have been assimilated by others of greater size and institutional recognition (La Aguada to the south and El Reducto to the north) but is still going strong due to its residents and social and cultural ventures. Its development has been closely linked to this second enlargement

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operation since the late 19th century. Its occupation occurred earlier on and was related to the very foundation of the colonial city, as a site for both crops on the banks of the watercourse which it is named after and the emergence of workshops for the leather and wool industry on the adjacent bay (Opiso 2016). The piping works in the watercourse and the subsequent industrial vocation that characterized it resulted in the appearance that we find in its cityscape.The tram lines were very important in a Montevideo that was expanding prodigiously (ÁlvarezLenzi, Arana and Bocchiardo 1986). This intervention therefore seeks to effectively revitalize a sleepy micro-area of the city amid heavy metropolitan traffic flows that is highly valuable due to its proximity to the classic centralities but needs public spaces to enable outdoor socialization and accommodate cultural and social centres on different scales. The large number of warehouses storing materials for export or distribution still defines the landscape. In the midst of all this, and on one of the main arteries, the new significance of this place enables new spaces for the construction of new ways of dwelling. Some of the old spatiality endures in those spacious high-ceilinged rooms, now with their exposed iron structures as an abstract skeleton of an open dome for recreational and political experimentation in the middle of the city. This combines various trends in the reuse of industrial ruins (Edensor 2005). The old terrestrial communications give way to new mediations, where the transport terminal becomes a beacon of the broadest and most fundamental social struggle in the contemporary world. As we said above, and as emphasized by the authorities and the participating organizations, the design of the spaces is accompanied by the guidelines for their uses, that is, the programmes that are to be implemented on the understanding that architecture is the materialization of devices that enable certain practices, specific assemblages that will prefigure possible subjectivity-forming experiences (Guattari 2013). Political management is one of the central dimensions in this regard, since it involves decision-making regarding the day-to-day running of activities, with care as the key to dwelling (Heidegger 2007). The project is also innovative in this regard, as it proposes co-management by six organizations: Colectivo Habitadas, Cotidiano Mujer, Colectivo Las Puñadito, Encuentro de Feministas Diversas, Colectivo Elefante and Fundación Plemmu (Uruguay’s Plenary of Women) (El País 2020). These are different feminist groupings, some of them recent and others with a long history and a recognized track record in the context of social struggles. Feminist urbanism is not limited to the planning and design of settings similar to those traditionally occupied by men. It implies a perspective where the patriarchal model of society, anchored in capitalist, racist and colonialist relations, is challenged and overcome (Col·lectiu Punt 6 2019). This must materialize in the very distinction between public and private, in the very existential composition where such dichotomies or hard lines of segmentation operate (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), in support of a micro-politics consistent with ways of dwelling where people live in a different way and new horizons open up for a transformation of subjectivity.

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The opening day was especially significant from the ethnographic point of view, since it allowed us to participate in the first collective use, where the space deployed all its functionality in action, broadcasting to its surroundings and beyond through long-distance communication networks, thereby becoming a key player in the evolution of the city in a transformation line that is pre-existing and new at the same time. With a capacity crowd, the new square was the scene of multiple activities, including games for children, and food and drink stalls. Official agreements were signed by the participating organizations, and, most importantly, artistic shows were presented, all this on a stage in the middle of the largest parting wall, with contemporary dance and brief performances by singers Rossana Taddei, Eli Almic with DJ Fuega and the women’s murga group Falta y Resto, as a sample of various genres strongly marked by femality. There was also a parade by a troupe of the comparsa group La Melasa, a historical ensemble of drums, a milestone in the universe of African-Uruguayan percussion related to Atlántico Negro (Ferreira 2007), which, like murga, has traditionally been perceived as an exclusively male domain. As is customary, the drums played as the group walked across the space, filling bodies with sound and making almost all of us dance, in an energetic ritual that gives meaning, thickness and a strong neighborhood feeling to spatiality (Gonçalvez Boggio 2007).

Figure 2. The surroundings of the Square. Photo by Karina Culela, 2020.

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Figure 3. The parade during the opening day. Photo by Karina Culela, 2020.

Figure 4. The inauguration of the Square. Photo by Karina Culela, 2020.

In order to add more heterotopic components, there was a video mapping display about the event. This artistic practice makes use of the architecture as staging support, bringing into play a deterritorializing dialogue between materiality and immateriality by combining audio-visual artistic expressions (Barber and Lafluf 2015). It should not be forgotten that in his day Foucault (1986) too used cinemas as examples of heterotopic spaces, due to the

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simultaneous match and mismatch between different spaces and times even in their modes of existence: the audience in their seats and the virtual universe of the film. The video mapping display by Cabe Trust in tribute to those pioneering women took the key of candombe as a structuring element of a ritornello that reaffirmed the existential territory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) summoned by the drums that had previously played there, again considering the fight of all things female to take over the traditional public space of the street and the square, historically male-dominated even at the grassroots level. To close this heterotopic overview, it should be noted that the show was broadcast by TV Ciudad, the municipal government’s public channel. That broadcast and the videos made from the footage (Espacio Feminista Plaza Las Pioneras 2020; Murga Falta y Resto 2020) show the way in which the event used the potential of this new heterotopic space, profoundly defined by its scenographic qualities. As night fell, the lighting enhanced this feature even further, highlighting the potentially limitless role of the old metal structure of the pre-existing central shed as a generic dome: an open deck. The murga group sang to pay tribute to women who have fallen victim to chauvinistic violence, seeking to recover their spirits and bring them back to life: present absences of a ghostly “heterochrony” (Foucault 1986) that donates meaning towards the conquest of the right to existence.

Figure 5. The Square during an ordinary day. Photo by Karina Culela, 2020.

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Figure 6. Square, an ordinary day. Photo by Karina Culela, 2020.

SOME REMARKS: CHALLENGES OF LIVING TOGETHER I decided to leave the new square through the entrance side —actually the widest and most open of the two— and going to the street instead of going to the avenue, more visible to passers-by and commuters using various means of transport. The neighborhood was there in the shape of the locals at their doorsteps, gathered at the corners, watching the unfolding event. The atmosphere was different, and so were the perceptions and views. The first thing I noticed was how an old man remarked to his neighbours as he walked by on his way out of the event: “too much diversity for my liking.” After some chuckling, I came across another male adult sitting in a deck chair rightin front of the square. He turned out to be an old neighbour from my childhood in another central neighborhood of the city, also located within the limits of the historical second enlargement. He called his wife, who recognized me straightaway. We talked about my parents, brother and former neighbours of thirty, forty years before. When I asked them about their first impressions about this new urban intervention and what was going on at the time, the first thing that emerged was apprehension about the use of contemporary public urban spaces: Who would take care of the place, how they would stop it from filling up with a crowd that they identify as regulars at nearby nightclubs on the avenue. They also remembered the murder of a young woman —the same murder El Almic later referred to on stage— which had occurred some days before in one of the garages next to the premises of the square, just a few metres from this broad street leading

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into the neighborhood. The young woman was found under a mattress some days after she had been murdered in this place of heavy metal gigs with several noise pollution complaints filed by local residents. I started reflecting on the near future of this decidedly heterotopic space that had just been born in the heart of historical Montevideo, in the socio-territorial fabric of abandoned but dynamic places, existentially precarious but charged with vitality, like so many old towns and central and intermediate areas close to them (Herzog 2006). Indeed, feminist spatiality conceived as an alternative subjectivation where people can exercise the right to gather, organize themselves and prepare for new conquests — and is open to the community through other artistic and, more broadly, cultural expressions — is disruptive by definition. Women have always had strategies and tactics to avoid being constrained by the typical prohibitions of male domination and the binary structure it entails, which includes all corresponding positions (Bourdieu 2001), particularly intimately at the home level (Col·lectiu Punt 6 2019). But the new visibility gained by these initiatives will require constant negotiation in the immediate environment in order to deal with the possible transformations in urban imaginaries and the daily practices involved. If the local residents are expected to take ownership of these new areas for socialization, these public spaces as dynamic triggers of diverse “commonness”, the only choice is to try to draw them in, allow oneself to be challenged and challenge them at the same time, turning political antagonism into an exercise of constructing rights.

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. (1998). Homo sacer: sovereing Power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agier, Michel. (2016). Borderlands. Toward an anthropology of the cosmopolitan condition.Cambridge–Malden: Polity Press. Álvarez Lenzi, Ricardo, Mariano Arana and Livia Bocchiardo. (1986). El Montevideo de la expansión (1868-191)5 [The Montevideo of expantion (1868-1915)]. Montevideo: EBO. Álvarez Pedrosian, Eduardo. (2016). “Las tramas socio-territoriales en las que habitamos: aportes para pensar la composición urbana en clave comunicacional.” [“The socialterritorial weft in which we dwell: contributions for thinking the urban composition from a communicational point of view”] Informatio, 21(2), 69-87. Accessed March 25, 2020. http://informatio.eubca.edu.uy/ojs/index.php/Infor/article/view/189. Álvarez Pedrosian, Eduardo. (2018). “La dimensión de lo barrial en la encrucijada entre la comunicación, la ciudad y el espacio público. Una miradaetnográficasobre la subjetividadurbanacontemporánea.” [“The neighborhood dimension at the crossroads of communication, city and public space. An ethnographic view of the contemporary

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eme/mujeres/inaugura-espacio-feminista-plaza-pioneras-sera-previa-8m.html [“The Feminist Space Pioneering Women Square is inaugurated and will be the preview of # 8M”]. Espacio Feminista Plaza Las Pioneras. (2020). “Video mapping realizado por la artista visual Curt Trust.” [“Video mapping realized for the visual artist Curt Trust”]. Accessed March, 15. https://www.facebook.com/espaciolaspioneras/videos/ 532944537358808/. Fabian, Johannes. (1983). Time and the Other. How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia UniversityPress. FADU. (2018). “Plaza Las Pioneras-La ciudad imaginada. 100 años de concursos en el Uruguay.” [“Pioneering Women Square-The imagined city. 100 years of competitions in Uruguay”]. Accessed March, 20. http://concursos.fadu.edu.uy/ index.php/concursos/plaza-las-pioneras/. Ferreira, Luis. (2007). “An afrocentric approach to musical performance in the Black South Atlantic: The Candombe drumming.” Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música,11. AccessedMarch 25, 2020. https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/129/anafrocentric-approach-to-musical-performance-in-the-black-south-atlantic-thecandombe-drumming-in-uruguay. Foucault, Michel. (1984). “What is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 32-50. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. (1986). “Of other spaces.” Diacritics, 16(1), 22-27. Foucault, Michel. (1990). “Maurice Blanchot: The thought from outside.” In Maurice Blanchot: The thought from outside. Michel Foucault as I imagine him, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault, 7-58. New York: Zone. Foucault, Michel. (2005). The order of things: An archeology of the human sciences. London-New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 19781979. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Gandy, Matthew. (2012). “Queer ecology: nature, sexuality, and heterotopic alliances.” Environment and Planning D: Society and space, 30, 727-747. Accessed March 24, 2020. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1068/d10511. Gonçalvez Boggio, Luis. (2007). “Los territorios del candombe.” [“Thecandombe’sterritories”]. In Cuerpo y subjetividades contemporáneas. Clínica bioenergética y esquizoanálisis. Montevideo: Clinicabioenergetica.com. AccessedMarch 25, 2020. http://www.academia.edu/11497032/Cuerpo_y_ subjetividades_contemporáneas. Gorelik, Adrián. (2004). “Imaginarios urbanos e imaginación urbana. Para un recorrido por los lugares comunes de los estudios culturales urbanos.” [“Urban imaginaries and urban imagination. For a journey through common places of urban cultural studies”].

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Bifurcaciones. Revista de estudios culturales urbanos, 1. AccessedFebruary 11, 2020. www.bifurcaciones.cl/001/Gorelik.htm. Guattari, Félix. (1995). Chaosmosis. An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. BloomingtonIndianapolis: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Félix. (2013). Schizoanalyitc cartographies. London-New York: Bloombsbury. Handlykken, AsneKvale. (2011). “Digital cities in the making: exploring perceptions of space, agency of actors and heterotopia.” C-legenda, 25, 22-37. Accessed March 23, 2020. https://periodicos.uff.br/ciberlegenda/article/view/36881/21455. Hannerz, Ulf. (1999). Transnational connections. Culture, people, places. London-New York: Routledge. Harvey, David. (2003). The new imperialism. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. (2012). Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution. London-New York: Verso. Heidegger, Martin. (2002). “Building, dwelling, thinking.” In Basic writings: From Being and time (1927) to Task of thinking (1964),347-363. London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. (2010). Being and time. Albany: State University of New York Press. Herzog, Lawrence A. (2006). Return to the center. Culture, public space, and city building in a global era. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hetherington, Kevin. (1997). The badlands of modernity. Heterotopia and social ordering. London-New York: Routledge. IM. (2018a). “Bases del Concurso-Licitación para el Proyecto y Ejecución de obra del Espacio Público ‘Las Pioneras’.” [“Bases of the Competition-Tender for the Project and Execution of work of the Public Space ‘The Pioneering Women’.”]Accesed March, 10. http://concursos.fadu.edu.uy/wp-content/uploads/ 2018_concurso_ laspioneras-bases.pdf. IM. (2018b). “Acta del Fallo Nº 8, Concurso Espacio Público ‘Las Pioneras’.” [“Minutes of Judgment No. 8, ‘The Pioneering Women’ Public Space Competition”]. Accessed March, 15. http://concursos.fadu.edu.uy/wp-content/uploads/2018_ concurso_laspioneras_acta_fallo_jurado.pdf. Ingold, Tim. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London-New York: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. (1993). We have never been moderns. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno and AlbenaYaneva. (2008). “‘Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move’: an ANT’s view of architecture.” In Exploration in architecture: teaching, design, research, edited by RetoGeiser, 80-89. Basel-Boston-Berlin: Birkhäuser. Lefebvre, Henri. (2000). Writings on cities. Oxord-Malden: Blackwell. Murga Falta y Resto. (2020). “Actuación completa de la Inauguración Plaza Las Pioneras. (TV Ciudad)”. [“Complete performance in the inauguration of The Pioneering Women Square”]. AccessedMarch, 10. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=me6GRjeQVBU.

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Opiso, Juan Carlos. (2016). Arroyo Seco: un barrio en la memoria.[Arroyo Seco: a neighborhood in the memory]. Montevideo: J. C. Opiso. Sennett, Richard. (2018). Building and dwelling. Ethics for the city. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sloterdijk, Peter. (2016). Not saved: essays after Heidegger. Cambridge: Polity Press. Soja, Edward W. (2000). Postmetropolis: critical studies of cities and regions. Oxford: Blackwell. Souvatzi, Stella. (2012). “Space, place, architecture: a major meeting point between social archeology and anthropology?” In Archaeology and anthropology. Past, present, and future, edited by David Shankland, 173-196. London: Berg. Tompkins, Joanne. (2014). Theatre’s heterotopias. Performance and the cultural politics of space. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 17

THE ‘BUNNY’ HETEROTOPIA. PLAYBOY’S TRANSFORMATION OF SEXUALITY IN PAUL B. PRECIADO Jorge Andreu Jiménez* Department of Philosophy, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

ABSTRACT Playboy’s transformation of sexuality in the United States of America from the Second World War to the present is—according to Paul B. Preciado—one of the most important changes in the usage of subjectivity construction technologies. Preciado thinks that space has played a major role in the construction of post-capitalist subjectivity. Space is not just a framework where technologies appear. It is a device that constructs places of exception, or heterotopias, where subjectivity is constructed and transformed.

Keywords: Paul B. Preciado, heterotopia, pornotopia, space, sexuality, subjectivity

INTRODUCTION Pornotopias are those places that “are capable of establishing relationships between space, sexuality, pleasure and technology (audiovisual, biochemistry, etc.), altering sexual or gender conventions and producing sexual subjectivity as a derivative of their spatial

*

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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operations (Preciado 2010, 120).1 In post-capitalist societies these pornotopias are by definition public spaces. Even if they are apparently rural or closed, these spaces will always be connected to the post-capitalist production flow through the mediatization of the private-public. Pornotopias are “a hermetically closed bunker filmed by closed circuit and whose images can be made public at any time” (Preciado 2010, 130). These spaces are, therefore, always open and public. Hence, the ground of the pornographization of society is the growth of publicized domestic privacy. Post-capitalist pornotopias differ from post-capitalist heterotopias in their discourses and spaces rather than in their ends. In this respect, although Disney’s EPCOT project also places us in a hypervigilated society, its purpose is the production of an economically desirable subject, the medium is still defined by the panopticism of a prison-like discipline oriented to the disciplining of subjects. On the other hand, in Playboy-inherited pornotopias surveillance becomes pleasure for the observer and the observed: “Playboy transformed surveillance devices and military communication techniques into desiring machines: It turned sexuality into a multimedia spectacle, reintroducing sexuality within the capital production flow through media” (Preciado 2019a, 221). If Disney proposed a community with “a strong control of public space and strict rules of behavior and usage” (González Baeza, 2016, 322)2, Playboy understands that the only reason to follow rules is to make them enjoyable in order to make self-control productive. This article shares the thesis of Paul B. Preciado according to which the transition from capitalist to post-capitalist pleasure finds in the Playboy porn heterotopia the transformation of control into generation of pleasure. For this reason, it is argued that spatiality is a means of construction of subjectivity just as important in the work of Paul B. Preciado as sex, drugs and biopolitics3. This is so because the spaces and meanings associated with the lived spatialities contribute to the construction of subjective identities. Thus, Pornotopia: an essay on Playboy’s architecture and biopolitics is the logical extension of Testo Junkie’s statement: “The purpose of these forms of architecture is not simply to provide habitat or represent the individual —instead, like true performative devices, they tend to produce the subject they claim to shelter. The convict, the student, the patient, the soldier, and the worker are the political precipitate of these architectural technologies of subjectification” (Preciado 2013, 205). In turn, that same year, Preciado argues in Cartografías Queer [Queer Cartographies] that “the centrality of the new production strategies of knowing about sex [...] does not exist without their respective exotechnical skeletons, without what we could call the deployment of an architectura sexualis: the gynecological chair, the straitjacket, the cell, the desk, the social building” (Preciado Translated by the author. Available text only in the Spanish version (Preciado 2010). The English version (Preciado 2019a) will be used, except where indicated. 2 Translated by the Author. 3 Although Testo Junkie’s major contribution is, as Mendoza Perez states, “a deconstruction of the gender subjectivity created by the use of particular drugs that interact with other cultural devices” (Perez 2016, 46), I argue that Preciado has placed more importance on space and architecture as “cultural devices”. 1

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2008, 10). For this reason, I argue that in Preciado’s work the analysis of the relationships of spatiality with other technologies of subjectivation is not an excursus in his philosophical approaches, but a central theme. Now, this analysis is not uniform. Therefrom it can be understood, for example, that the text on the Fansworth house would be contrary to my thesis. In it, it is stated that architecture: “does not depend on any essential character of identity (“feminine”, “masculine”, “gay”, “lesbian” or “heterosexual”) that can determine the space [...], but on the socio-political context in which the space is deployed and the possibilities of the resident to manage the visibility and the gaze’s access to privacy” (Preciado 2000, 31). 4 A fragment of his latest published work (2020) also seems to endorse this position: “the body and sexuality occupy the place that the factory occupied in the 19th century in the current industrial mutation” (Preciado 2020, 36)5. However, this article maintains, first of all, that in these texts spatiality (like drugs, sex...) is only operative as a technology for altering subjectivity within a network of meanings typical of a social-political context. In other words, I argue that neither drugs nor spatiality should be understood as technologies abstractly. These need a way of being experienced such as to generate an appropriate discourse in order to display its heterotopic potency or its pharmacopower. Thus, I are in agreement with Nishant Shah (2005), whose analysis states that we should study “the shaping of pornography within cyberspaces” (5). Secondly, the article argues that the transition from capitalist to post-capitalist pharmacopornographic sexuality finds the necessary transformation of the generation of pleasure in the Playboy porn heterotopia. This thesis is present in works prior to Pornotopia, in which Preciado defines Playboy’s multimedia brothels and hotels as “a space of politicosexual exception dominated by laws and values that are in apparent contradiction with those of the dominant public space” (Preciado 2013, 283). This transformation of pleasure is linked to a concrete interpretation. Preciado conceives it through the Spinozian concept of potentia gaudendi: “Orgasmic force is the sum of the potential for excitation inherent in every material molecule” (Preciado 2013, 42). Despite this, Preciado does not understand it as “an organic force. It is not a natural or intrinsic force of the body, understood as simple anatomy. But rather a capacity that is always developed through the relationship” (Preciado 2019b)6. In this case, a capacity that is developed by the relationship of the molecular with the fictions built by pornography and with the stimuli generated by drugs and the meanings of spaces. It is sexuality devices such as the Playboy pornotopia that transform this potentia gaudendi into capitalist value: “current capitalism tries to put to work the potentia gaudendi in whatever form in which it exists” (Preciado 2013, 42).

Translated by the author. Translated by the author. 6 Translated by the author. 4 5

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The pornotopia is one of the main places of pleasure-discharge7 and, therefore, of capitalist production. Playboy is not only the first post-capitalist pornotopia, it also anticipated the future revolution in multimedia pleasure technology. The Playboy universe of pornotopia has had a vital influence on the post-domestic, pharmacopornographic and post-capitalist society in which we now live. With the aim of showing how the concept of heterotopia plays a fundamental role within the pharmacopornographic theory developed by Preciado, we will divide the rest of the chapter into three sections. In the first one, I explain how Playboy constructs a pornographic representation different from that of modernity and how the performativity on which that representation is based affects us. In the second, following Preciado, I depict the masculinity that Playboy sets out to build based on the domination of artifice. In the third, I propose that the main transformation initiated by Playboy is the breakdown of the public/private division. Lastly, I conclude that Preciado analyzes space as one more technology for the construction of subjectivity that is on the same level as other technologies studied in Preciado (2013): drugs, hormones, or pornography.

PORNOGRAPHY SPACES ARE ALWAYS PERFORMATIVE According to Preciado, all the constructions of sexuality in particular, and of desire in general, have a correlate in symbolic and material alterations of the space that are used to enable this construction. In the specific case of post-war American capitalism, Playboy’s alteration of sexuality —through the construction of new spaces— maintains a fundamental role today. The manipulation begins with a magazine of the same name that eroticizes female sexuality, presenting it in a different way than was usual in the post-war society. The presentation of this content was not that of total nudity, as was in National Geographic, a magazine in which the nudity is complete but without associated pornographic content. Instead, Playboy put some photos of Marilyn Monroe taken four years before the publication of the magazine on its first cover. Meaning, in this case the pornographic nature did not reside neither in nudity nor in the photos themselves, but in the way in which they were produced as pleasure-discharge mechanisms. Preciado appreciates that Playboy’s success comes from understanding that the masturbatory force of the image originates as a result of the “contrast of red and flesh color and the enlargement to a double page” (Preciado 2019a, 25). In this respect, after Playboy “pornography has the same characteristics as any other spectacle of the culture

7

We use the concept “pleasure-discharge” in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari: “desire will be assuaged by pleasure; and not only will the pleasure obtained silence desire for a moment but the process of obtaining it is already a way of interrupting it, of instantly discharging it and unburdening oneself of it. Pleasure as discharge” (Deleuze y Guattari 1987, 154). From this point of view, the potentia can be discharged in pleasure eternally, since it only needs a body with the potential to be aroused or arouse (itself).

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industry: performance, virtuosity, dramatization, spectacularization, technical reproducibility, digital transformation, and audiovisual distribution” (Preciado 2013, 266267). The pornographic device is, therefore, the representation of women in a certain format: as an object of desire and according to specific guidelines with the aim of producing an increase in libido and its subsequent discharge. The characteristic theatricality of a performance is what constructs the image as pornographic, not the presence of a naked or clothed body per se. This analysis of the performative nature of pornography can be exemplified in subsequent works, such as Rubio and Sartori’s, where “the staging and theatricalization of sexual and gender bodily relationships comprises a first design of place: the stage, mirrors and small bar will be present in all the premises” (Rubio and Sartori 2019, 120). The image of desire, of the pornographically treated body, allows us to speak of another body (or bodies) that react to that pornographic stimulus. In this conceptualization the connection between sale, consumption and distribution occupies a position of construction of two concrete positions: that of the sex worker whose body is pornographed and that of consumers whose stimuli feed the cycle of capital through their pleasure. As all work done in a post-capitalist society makes use of that potentia gaudendi, sex work for Preciado is not qualitatively different from other jobs. Sex work “consists in creating a masturbatory device (through touch, language and theatrical staging) capable of activating the muscular, neurological and biochemical mechanisms that govern the production of pleasure for the client. The sex worker does not put her body up for sale, but transforms, as does the osteopath, the actor or the publicist, his somatic and cognitive resources into a force of living production.” (Preciado 2020, 90)8

Continuing with the concrete treatment of the pornographic image, the relationship between pornography and the new video surveillance mechanisms that allow the full exposure of privacy is very important. The place of pleasure no longer consists in concealing the private room, typical of the voyeur, but in wanting to see and wanting to be seen at all costs while the potentia guadendi of the spectators/actors contribute to the commercialization of the pleasure/capital9. Everyone from their homes act as voyeurs “producing hundreds of releasings of pleasure at the other end of the world as their virtual displacement emits a living flow of capital” (Preciado 2013, 266). Society needs new spaces that enable these relationships of video-monitored exposure. In this regard, the current heterotopias of pleasure analyzed by Preciado offer that pleasuredischarge. The theatricalization, pornification and transformation initiated by Playboy not 8 9

Translated by the author. The figure of the voyeur is replaced by the flaneur who constitutes the “sexual community” (Preciado 2008, 15) that becomes public. Today’s society, according to my interpretation of Preciado, becomes a flaneur society in which your experience of sexuality is public. A voyeur person needs a flaneur society in order to experience pleasure.

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only consists of a new type of representation typical of a new historical era, but is also part of the construction of a new type of desire, self-understanding of one’s sexuality and the private/public division. Masculinity will not be the same after having met Playboy’s “Bunny”.

BUILDING A NEW MASCULINITY According to Preciado, the new subjectivity replaces the post-war masculinity based on hunting with other men and the single-family home on the suburbs with the “hunting” of “the Girl Next door” (Preciado 2019a, 51) and the bachelor’s attic. The transformation of housing is also the transformation of life, that is, of the ways in which we understand our relationships with others and with what surrounds us. Consequently, the Playboy attic will be conceived as the perfect place for the meeting of men and the seduction of women. Hunting for the Bunny woman will require some visual/spatial play to catch the new prey. In order to achieve it, the single man living in the attic will put on a show using the techniques of “kitchenless kitchen” and rotating devices. In short, he will use technological furniture with the intention of unlocking the full potential of male domination. With this purpose in mind, the Playboy man will resort to prostheses10 that will allow him to exaggerate, feign and generate total control over space, pleasure and sexuality. In its magazine, Playboy will offer male sexuality a large number of prostheses in the form of kitchens, screens, beds and other pieces of furniture. Furniture will recover its historical significance as a mobile asset that “followed the sovereign feudal lord everywhere he went” (Preciado 2019a, 147), which constitutes the Playboy man into a subject akin to nomadism and variation. In addition, “the need to mark the body with external signs of power that show the individual’s social and political status at all times”11 (Preciado 2019a, 148) implies that the Playboy subject “integrates the premodern function of furniture as a portable sign of social status and the modern functions of comfort and a media-constructed environment transforming its occupant into a pop multimedia feudal lord” (Preciado 2019a, 148).

Preciado’s position coincides with Heidegger’s, since he states that technology is not a mere means. Therefore it has implications in the world beyond an ideal utilization. In addition, Heidegger will claim that technology is a mode of revealing that enframes and “conceals a former way of revealing, bringing-forth, but it conceals revealing itself and with it” (Heidegger 1977, 27). On the contrary, Preciado will claim that technology cannot conceal anything because what technology shows is what “is”. There is no behind. Preciado will state in the famous Heideggerian example of the “hydroelectric plant in the Rhine River” (Heidegger 1977, 16) that the river is no more than what technology has made of it, a source of energy. 11 On the other hand, this production of an illusion of social status through technology and artifice takes us to Margaret Cavendish’s conception of politics. In The Blazing World (1994), she considers technology as a way to impress and convince others of your own power. Techniques are shown as political and social status symbols. Technology doesn’t conceal any reality. Technology and spectacle are how power and control make things appear. 10

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The essential point in the prosthetic relationship with the world is the Playboy bed — to which Paul B. Preciado dedicates an entire chapter. This is seen as one of the paradigmatic products of the new pharmacopornographic system of post-capitalism: “Hefners’s rotating bed was the pharmacopornographic device par excellence” (Preciado 2019a, 141). The bed had access to all possible communication networks at the time: telephone line, radio and television. In addition, “a video camera installed on a tripod and aimed at the bed allowed Hefner to videotape his ‘private’ encounters, both businessrelated and sexual” (Preciado 2019a, 142). The bed was not only a 6 to 8 hour nightly resting place, but a control unit from which Hefner controlled his pleasure without having to leave the horizontal position. According to Preciado, “articulated as a single module, the bed and the recording and multimedia station did away with the traditional antithesis between passivity and activity […] No longer synonymous with sleep, the bed became a topos of never-ending, meditated waking” (Preciado 2019a, 146). In this regard, the Playboy bed is the porn heterotopia that constructs the new pharmacopornographic subject which “everyone” currently wants to identify with. Hugh Hefner lived in his bed, as it was his work environment, his private environment and, at the same time, the public space from which he appeared before the world. The bed was not a resting place: the pornographic consumption of amphetamines prevented Hefner from sleeping for whole days. This constructed space then appears as a pharmacopornographic heterotopia of total control of the environment. Hefner (like other Americans) built his own bomb shelter12: “The rotating bed functioned as a pharmacopornographic multimedia prosthesis to which a body needed to be connected in order to become a playboy. This multimedia connection is what allowed him to stay in contact with the exterior world while remaining basically encapsulated and at the same time transformed his stillness into sexuality and business, pleasure and work.” (Preciado 2019a, 164)

Hefner will rely on this material and technological application of prosthetics, through an associated network of socio-symbolic meanings of power, as a means of refining the biopolitics of the post-capitalist consumer society. At this point Preciado incorporates the Foucauldian perspective of the notion of biopolitics (Foucault 2003) and tries to adapt it to pharmacotopia: “pharmacopornographic biocapitalism does not produce things. It produces movable ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions, and affects. In the fields of

12

The study of the attic carried out by Preciado uses the Colomina’s bunker analysis, who states that the bunker is a space where “there is no outside. The house is only an inside” (Colomina 2006, 227).

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Foucault’s biopolitics aims to (re)produce human capital.14 This is precisely what pornotopia does since, according to Schussler, “biopolitics, sex and sexuality were transformed into governmental agencies for the control and standardization of life” (2016, 34). To achieve this standardization of life, he will use the so-called compulsory heterosexuality (Rich 2003). This is a practice that Hefner will refine to make it a prescriptive ideal of masculinity for generations of Americans. To them, Hefner will become an ideal and normative myth, which highlights the fact that the construction of a certain subjectivity requires a transformation of the relationship with subjectivity control technologies (drugs, prosthetics and spatialities). These techniques enable the appearance of a new subject that interacts in a toxic way with them: “Contemporary society is inhabited by toxic-pornographic subjectivities: subjectivities defined by the substance (or substances) that supply their metabolism, by the cybernetic prostheses and various types of pharmacopornographic desires that feed the subject’s actions and through which they turn into agents. So we will speak of Prozac subjects, cannabis subjects, cocaine subjects, alcohol subjects, Ritalin subjects, cortisone subjects, silicone subjects, heterovaginal subjects, double-penetration subjects, Viagra subjects.” (Preciado 2013, 35)

Drugs, prosthetics, and spaces construct subjects simultaneously, and that is why heterotopias of pleasure or leisure are fundamental in the constructions of post-capitalist subjectivities. In this respect, “The real stake of capitalism today is the pharmacopornographic control of subjectivity […] and the entire material and virtual complex participating in the production of mental and psychosomatic states of excitation, relaxation, and discharge, as well as those of omnipotence and total control. In these conditions, money itself becomes an abstract, signifying psychotropic substance. Sex is the corollary of capitalism and war, the mirror of production. The dependent and sexual body and sex and all its semiotechnical derivations are henceforth the principal resource of post-Fordist capitalism.” (Preciado 2013, 39)

Reproductive and multimedia masculinity will find in the Playboy subject the perfect subject for post-capitalist society. It will be the subject built by a control society that best Although these types of texts taken out of context could imply that the type of biopolitical production typical of post-capitalism does not refer to space, the thesis we defend assumes that the discourses produced always have material implications. Post-capitalist spaces are those inhabited by the post-capitalist subject, but this subject is, in turn, produced by those spaces. Heterotopias are the places where the biopolitical operations take place. 14 Both Butler (1997) and Silvia Federici (2014) maintain that reproductive work is one of the main pillars of capitalism. In tune with them, Preciado will understand that the work of global arousal will also be the exclusive work of bio-women, but he states that it does not have to be this way. 13

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suits biopolitical needs. As stated in his latest work (Preciado 2020), the new industrial revolution is distinctive in that it affects the production processes of life: “in the current industrial mutation the body and sexuality occupy the place that the factory occupied in the 19th century” (Preciado 2020, 36)15. That said, these socio-symbolic constructions need some spacial device to be effective.

PORNOGRAPHY AND PLAYBOY’S PUBLICITY OF PRIVACY The most relevant thesis argued by Preciado is that the Playboy world breaks away from the notions of sexuality, nudity and pornography typical of modernity. This rupture consists of the end of its topological delimitation, since in modernity “the legal definitions of ‘obscenity’ and ‘pornography’ that appear during this time and that affect the representations of the body and of the sexuality have to do, not so much with image, with that which is shown, but rather, with the regulation of usage in public spaces and the fiction of private domesticity and the intimate body.” (Preciado 2019a, 68)

Modern sexuality understands the public-domestic division as a spatial division based on the normalization of the body and obscenity in the public sphere. This is highlighted by the fact that “what depicts sexual acts and the sexual representations as lawful or unlawful is not their content, but the space where their exhibition takes place.” (Preciado 2019a, 69). A complete opposition to this dichotomous conceptualization of public space/domestic space was the key to Playboy’s success. Playboy pornography does not reside so much in the fold-out nude pictures on the cover of the men’s magazine as in the exhibition of domestic space, finally turning it into the current techno-surveillance space: “Playboy was undressing the private space in front of the eyes of North America, and by doing so, it was shaking its conventions and it codes of representation.” (Preciado 2019a, 76) Hugh Hefner made the features in his own domestic space, occupying, he and the other people summoned to pose, a carefully self-constructed position of the domestic. The breaking away from the modern domestic occurs through “a striptease of American heterosexual domestic life. Nevertheless, this is not an unveiling of a hidden truth, but rather, a theatrical production and a narrative construction process in which each detail has been technically orchestrated.” (Preciado 2019a, 80). As Schussler (2013) explains “[nowadays] the curtain behind which the Greek actors played their violence scenes disappears, so that everything is revealed as clearly as possible to the public. Practically, the ancient ob skênê is transformed, in the contemporaneous show, into ‘on skênê’.” (Schussler 2013, 857) 15

Translated by the autor.

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With these representations the domestic space is shown in the common imagination as “topos” for the representations of the “innershown” (which meets both the categories of internal and public). Decades ahead of photographic social media like Instagram and Tumblr, Playboy puts forward the fact that domestic space (the living room, the bathroom or the bedroom) are reference spaces for the appearance of the individual public image. These changes show that the rules of representation of domestic space have been radicalized in the West16 to make the domestic by definition multimedia public. This dedomestication of interior space was started, according to Preciado, by Hefner’s photographic features. His most notable example is Playboy Penthouse (Preciado 2019a, 117), whose successors could be “My house is yours” hosted by Bertin Osborne and its Italian version “A raccontare comincia tu” hosted by Raffaela Carra17. The theatricalization of domestic space is the main tool used since the Playboy era to show, like a striptease, the domestic background on which American heterosexuality is built. This form of representation is pornographic: “We will speak of pornography as a device for the publication of the private. Or, even better, a device that, representing part of public space, thereby defines it as private while loading it with an added masturbatory value.” (Preciado 2013, 266). Sexuality —including your own— no longer belongs to your private domestic space. “The private” of post-capitalist society can never again be truly private. The public/private spheres are meaningless as an analytic divide, since “a public representation implies an ability for exchange on the global market in a digital form that can be transformed into capital” (Preciado 2013, 266). Now, this transformation needs to be deceptively defined as private to achieve its erotization and sexualization.

CONCLUSION The moment technology makes it possible for anyone to have access to the pornographic cycle of merchandise —whether as a sex worker (in the broad sense of the word) or as a consumer— there is no way back. The myth of a private sexuality in the sense of first or primitive is, in addition to dangerous, false. The path cannot be retraced: “pornography tells the performative truth about sexuality. It is not the degree zero of representation. Rather, it reveals that sexuality is always performance, the public practice

Dutch portraits are probably some of the first representations of domestic spaces. As Panofsky states: “interiors are built up in such a way that what is possibly meant to be a mere realistic motive can, at the same time, be conceived as a symbol” (Panofsky 1934, 126). Domestic space is used as a kind of discourse about status and marriage. Domestic space is used to talk about public relationships. In that way Playboy is just a multimedia radicalization of domesticity. 17 In this TV show a celebrity hosts in his private home an interview with Bertín Osborne. This show theatrically reveals the domestic space and his domestic living: they cook together, they talk about their intimacy and they represent —always in a kind of pornographic way of revealing— their everyday domesticity 16

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of a regulated repetition, a staging as well as an involuntary mechanism of connection to the global circuit of excitation-frustration-excitation” (Preciado 2013, 271). In the face of these sexuality construction devices, Preciado proposes a way out of this post-capitalist pharmacopornographic regime through a commitment to “inventing other common, shared, collective, and copyleft forms of sexuality that extend beyond the narrow framework of the dominant pornographic representation and standardized sexual consumption.” (Preciado 2013, 267) In other words, what was always public must remain public, but in a different way. The desirable political transformation is not to abolish public representation of sexuality to return to the private-public divide, but rather to achieve “a radical transformation of their gender status and of their sex and sexuality, and from a reappropriation of the sexopolitical techniques of subjectification” (Preciado 2013, 300). Like all radical transformations, these must have their own spaces that make them possible. These will be authentic post-capitalist post-sexuality pornotopias that will enable a radical alteration of the ways of feeling pleasure and understanding our sexuality. The notion of heterotopia and its spatial connotation runs through all of Preciado’s work. However, it is also true that it is not of equal importance in all of it. In some, the analysis focuses on discourses on the body and sexuality without paying enough attention to the influence of space. Instead, Pornotopia (Preciado 2019a) offers the analysis of the spatial devices that have enabled these discursive constructions. The importance of space analysis as a fundamental element in the construction of sexuality carried out by Preciado can be supported by works such as Soja (1996) or Betsky (1997). Heterotopias in general and pornotopias in particular must be analyzed as mechanisms for the social and material transformation of individuals. Spaces are not only their materiality, they are also the discourses that they harbor and that have made them possible. Gender lives in the technologies that build it.

REFERENCES Betsky, Aaron. 1997. Queer space: architecture and same-sex desire. 1st ed. New York: William Morrow & Co. Butler, Judith. 1997. “Merely Cultural.” New Left Review, 227, 109-121. Cavendish, Margaret. 1994. The blazing world and other writings. London; New York: Penguin. Colomina, Beatriz. 2006. Domesticity at War. Barcelona: Actar. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Federici, Silvia Beatriz. 2014. Caliban and the Witch., 2. rev. ed. New York, NY: Autonomedia.

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Foucault, Michel. 2004. Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France (19781979). Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. [2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan]. González Baeza, Andrés. 2016. “Dis(ney)topia” [“Disney/Dystopia”], edited by Lourdes Barrado Diego, Jorge Fernández-Santos, and Jorge León Casero, 313-322. Open Sourcing. Investigación y Formación Avanzada en Arquitectura. [Open Sourcing. Research and advanced training in Architecture]. Zaragoza: Ediciones Universidad San Jorge. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York: Garland Pub. Hester, Helen. 2018. Xenofeminism. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity Press. Panofsky, Erwin. 1934. “Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 64, 372, 117-127. Pérez Mendoza, Karmele. 2016. “Preciado. Testo junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era.” Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 3(1), 46. doi: 10.5324/njsts.v3i1.2156. Preciado, Paul B. 2000. “Mies-concepction: la casa Farnsworth y el misterio del armario transparente”. [“Mies-concepction: the Farnsworth house and the mystery of the transparent wardrobe”]. Zehar: revista de Arteleku-ko aldizkaria, 44, 26-32. Preciado, Paul B. 2008. “Cartografías queer: El flâneur perverso, la lesbiana topofóbica y la puta multicartográfica, o cómo hacer una cartografía ‘zorra’ con Annie Sprinkle”. [“Queer cartographies: the perverse flaneur, the topophobic lesbian and the multicartographic whore, or how to make ‘slut’ cartography with Annie Sprinkle”]. Cartografias disidentes, Madrid: SEACEX. Preciado, Paul B. 2010. Pornotopía: Arquitectura y sexualidad en ‘Playboy’ durante la guerra fría. Barcelona: Anagrama. Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Preciado, Paul B. 2019a. Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics. S.l., ZONE BOOKS. Preciado, Paul B. 2019b. “Paul B. Preciado y la sonrisa de los cocodrilos: una entrevista desde Urano. Parte II” [“Paul B. Preciado and the smile of the crocodiles: an interview from Uranus. Part II”]. El rumor de las multitudes Revista El Salto, June 11. https://www.elsaltodiario.com/el-rumor-de-las-multitudes/paul-b-preciado-y-lasonrisa-de-los-cocodrilos-una-entrevista-desde-urano-parte-ii. Preciado, Paul B. 2020. An apartment on Uranus. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Rich, Adrienne Cecile. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(4), 631-685. doi:10.1353/jowh.2003.0079.

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Rubio, Marcela Carolina Hurtado and Rodrigo Francisco Browne Sartori. 2019. “‘Café con piernas’ una pornotopía a la chilena: sexualidad y espacio en una instalación neoliberal.” Estudios Ibero-Americanos, 45(3), 114. doi:10.15448/1980864X.2019.3.31764. Schussler, Aura-Elena. 2013. “From Eroticism to Pornography: The Culture of the Obscene.” Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 92, 854-859. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.08.765. Schussler, Aura-Elena. 2016. “Pornography as a Biopolitical Phenomenon.” Postmodern Openings, VII(2), 25-41. doi:10.18662/po/2016.0702.03. Shah, Nishant. 2005. “PlayBlog: Pornography, performance and cyberspace.” Cut-up.com Magazine, 1-19. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell.

SECTION 5: HETEROTOPIA AND SYMBOLIC SPACE

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 18

IMAGINING, BUILDING AND INHABITING NATURE: ISHIGAMI’S JOURNEY TO HUMBOLDT’S EDEN Javier Pérez-Herreras*

Department of Architecture, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

ABSTRACT New architectures have found design tools in the notebooks written durig and after the first European scientific expeditions that take Europeans back to a more primitive nature. The landscapes depicted in the drawings opened up the gates to a new way of imagining that nature. An invented nature came about through the drawings inspired by emotion and scientific reason. The nature built by Junya Ishigami is installed in that nature. On a journey to one of the designed sites, the mountains in the Kinmen Passenger Centre, we discover the nature drawn by Alexander von Humboldt during his first expedition to South America. The sketches and notes by the Prussian naturalist help us discover the Ishigami’s nature as a new scientific art, which links the knowledge about nature and the poetics of imagination. It is an imagined nature in those primitive natures drawn by Humboldt.

Keywords: Junya Ishigami, Alexander von Humboldt, Kinmen, Naturgemälde

*

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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THE JOURNEY TOWARDS A NEW NATURE The history of Western architecture has been formed as an artificial phenomenon, destined to subdue an inherited nature. Modernity used to mean unlimited human control over nature and subsequent supremacy over it (Navarrete 1993, 122). Architecture had to be beautiful, useful and strong against nature. However, the unstoppable development of that artificiality has demonstrated the limits of a world that no one thought could be destroyed.

Figure 1. Little gardens. Takumi Ota, 2007.

Contrary to this unforeseen reality, and in the geographical and cultural opposites of this architecture, we find the work of Junya Ishigami (Kanagawa, 1974). His designs show a desire to leave behind an architecture that was strong against natural phenomena to seek another, one that is rooted in the manifestation of phenomena. Ishigami’s natures attempt to overcome an exhausting modernity, one that is gray and artificial and increasingly difficult to accommodate in our small world. As Ishigami claims, we cannot draw a new line and use it to separate an artificial world from our nature (2011, 3). His drawings attempt to construct a new nature that is capable of accommodating an undeniable progress. This drawn nature does not arise as a scientific imitation based on a compared taxonomy, as it would lose its bond to the totality as a phenomenon, neither does it arise as an artistic

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imitation based on an idealization of nature, as it would not succeed in becoming a reality. We will see that Ishigami’s new nature comes from an open narrative that ―as Goethe pointed out (1997, 64)― unites scientists’ knowledge about natural laws and the imagination of the poet who brings them to life; that is when a new nature takes shape (Ishigami 2011, 5). This open narrative turns Ishigami’s table into a journey that shows a place in a state of flux that abandons artificiality to discover the phenomena of a new nature that connects us to the world. His table is a white, circular world where everything aspires to be united under a new system contained in that nature. In the photograph taken by Takumi Ota in 2007 (figure 1), we see this small place in a state of flux. The gray plane, under the white table, is the legacy of the artificiality that we wish to overcome. In it we discover the lush proliferation of infinite and miniscule pieces. They all seem isolated ―there is no relationship between them. They all have different shapes and sizes. They all seem small compared to the hands that recognize and catalog them. None of them seem to be alive.

Figure 2. Nebulae. William Herschel, 1784.

Some of these pieces travel in the architect’s hands to a white circular table. His hands choose each piece’s place and its relationship with the other pieces that are already on the table. On the tabletop we distinguish different groups of those pieces that are joined in an invisible ―for being indecipherable― kind of organization. If the pieces located on the gray plane seemed to have no life, they now seem to form part of a newly discovered natural environment. The artificiality of the objects on the gray plane has changed within the order of a new world. The minuscule size of these isolated objects has been transformed into a

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new scale that is dictated by the structure of a place. Their colors, now bright and shining, tell us of an imagined nature. Ishigami turns his table into the journey and the change to a new nature that contemporary society hopes to use to replace the already overcome artificiality of the modern world. This movement from the gray plane to his white circular table is fueled by a transformative power that adds to the scientific discovery of the natural phenomena the emotion of an imagination that brings them to life. Nature turns the permanent state of flux ―like Herschel nebulae that Ishigami includes in his written work― into his elusive reason (figure 2).

THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC JOURNEYS: THE RETURN TO AN ORIGINAL NATURE Junya Ishigami published Another Scale of Architecture in 2011. This work, small in size but full of extraordinarily beautiful drawings, is a notebook of imaginary journeys. A notebook written on the shoulders of other travelers who preceded the young architect.

Figure 3. Another Scale of Architecture, 160-161. Junya Ishigami, 2011.

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Figure 4. Mountains and Rivers. George Woolworth Colton, 1856.

One of the pictures that he includes in his travel notebook is one of a range of mountains, which he states was drawn in approximately 1860 (figure 3). Ishigami does not cite the source of the drawing, which in fact is a small part of one of the maps of the Atlas of the World published by Joseph Hutchins Colton in 1856 in New York (figure 4). The map arranges, outlines and compares the length of the rivers and the height of the main known mountains at that time, marking the locations reached by the traveler, Alexander von Humboldt. We can assume that Colton used the drawings by the Prussian naturalist; indeed, print No. 24 of Cosmos, published by Humboldt five years earlier, already included a drawing of part of these mountain ranges. We also know that, a few years earlier, Humboldt had personally given President Thomas Jefferson all the maps that he had drawn after his first journey to South America. Ishigami does not cite the source or the author of most of the other drawings that he uses for his travel notebook. When searching for them, we found that they are illustrations by engineers, naturalists and travelers who were contemporaries of Humboldt. The Prussian nobleman was not the first or the only naturalist traveler, but he inspired and helped financially others to follow in his footsteps (Garrido, Rebok and Puig-Samper 2016, 367). His drawings showed to an enlightened Europe the strata of the soil and of the sky, the movements of birds and their anatomy, the geography of plants, their evolution and the development of the machines that took them to even more distant places. The excited hand

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of someone who is discovering new worlds appears in all of them, guided by a scientific ambition that did not isolate nature in its drawn and still un-photographed representation. His drawings opened the door for the involvement of emotion in the discovery of nature. The totality of all these drawings that Ishigami constructs as a travel notebook approach the world with a holistic vision that imagines nature as an enormous system in which everything is interconnected. Its scenes promote a profound involvement of science and imagination, redefining a new concept of place (Dunlap 2016, 2), a place whose nature is shown as the sum of an invisible imagined reality and its visible phenomena. This is how a link between the visible world and a better world that eludes the senses is revealed. They are involuntarily confused with each other (Humboldt 1875, 18). Ishigami and those first naturalist travelers are united by a clear ambition of exteriority, which Dunlap defines for Humboldt by using the German term Fernweh: the longing for a distant place (2016, 3). This distance fuels the emotion to reach an original nature, ultimately, a primitive imagined place. Therefore, the explorer and the architect unite science and emotion as a compass for a continuous journey to a nature that is no longer that lost Eden, but their own nature, theirs, the nature of their imagined world (Thoreau 1967, 185). Another Scale of Architecture could be read, therefore, as a modern revision of Cosmos, published by Alexander von Humboldt in 1845, where the Prussian naturalist narrates his constant expedition to an external world that includes all the phenomena of the universe, from planetary nebulae to the geography of plants and animals and human races (Humboldt 1875, 17). Humboldt’s illustrated Prussia and Ishigami’s more modern Japan are beyond this exteriority. History and its memory, which are no longer tied to this journey, are left behind. Humboldt does not look to his native Prussia as the source of his discovered natures, he looks to the new America as an example of a better future homeland. Similarly, Ishigami’s notebook does not look at modernity as an architectural past that will guide the journey, it looks at the images of those adventurers who searched for the possibility of a new homeland in distant natures. The two are connected by the clear ambition to understand nature from a global perspective that avoids the isolation of science. Neither Ishigami nor Humboldt are interested in the definition of science as the origin of a potential nature, they are interested in the discovery of the hidden action that constructs nature and turns it into a permanent empirical experience. They are not interested either in imagining an art that speculated for no other reason than mere emotion about those other natures. Ishigami’s travel notebook turns the phenomena portrayed by those traveling naturalists into architectural phenomena that are tied to nature itself. From the viewpoint of this resonance of phenomena, the objects on his circular table sparkle like the variable stars of the astronomer William Herschel, included in Another Scale of Architecture. If in Herschel’s maps Humboldt saw the “great garden of the universe” (Wulf 2016, 213), in his table Ishigami saw a “little garden.” In that same resonance of phenomena, the isotherms discovered by Humboldt himself guided the way of structuring a cloud at an exhibition at

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the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art; the rainfall from this cloud, according to Luke Howard, becomes the architectural phenomenon of the House of Peace in Copenhagen; the behavior of the airflow drawn by Otto Lilienthal drives the ascent of Ishigami’s aluminium Cuboid Balloon in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; and the maps of the nebulae by William Herschel light the almost plasmatic layout of the Kanagawa Institute of Technology. Using Ishigami’s notebook, we suggest a new journey, a journey to the mountains at the Kinmen Passenger Service Center. We will be using the drawings and texts of Humboldt’s first travel notebook: Essay on the Geography of Plants (1805). This essay is the first narration of Humboldt’s journeys to South America and his ascent of Chimborazo, then considered to be the highest mountain in the world. Humboldt’s description makes this scientific journey a discovery of a world that requires the imagination as an essential companion to make it emerge, as Goethe would say (1997, 13). His essays offer us a new way of seeing nature that shows a close relationship between plants, climates and geography. His drawings help us to understand the keys to the architecture of Kinmen as the discovery of imagined mountains. Ishigami, like Humboldt, champions their relationship as a way of discovering an original nature.

IMAGINING MOUNTAINS: KINMEN PASSENGER SERVICE CENTER In 2014, Ishigami won the international competition to design the new Kinmen Passenger Service Center. Kinmen is an island that is part of a small Taiwanese archipelago and is located 190 kilometers from the island of Taiwan. Five teams competed in the initial phase: two American firms, Tom Wiscombe and Lorcan O’Herlihy; two Spanish teams, EMBT and Josep Miàs; and Ishigami’s team. Ishigami’s design proposes a visual tour of a traveler who discovers various manifestations of the same nature (figure 5). Ishigami approaches the coast of Kinmen by unfolding a transition of scenes of a nature that moves with them. The first scene shows a simple gray line two kilometers away, perhaps like the modernity that Ishigami wishes to replace; a line that divides the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea, the line of a predictable world. In the next scenes, Ishigami follows a transformation process. At 1200 meters, he identifies a trace of green in the center of the gray line. In the next scene, at 800 meters, this trace of green becomes a broad winding line that moves with the waves of the sea and the clouds in the sky. This line of the world appears to be the gentle rippling of a series of six elevations. Mountains? In a new scene, now at 100 meters, Ishigami displays these elevations as the sum of three green layers: three strata of nature. Black winding lines appear among them and divide them. But, where is the port?

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Figure 5. Kinmen Passenger Service Center. At 2km, 1.2km and 800m. Junya Ishigami + Associates, 2014.

Figure 6. Kinmen Passenger Service Center. At 100m and 20m. Junya Ishigami + Associates, 2014.

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In his travel notebook, Ishigami suggest imagining all the mountains in the world gathered together in one place. If we consider the scale of a mountain like that of a potential architecture, then a city could be a mountain range (Ishigami 2011, 181). 20 meters away we discover the nature of the three green layers dotted with the same bright colors as his white circular table, which suggest rich flora and fauna (figure 6). The architectures of a modernity of straight lines and the color gray are in the background, behind the green layers. Here, their artificiality has become an imagined nature of mountains. The three green layers structure the port into corresponding levels. The black winding lines that separate them are used as a corridor for travelers who breathe in and enjoy the breeze of the China Sea inside this new nature. A new interior landscape appears that is displayed as an open nature to passengers passing through.

Figure 7. Kinmen Passenger Service Center. Sectioned elevations. Junya Ishigami + Associates, 2014.

After this process of approaching, Ishigami displays a collection of sectioned elevation views, longitudinal and cross-sectional, of the new mountains (figure 7). His drawings follow in the footsteps of Humboldt’s approach to Chimborazo. The Prussian traveler defines the varied vegetation that covers the surface of his mythological mountain with differing green tones. The result is a collection of natural and geographical strata. The representation of his geography of plants ―in a large hand-colored print of 90 by 60 cm ―coexists with a section that describes in amazing detail the conditions and ways of life at the different heights of the mountain (figure 8). The drawing of the mountain is not just a skilled collection of strata that comprise the beautiful volume that rises over the Tapi plain. On each side of the print, Humboldt organizes the numerous scales that back the drawn scene. To the chart of temperatures and atmospheric pressures, he adds up to 14 scales that measure the humidity at various heights, that evaluate the amount of oxygen, that measure the atmospheric electricity charge and even the strength of the sky’s color. Humboldt also adds a table devoted to several species of animals according to the height at which they could be found, thereby completing Zimmerman’s work, Geographia animalium (Garrido, Rebok and Puig-Samper 2016,

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385). His essay on the geography of plants is an explanation of the comprehensive and integrated picture of nature portrayed on Chimborazo, which Humboldt himself named using the German term Naturgemälde.

Figure 8. Naturgemälde. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, 1807.

Figure 9. Geographie plantarum lineamenta. Alexander von Humboldt, 1817.

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Figure 10. Kinmen Passenger Service Center. Inventory of birds and plants. Junya Ishigami + Associates, 2014.

Ishigami’s drawings show the same rich scientific knowledge that makes it possible to tie a new artistic narrative. Again, scientific experience does not isolate in itself, nor does it abandon the sensitive experience. His drawings avoid the hyperreality of new graphic techniques that would close off the way to a poetic imagination. Ishigami’s mountains, of round peaks like Humboldt’s Chimborazo, are also imagined as the result of a series of geographical strata that tell us about the different natures that inhabit their imagined nature (figure 9). If Humboldt discovered in these strata the hidden threads that united the natures of Chimborazo with others discovered in Europe, Ishigami reveals in his sum of strata the organization of the process that links their occupation to the imagined nature. The catalog of species that Humboldt describes on the seven levels of the mountain has its parallel in a new panel in Ishigami’s design. The architect from Kanagawa establishes, in four graphic chapters, the types of environment, the species of birds and plants and the levels of vegetable growth measured in the profile of the mountains. Following the natural geography developed by Humboldt, those classifications are connected to each other, defining a unique nature of countless expressions. Thus, the species of birds are divided into those that prefer low trees, fields and shorelines, and those that prefer proximity to people. Ishigami represents the future composition of his new mountain through an inventory of birds and plants that will inhabit the various strata that comprise his mountain in Kinmen (figure 10).

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The three covers of the strata with winding profiles are broken down into a series of geographical concavities, convexities and plains. They describe with scientific precision various conditions of humidity, temperature and sunlight that determine varying natures. Not everything is vegetation, writes Ishigami; there are rocky sections, grassed areas, streams, windy areas, protected areas, shady areas, sunny areas, and reserves for wild birds: various habitats that emerge from the complex forms of the covers designed with the natural sensitivity of nature itself (Ishigami 2016, 285). Nature is constructed as a complete system where everything is connected. This was Humboldt’s fundamental contribution in his essay on the geography of plants from his first visit to South America. He was able to imagine different strata determined by their levels of humidity, temperature, oxygen and sunlight that defined a geography of natures.

Figure 11. Left. Kinmen’s structural method. Junya Ishigami + Associates, 2014.

The geological structure of this new imagined nature in Kinmen determines new tectonics. The repetition and variation as they are added define the habitability capacity of the different strata that comprise this architecture. The scale of a structure of concrete arcades approximately thirty meters wide that draw their roofing with the curvature of oriental ceilings matches the geological scale of a mountain. Therefore, these concrete arcades become the defining lines of a series of various profiles whose sequence ―with a separation of approximately ten meters― generates the geography of the six elevations that occupy a plot 520 meters long and 100 meters wide (figure 11). This way of understanding the anatomy of a place is clearly recognizable in the geological outlines that Humboldt

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himself imagined in the mountains on his trip to South America (figure 12). The succession of profiles, understood as planes that describe their own structural geology, are added to the profiles of Ishigami’s arcades that use the scale of a mountain to define their own structural capacity.

Figure 12. Right. American travel diaries: geological outlines. Alexander Humboldt, 1804.

In a new print, Ishigami shows a succession of sketches that expand this imagined nature. His way of showing us the various natural phenomena of nature, the habitat that they lead to, the landscape scenes or the topography achieved emerge in the form of a drawing that is added to an essential imagination that entails a new nature. The simple expression of his drawings, with strong contours and plain colors, enlightened by the scientific data about the natures that color it, open the door to a clear invented nature. The bare hills of Kinmen, on the shore of the China Sea, emerge as the imagined nature that provides the habitat for a Passenger Service Center. As stated by Yoko Nose (2011, 231), architecture has become a landscape, a landscape that surpasses simple scientific narration to achieve an esthetic experience as the sum of scientific reason and poetic emotion.

THE HETEROTOPIC FEATURE OF THE NATURGEMÄLDE The scene of Humboldt at the foot of Chimborazo painted by Friedrich Georg Weitsch or the Kinmen Passenger Service Center designed by Ishigami return us to a nature that is

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no longer limited to a single experience. Their natures do not come from one isolated scientific experience of their geography or from an intimate poetic experience of their imagined order. It is the tying of both: it is the nature that shows itself to the being who gazes at it with feeling (Garrido, Rebok and Puig-Samper 2016, 376). We cannot ignore the moving scene of Chimborazo without ignoring the different natures that tell us about the various aerial strata and their atmospheric conditions, just as we cannot stop seeing in the gentle nature of the port of Kinmen the various strata that organize the passenger corridors and the port program of that imagined mountain. These pictures of nature, where the united action of all forces is proved, attempt to construct a whole by themselves.

Figure 13. Humboldt, Aime Bonpland and Carlos Montúfar at the foot of Chimborazo. On the right is Carguairazo. Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806.

That the people who appear in front of both mountains are travelers from distant places is not trite. They ―those who travel the world― are most able to discover nature as the sum of scientific and poetic equality. In 1802, Humboldt and his companions, Bonpland and Montúfar, discovered, after traveling through the Andes, the west face of Chimborazo with the South Seas beyond (figure 13); 200 years later the anonymous passengers of ships that sail the China Sea do it. These new travelers tie, as they circulate through the open

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corridors of Kinmen, the geology of new mountains to the nature of the island. Their route invents the Passenger Service Center as a new, true nature (figure 14).

Figure 14. Hills of Kinmen Passenger Service Center. Junya Ishigami + Associates, 2014.

The precision of the scientific experience that both Ishigami and Humboldt display does not end with a simple accredited recognition, it becomes a poetic key that lightens the dim area of that scientific reason. Ishigami’s drawings, like Humboldt’s, contain the imaginary that emerges into the exterior. The emergence of this imaginary surpasses scientific experience in an invented nature. Ishigami’s strategy to make this preliminary place into a new nature is Humboldt’s narrative, which searches for common threads that unite all the natures that comprise the great Nature. Both work within an equality that considers scientific knowledge as equal to the imagination of a poet. Ishigami’s architecture has equaled Humboldt’s science. The sum of profiles with which Humboldt dissects mountains is now the sum of structural arcades that imagine the geography of the six new elevations. The natural geography that Humboldt describes of the various imagined strata of Chimborazo is the scientific argument that brings to life the three green layers that imagine the mountains of Kinmen. Ishigami’s drawings, visibly similar to Humboldt’s scenes, tell us of a scientific resource that opens the way to a new place. The scene of Chimborazo next to Carihuairazo volcano ―as the backdrop to Humboldt’s small encampment― contains a level of information that is waiting for an imagination that connects its discovery to the emergence

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of an imagined nature. The open simplicity of these early drawings, not yet photographs, fueled by a science and the emotion of the person who discovered them, makes it possible to retie a poetry that brings their union to life. Similarly, Ishigami’s drawings, enlightened by the reason of those traveling naturalists, contain an intentional innocence and simplicity in their style. Innocence allows the spectator of his drawings a union of science and emotion that is the source of their imagined nature. In his notebook of imagined journeys, Ishigami shows us the role of the emotion that accompanies Humboldt’s scientific experiences. His gaze is, therefore, as wide and rich as the Naturgemälde that Humboldt himself described in his essay on the geography of plants. Ishigami’s journey, understood as the tying of all of Humboldt’s drawings allows us to see the unity of a nature in each and every one of its phenomena. If Humboldt traveled beyond illustrated reason to discover in his Chimborazo the emotion of a new nature, Ishigami shows us the nature imagined by Humboldt beyond modern reason. Therefore, both appear to welcome an imminent romanticism that dreams of a world where nature once again governs with all its beauty. Ishigami’s imagined nature applied to the coastlines of Kinmen is, as was Humboldt’s imagined nature applied to Chimborazo, a nature that we inhabit among natures. Nature as the interior and nature as the exterior. Nature as intimacy and nature as a public expression of ourselves. Nature as a state of flux among all natures. Ultimately, nature asa living expression of our natural existence. Architecture, like our new life, simply flourishes. Ishigami’s Kinmen Passenger Service Center constructs the return journey from the original nature described by Humboldt on Chimborazo and natures overseas. The sum of scientific reason and poetic emotion that Ishigami notes down in his notebook of the travels by Humboldt and his contemporaries return as a fact constructed in an esthetically present nature that is shown to those who inhabit it: they would call it “extreme nature” in the Venice Biennale. Humboldt’s picture of the nature of Chimborazo has become the architecture of a new nature in Kinmen. Ishigami has imagined the nature of Kinmen in Humboldt’s Naturgemälde.

REFERENCES Colton, George Woolworth. 1856. Colton’s Atlas of the World, Illustrating Physical and Political Geography. New York: J.H. Colton & Company. Dunlap, Julie. 2016. “The Invention of Place: Alexander von Humboldt and the meaning of Home.” Journal of Sustainability Education 11:1-5. Garrido, Elisa. Rebok, Sandra. Puig-Samper, Miguel Ángel. 2016. “El arte al servicio de la ciencia: antecedentes artísticos en Alexander von Humboldt.” [“Art at the service of Science: artistic precedents in Alexander von Humboldt”]. Dynamis 36:363–390.

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Goethe, Johann Wofgang. 1997. Teoría de la Naturaleza. [Theory of nature]. Madrid: Tecnos. Herschel, William. 1784. “Acount of some observations tending to investigate the construction of the heavens.” Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society 74/2. Humboldt, Alexander. 1875. Cosmos. A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe. Bélgica: Eduardo Perié. Humboldt, Alexander. 1817. Geographiae plantarum lineamenta. Zurich: ETH-Bibliothek Zürich. Humboldt, Alexander. 1804. Geosnostic Section. Berlin: Berlin State Library. Humboldt, Alexander and Aimé Bonpland. 1807. Naturgemälde. Zurich: Zentralbibliotethek Zürich. Ishigami, Junya. 2014. Kinmen Passenger Service Center. Tokyo: Junya Ishigami + Associates. Ishigami, Junya. 2011. Another scale of Architecture. Kyoto: Seigensha. Ishigami, Junya. 2016. “Terminal Marítima de Kinmen.”[“Kinmen’s maritime terminal”]. El Croquis 182: 282–287. Navarrete, Ana. 1993. La crítica de la modernidad como crítica de la autonomía del arte. [The Critique of Modernity as the critique of the the autonomy of Art].Ciudad Real: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. Nose, Yoko. 2011. “Connecting landscape and architecture”. In Another Scale of Architecture. Seigensha. Kyoto: Seigensha. Thoreau, Henry David. 1967. The heart of Thoreau’s Journal. New York: Dover Publications. Weitsch, Friedrich Georg. 1806. Alexander Humboldt, Aimé Bonpland and Carlos Montúfar at the foot of Chimborazo. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Humboldt-Bonpland_Chimborazo.jpg. Wulf, Andrea. 2016. La invención de la naturaleza. [The invention of nature]. Madrid: Taurus.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 19

THE STRANGE BIRDS AND BEASTS IN OYAMADA HIROKO’S “THE FACTORY” (KŌJŌ, 2010) Angela Yiu*

Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

ABSTRACT Oyamada Hiroko (b. 1983) creates a heterotopia filled with strange birds and beasts in her novella The Factory to reflect and problematize the real-life issues of an underclass of underpaid menial workers trapped in estranged labor in contemporary Japanese society. The spatial dimension of her heterotopia is an immense industrial zone that resembles an oversized town, but space alone is not the determining factor in the formulation of her heterotopic site. It is the nonhuman living creatures —numerous haunting black birds called “factory cormorants,” overgrown rodents called “nutoria,” and creepy “washing machine lizards”— that make her imaginary landscape eerie and bizarre, but at the same time serve as a mirror and a connection to a real place inhabited by humans rendered lessthan-human by virtue of the mode of employment and the alienating nature of their jobs. Narrated through the perspectives of three employees, “The Factory” reveals a heterotopia that is as strange as it is familiar in comparison to an expanding stratum in contemporary Japanese society where humans work, live, and perish like the mysterious birds and beasts in the story.

Keywords: Oyamada Hiroko, contemporary Japanese literature, underclass, heterotopia

*

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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INTRODUCTION Oyamada Hiroko (b. 1983), who won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2014, is singularly obsessed with the depiction of real, imaginary, and symbolic spaces in all her works, as evident in the succession of titles of three anthologies of short fiction that feature space of one kind or another —The Factory, The Hole (Ana, 2014) and The Garden (Niwa, 2018). The separation between these different spatial dimensions is blurred, pervious, or non-existence, rendering the real and unreal topos fluid and haunting. This chapter will focus on her debut work “The Factory,” a novella that gave her anthology its title, in which these spatial dimensions bleed into one another to create a heterotopic site. The story is deceptively simple and nearly plotless. Told in alternation by three narrative voices — twenty-six-year-old Ushiyama Yoshiko, her older brother, and a male graduate student Furufue Yoshi— the story unfolds in an episodic mode to recount their experiences as nonregular workers at the titular factory, with an emphasis on their observations of the immense factory grounds and the bizarre nonhuman living creatures that populate the place. Oyamada uses this strange place to address and reflect, albeit through a mirror of distortion and deformation, real and realistic social issues that haunt contemporary Japan. Central to these social issues in the story is the silent yet persistent expansion of the underclass made up of non-regular workers —temp workers, single women, and laid-off workers from a downsized workforce— men and women who are forgotten casualty of a prolonged economic recession that lasted over two decades after the burst of the economic bubble in 1992. While the issues of the underclass she addresses are real, the heterotopia she creates in her story to mirror these issues is fantastical and filled with strange animals. This chapter will begin with a brief introduction of the social reality of the underclass in Japan and will focus on the way Oyamada transforms that reality into an “unreal and virtual space” —a Foucauldian mirror—of an industrial zone occupied by human and their nonhuman counterparts. In doing so, Oyamada compels us to see the strangeness of a world that is different but eerily similar to a social reality that we shun. Foucault distinguishes the world in a mirror from the placeless utopia in that the mirror does exist in reality and thus “exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that [one] occup[ies]” (Foucault 1986, 24). Similarly, in creating the fantastical space and a host of mysterious human and nonhuman occupants in the heterotopic site of her story, Oyamada forces us to gaze at the hidden reality of underpaid and devalued workers mirrored in a grotesque and frightening world.

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THE CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE UNDERCLASS A brief discussion of the expanding Japanese underclass is in order for us to understand the underlying social references in Oyamada’s story. During the period of rapid economic growth in the 1970s and 80s, the wage disparity in Japan was relatively small, resulting in the so-called era of “A Hundred Million Middle-Class” (ichioku sōchūryū), a rounded figure conventionally used to stand for the entire Japanese population, suggesting that “everyone is middle-class.” The sociologist Hashimoto Kenji points out that somewhere in the late 1980s when Japanese was still experiencing the Economic Bubble, the underclass began to proliferate. As the need for cheap labor intensified, Japanese companies increased the hiring of non-regular workers (hiseiki rōdōsha) instead of regular employees (seisha’in) with full benefits as a cost-cutting measure. Up until then, non-regular workers referred largely to student part-time workers (called arubaito in Japanese, after the German term arbeit for work), housewife part-time workers (called paato in Japanese, after the word “part” from “part-time”), and post-retirement workers. In the late 80s, however, a new troop of workers that include fresh college graduates joined the work force not as full-time regular employees but as “freeters,” non-regular and temporary workers who shift from one low-paying job to another with scant job training, insufficient or no health and pension insurance, and are subject to layoffs.1 The situation worsened as Japan entered a prolonged economic recession after the burst of the Bubble in the early 1990s, resulting in an entire generation of non-regular employees or “freeters” trapped in the lower rung of the economic ladder, forming a huge and growing underclass. A large number of these nonregular workers are single, divorced, or widowed women with no professional job training, and the underclass expands like invisible tubers at the foundation of contemporary Japanese society (Hashimoto 2018b, 12-13). Hashimoto points out that by 2012, there were nearly 9.3 million non-regular workers or “freeters,” 14.9% of the entire working population.2 These non-regular workers are sometimes called “contract employees” (keiyaku sha’in) if hired on a limited term, and “temp workers” (haken sha’in) if dispatched from a temp agency. Their average income was 1.86 million yen,3 and the poverty rate was 38.7%. Many of these people were unable to marry for financial reasons, and the percentage of unmarried people among those aged 20-59 was 66.4% for men and 56.1% for women (Hashimoto 2018a, 9).

“Freeter” is a Japanese expression (furiitaa) that borrows partially from the English word free or freelance and the German word arbeiter (laborer). It was first used around 1987. The Ministry of Labor, Health and Welfare (MLHW) in Japan defines the term as “young people 15-34 years of age, with the exception of students and married women, who engage in part-time work or who are unemployed but wish to be employed part-time” (Digital Daijisen 2020). However, as these part-time workers become older, they exceed the age group of the official definition. 2 The exact figures quoted by Hashimoto are 92,870,000 non-regular workers in 2012. This does not include students, housewives and those in specialized professional and managerial positions (Hashimoto 2018a, 9). 3 About US$23,250 by the 2012 exchange rate (about ¥80 =$1). 1

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The three principle characters and narrative voices in Oyamada’s story fit the profile of non-regular workers in the growing Japanese underclass. Ushiyama Yoshiko interviews at the factory for her sixth job in four years since graduating from college, and despite the fact that the job was advertised as a regular position, she is offered a non-regular position paid by the hour, an experience shared by many stuck in non-regular employment once it persists for a couple of initial years. She is assigned to feeding unwanted documents into a giant shredder placed in the remotest corner in the basement of one of the factory buildings, seven-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week. The fact that she works nearly the same hours as a regular employee does not make her one, and she has reduced benefits and social and job security. Unbeknownst to Yoshiko, her brother also started working as a non-regular employee at the factory around the same time. Yoshiko’s brother, identified for the most part by the generic male pronoun Ore that serves to mark him as Everyman, used to work as a system engineer in a small company, but was laid-off at the age of thirty because of downsizing, commonly known as company “restructuring” (risutora in Japanese). He is hired as a temp worker to revise paperwork at the factory through the facilitation of his girlfriend who has regular job at a temp agency. The paperwork he is assigned to check consists of mindnumbing and senseless sentences and paragraphs routinely used in poorly written manuals or apologies for recalls, and he often drifts into a fog-like state of semi-consciousness as he tries to wrangle meaning out of the meaningless prose (Oyamada 2013, 63). The third narrative voice belongs to that of a doctoral student Furufue Yoshio, whose given name shares one character with that of Yoshiko, suggesting that they are male and female counterparts of each other. Furufue is over thirty and specializes in the taxonomy of mosses, an expertise so narrow in scope and applicability that highly limits his job opportunities. His profile fits that of the “highly educated working poor” (kōgakureki waakingu pua) or “degree refugees” (gakureki nanmin), graduates from undergraduate and particularly graduate programs of prestigious universities who fail to be in full-time employment despite efforts in job-hunting, and who end up joining the league of the unemployed, NEET, and the precariat class of non-regular workers.4 They are in part the products of government policy to increase the number of advanced degree holders in Japan. In 1991, the Japanese government pushed for a doubling of doctoral degrees in an attempt to promote not only academic research but also active engagement in corporations. As a result, the number of doctoral students rose from 29,911 persons in 1991 to 74,000 persons in 2019 (Aida 2019). Meanwhile, the number of tenured positions in reputable universities and government research institutes decreased, and hiring at companies failed to catch up with the growing numbers, since companies typically prefer fresh college graduates who are not as highly specified in training and more malleable as employees. In a survey of the 4

NEET is an acronym originated in 1999 from the United Kingdom that stands for young persons “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.” The term became widely used in Japan around 2005, and MHWL applies it to the age group between 15 and 34. (MHWL 2013).

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career paths of graduates with doctoral degrees in 2012, only 66.9% are employed, out of which over 30% in non-regular unemployment (Aida 2019). In another report in 2009, a large number of those with doctorates in the sciences end up as postdoc’s (low-paid research fellows with a limited term), and those in the humanities subsist as adjunct instructors in various universities, earning wages that are inadequate for basic livelihood or paying back student loans (Sugimoto 2009). Furufue falls within this category of people who are over qualified and overage for ordinary employment, and he is fortunate to receive financial support from parents and finally secure employment at the factory. But the work that awaits him at the factory resembles a dead-end job. He is put in a one-person department to promote ostensibly a vague rooftop greening project, but given neither tools nor co-workers, his only duty is to run informal guided tours for moss observation for casual visitors to the industrial zone. As a character as well as a narrative voice, Furufue joins Ushiyama Yoshiko and her brother as a trio reflection of the growing underclass in contemporary Japan.

THE FACTORY AS HETEROTOPIA Had Oyamada stopped at the human characters and narrative voices, her novella would have read as a satire or critique of realistic social issues at best, but the most striking feature of her work is the construction of an immense spatial dimension to mirror the invisible space of the underclass and a host of nonhuman living creatures to stand for the dehumanized inhabitants who live and toil in that stratum of society. This section will begin with a description and analysis of the space of the factory as heterotopia. Despite the common use of metaphors such as a “stratum” or the “underclass” to describe the dispossessed and frustrated workers living in relative poverty in Japanese society, the space of poverty and alienation in fact remains invisible and hidden.5 Oyamada constructs an oversized space and lays it out in plain view for all to see in her work, as a kind of imaginary collective counterspace to the invisible yet real space of the working poor. The factory corresponds to Foucault’s example of a colony to illustrate the sixth principle of heterotopias —a creation of “a space of illusion that exposes every real space,” “a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (Foucault 1986, 27). A closer examination of the layout of the grounds of the factory will yield further correspondences to other Foucauldian principles of heterotopias. The titular factory, whose actual production remains obscure, refers to an industrial zone that resembles a town of unspecified and mind-blowing dimensions. There are four 5

A threshold of 50% or below median disposable income, as employed in EU and OECD statistics, is used as the standard to define relative poverty in Japan. (Tachibanaki and Urakawa 2008, 26).

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openings ―North, East, South, West― and one enters through the North to access the Headquarters. Apart from the HQ and the factory buildings, prominent sites include the factory museum for visitors, numerous warehouses, a gigantic waste-processing plant, bus depot, residential areas, and a huge expanse of vacant ground for product testing. Several bus lines crisscross the grounds to take employees and visitors to different parts of the grounds ―shops, company housing, train stations, restaurants, and over a hundred company cafeterias. A river runs through the grounds to partition it into the Northeast and Southwest zones, and a two-lane large bridge with a five-meter pedestrian walkway on each side arches over the river and takes ninety minutes to cross on foot. The river flows into the sea on the south side of the industrial zone (Oyamada 2013, 23-24, 120). The locations of buildings are unspecific, and the number of buildings scattered throughout the map in Figure 1 has to be multiplied by at least a hundred times to reflect the tremendous scale. The boundary is not specifically rectangular as in the map, but there are definite borders with openings on each side. The configuration of Oyamada’s industrial zone responds to the Foucauldian principles of heterotopias in a few ways. The openings in the four directions correspond to the fifth principle which presupposes “a system of opening and closing that both isolates [the heterotopias] and make them penetrable” (Foucault 1986, 26). Foucault uses the prison as an example of a heterotopic site that “is not freely accessible like a public place” (26). While the factory is not exactly a jail, it has a system of identification which marks the status of everyone allowed to enter the site. Whereas full-time regular employees wear dark blue tags, important personages black, VIP silver, visitors dark red, non-regular workers in grey overalls typically wear fire-engine red, yellow, or shocking-pink tags, a reminder of the bright orange uniforms that US prisoners typically are made to wear.

Figure 1. A simplified configuration of the industrial zone in “The Factory.”

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The prominent existence of the factory museum, the enormous waste-processing plant, and the huge vacant grounds for product testing corresponds to the fourth principle, which states that “heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time,” or in another word, “heterochronies” (Foucault 1986, 26). Like the Foucauldian museum or library, the factory museum presumably houses products deemed significant in the history of the factory, while the waste-processing plant destroys and discards useless by-products in present time, and the testing grounds provide unmapped territories for the future. Past, present, and future and the many in-between slices of time co-exist simultaneously in the heterotopic site of the factory grounds, and workers shuttling back and forth among those symbolic spatial dimensions provide the link to those places. Yet it is the nonhuman occupants of the heterotopic space in Oyamada’s story that correspond in a most uncanny manner to Foucault’s third principle of heterotopias. Foucault uses the theater, cinema, and garden to illustrate the heterotopic site that is “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (25). In particular, he emphasizes the garden as a microcosm that brings together vegetation from various parts of the world —the garden being the “smallest parcel of the world” yet “the totality of the world” — and suggests that the modern zoological gardens spring from that source (26). The next section will focus on the strange birds and beasts in the story that complete the heterotopic imagination originating with the description of space.

THE STRANGE FACTORY BIRDS AND BEASTS Despite the powerful and suggestive configuration of space in “The Factory,” space alone is inadequate to suggest the full impact of the heterotopic site. Without the population of the imaginary birds and beasts, the factory grounds will be at best an inversion of utopia, a planned and tightly controlled city that quickly turns into a dystopia. The birds and beasts provide a mirror image and a link to the human counterparts in the story and connect the unreal factory grounds to a possible reality inhabited by real people, in particular the harsh reality of the underclass of non-regular workers and the unemployed in contemporary Japan. Paradoxically, the fantastical birds and beasts give the imaginary landscape a reality it would not have had and turn it into a heterotopic site firmly connected with the hidden stratum of the underclass. All three narrators begin their observations with an awareness of the ubiquitous presence of the strange “factory cormorants.” The first sentence of the story in Ushiyama’s perspective reads, “The factory is grey, and the moment the door of the basement opens there is a smell of birds” (Oyamada 2013, 7). Her brother, dozing off on his job, is aware of “shadows of fluttering black objects lingering in his eyes” (24). Furufue’s observation, typical of a science student, is even more detailed:

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Angela Yiu “There are black birds. For a moment I thought they are crows, but they appear to be cormorants. From the bridge, the edge of the water where the birds perch looks faraway, but I can make out several birds gazing at the factory that stand on the other side of the sea. I can almost feel if I squeezed their narrow necks I would have ink stain on my hand, the way their feathers look slimy and glossy. The sea is right there, and the part where the river widens must be where fresh water mixes with seawater. Can cormorants live in such as place, I wonder. Are they sea cormorants or river cormorants?” (13)

Further on in the story, the report of a fifth grader provides more details. The factory cormorants measure eighty to ninety centimeters and are jet black from crown to toe. Even though they have wings and feathers, they can only fly low a few meters at a time near the river. They have webbed feet and can swim and catch fish, but they never venture out to the sea, and prefer to eat leftovers of ready-made food discarded by the factory. Even though they flock together, they do not form pairs, and are not seen to have built nests, laid eggs, and raised chicks. In fact, there is no recorded spotting of chicks. A typical flock of factory cormorants consists only of adult birds, and they appear neither to communicate nor nestle together. There is also no sighting of any bird corpses. Factory staff occasionally catch them for unknown purposes and eventually release the exhausted birds to the sea. Some appear to return to the flock, emaciated and dull-colored. There appear to be constantly several to tens of exhausted factory cormorants in a flock (90-92). In the same report, there are detailed observations about two other nonhuman living creatures. Nutorias are rodents that measure forty to seventy centimeters from head to body, with tails of about thirty centimeters in length. They typically weigh about ten kilograms, but large ones can weigh up to thirty kilograms. They have greyish long fur, large front teeth, and five digits on each foot. Even though they live in the river, they are poor swimmers. They are nocturnal and spend nearly all day in their nests. Predominantly herbivorous, they also eat small mice and fish, and are particularly fond of discarded leftovers from the factory, being too clumsy to be effective hunters. But a diet of leftovers leads to obesity and gigantism, and some are said to have grown up to two meters in length. They also love to gather around the drainage ditch and soak themselves in warm water of thirty to forty degrees Celsius. Pregnant females tend to become aggressive, and typically each litter consists of one to three, and sometimes as many as five cubs, at the end of a twohundred-day term. Nutorias live anywhere between ten to forty years. Old nutorias tend to huddle around the warm ditches until they die, and their corpses often clog up the ditches and pose a big challenge for the cleaning staff (81-85). Another species of strange nonhuman inhabitant is the Washing Machine Lizard. They measure five to ten centimeters in length, with a tail that measures another one to three centimeter(s), and weigh about twenty grams. Greyish and resembling small common lizards, they are distinguished by their habits of making nests between, underneath, or behind washing machines in the two cleaning plants on the factory grounds. The nests are made of bits of fiber and lint glued together by viscous secretion from the lizard’s rear end.

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They move around near their nests in search of heat from the washing machine, and their diet consists of small insects, undissolved globs of washing detergent, dust mixed with bits of skin protein, and bits of fiber. In spring, the female lizards lay three to ten eggs of eight millimeters in size in the nest, but do not incubate them. The hatching is left to chance— the all-day vibration of the washing machine causes some eggs to crack, and if the timing is right, some lucky infant lizards will emerge, though many eggs dry up and crack at the wrong time, resulting in numerous premature deaths. Even those hatched successfully will be consumed by spiders and other predators or drown by falling into the washing machines. The average life span of a washing machine lizard is three years, during which it hardly ever leaves its nest. Sweeping under the washing machines in the cleaning plants yields numerous dead and desiccated bodies, and piles of the dead are said to remain underneath unswept washing machines (87-89). Despite the significant differences in the forms, sizes, modes of living, and habitats of these three fantastical species, collectively they mirror the lives of the three narrators/characters in the story and by extension serve as powerful symbols for the life and fate of the underclass in contemporary Japanese society. First, in grey and dark coloration like workers in suits or uniforms, they do not venture out of their inconspicuous habitats, either out of fear or acquired disabilities and inhibitions. Similarly, in the story, Ushiyama, her brother, and Furufue docilely accept soul-depleting work for fear of losing their meagre livelihood, while millions of non-regular workers in Japanese society cling to their underpaid jobs like Marxist wage slaves tied to an unfulfilling, alienating production line. Second, the nonhuman species rely on leftover and scraps from the factory and slowly lose their abilities to secure their own food. In the story, over a hundred company cafeterias provide cheap food (¥250 per day, or ¥5,000 per month) for employees to keep them fed and chained to their lots, like animals in invisible cages (72).6 This mirrors the unskilled laborers who work from hand to mouth, with no prospect of rising above labor that keeps them down. Third, the birds and beasts produce offspring that repeat the cycle of deprivation and limitation, and in the case of the factory cormorants, reproduction ceases to be part of the life cycle. In the story, none of the three characters is married, and even Ushiyama’s brother, the only one with a partner, has scant prospect of marrying the woman above his station in life. As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the underclass in Japan is marked by a high percentage of unmarried people, as though the entire stratum is stripped of the economic means to have and sustain families, an aspect of life that may restore hope and dignity to the alienated worker. Furthermore, children from low income household

6

About $2.70 per day and $54 per month by the exchange rate in 2010 (about ¥92 = $1).

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tend to have a lower chance of attending college, making it harder for the new generation to rise above the underclass of their parents.7 Fourth, the factory birds and beasts are eerily silent in accepting a fate of mistreatment, misuse, and abandonment. This silence is shared by the three characters, a silence in part sustained by an overall passivity in questioning and challenging social and economic injustice in Japan, out shame, shyness, ignorance, despair, or a combination of these things. Finally, the birds and beasts die quietly in droves, numerous yet uncounted, to be swept away in oblivion as garbage and waste. The story does not depict the future of the three characters, though Furufue slips into moments of fantasy and imagines himself, fifteen years from the time of hiring, making neither progress in nor application of his research, while rooftop greening is outsourced and his job rendered superfluous. In the next section, I will discuss how Ushiyama envisions her fate in the heterotopic site, a foreboding fate that symbolizes what lies in store for the underclass in Japanese society.

CROSSING OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE Assigned to feeding scraps to a shredder all day, Ushiyama experiences the classical sense of Marxist alienation in estranged labor, in that “labor is external to the worker” (Marx 1844, 4). In her work, “[s]he does not affirm [herself] but denies [herself], does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely her physical and mental energy but mortifies [her] body and ruins [her] mind” (Marx 1844, 4). Facing the gigantic shredder, Ushiyama feels a disconnectedness between “self and labor, self and the factory, self and society” (Oyamada 2013, 95). Taking a half-day off, she gazes at the factory cormorants under the Factory Big Bridge and contemplates her relationship with work. “I am after all just a disposable laborer at the far end of a system that does not even brush against the enormity of the entire factory” (99). Knowing that she ought to appreciate having a job, she nonetheless sees no meaning in her work: “I don’t want to work. I really don’t want to work. I can’t see the connection between labor and the value and meaning of life. I used to think there ought to be some connection between the two, but I have come to realize there is no connection whatsoever… I don’t feel that I am fighting against work and labor, but what I experience is a strange feeling that work is external to me, not a part of me, as though it is in a totally different world of its own. […] I have been trying my best so far, but what I considered “trying my best” in fact has no value at all. The evidence is in my deplorable condition now. I don’t want to work. I don’t want to work, but if I don’t, I won’t survive” (99-100).

7

According to a 2016 report by the Japanese Cabinet Office (Naikakufu), while the college attendance rate of children from all households is 52.1%, that of children from households on welfare is 19%, from children’s home 12.4%, and from single-parent households 23.9% (Naikakufu 2016, 4).

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In this scene, Ushiyama’s alienation is contextualized in a heterotopic site that includes both the human and nonhuman world. On the bridge, hordes of workers in grey overalls and Ushiyama in a grey shirt and jeans are mirrored by the factory cormorants under the bridge, and the convolution of the river and sea below also acts as an unstable mirror to reflect and threaten to suck her into another space. “I don’t know where the water comes from and where it is flowing to. Looking down from a high place always makes me feel as though I will be sucked into the water, so I quickly move away. Maybe I don’t even know where I came from” (102). It is as though the human and nonhuman spaces permeate each other to invite a crossing over, the way the Foucauldian mirror dissolves the barrier between “over here” and “over there” and connects the shimmering reality and unreality of the two spatial dimensions. “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there” (Foucault 1986, 24). Ushiyama makes the crossing over to the space on the other side in the final scene of metamorphosis. On her way to the restroom in the factory, she passes by “a middle-aged woman who has her thick forearms underneath the wings of one of the numerous black birds gathered on the river the previous day and her hands fastened around its neck. With its wing spread apart, the bird offers no resistance, and only the head swaying left and right shows signs of life” (122). Ushiyama stops short in shock, but the woman continues to walk upstairs as though nothing is out of the ordinary. Returning to her work position, Ushiyama notices that her colleagues are going about their regular business of working, chatting, and even laughing. “Not knowing what to think, I grab sheets of paper from my allotted container and feed them into the shredder. Without thinking, I keep feeding paper into the shredder. As I feed the last batch of paper from the container at my feet into the shredder, it dawns on me that I have turned into a black bird. I can see human feet and human arms. I can see grey lumps and green. And I can smell the sea” (122-123).

It is not clear whether workers in the factory turn into birds or captured birds at some point turn into human workers, but the implication is that the workers and birds are interchangeable forms of each other in this fluid heterotopic site.

CONCLUSION In different but similar ways, the nonhuman creatures in the story indicate the increasing estrangement and isolation of life forms in relationship to nature. Feeding on

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leftovers discarded by the factory, oversized Nutorias progressively lose their ability to hunt for food. The lizards subsist entirely on by-products from the washing machines, and the factory cormorants lose their ability to reproduce. Their countless forgotten lives and deaths simply clog up the ditches and have very little impact on the operation of the factory. Collectively, they stand for dehumanized workers in the vast factory grounds that survive unquestioningly at the mercy of a mysterious and immense production line until they are no longer useful. The full symbolic meaning of the nonhuman creatures in the story becomes clear with Ushiyama’s metamorphosis into a factory bird. “Estranged labor,” writes Marx, “estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect” (Marx 1844, 7). The moment Ushiyama turns into a bird is the moment estranged labor has stripped her of the last vestige of humanity. Like an exhausted bird, a dispensable non-regular worker assigned to an alienated job that can be performed more efficiently by a machine can simply be picked out from the operation and replaced with another. The immense grounds and impersonal system of the factory become the perfect setting to deprive workers of their self-worth, value, happiness, connection to nature, and humanity. Perhaps Oyamada is suggesting that Ushiyama’s metamorphosis into a factory bird is not a singular case, and that the flocks of factory birds were once human workers dehumanized by estranged labor. Alternatively, she may also be suggesting that the workers are once birds plucked from the flock, transformed into human workers until they are used up and thrown out to perish. Both are believable transformations in the heterotopia of the story. The heterotopic space in the story is also a mirror of contemporary Japanese society. The exhausted, working poor forms an expanding, invisible, and silent underclass is toiling at the mercy of large corporations and conglomerates. Many of these underpaid workers are engaged in manual labor, retailing, and the service industry, typically working as sales clerks, cooks, waiters and waitresses, cleaning staff, cashiers, dock laborers, care workers, home helpers, and so on (Hashimoto 2018b, 9). Many of them work full-time but still live in relative poverty, up to 16% in 2014 (The Economist 2015). Furthermore, the term kakusa shakai (a Society of Disparity), first selected as one of the top ten neologisms in 2006, was selected again as the top neologism in thirty years in 2013.8 Yet poverty in Japan is said to be “invisible” because, as the scholar Yuki Sekine points out, “[Japan] has no ‘poverty line,’ and subsequently no official statistics on poverty” (Sekine 2008, 49). Beggars and poor neighborhoods remain inconspicuous, and the homeless keep a low profile in certain parks and riverbanks. Perhaps somewhere in the collective subconscious mind of Japanese society, people still nurture the myth of “Everyone is middle class” and train their eyes to look away from the space of poverty. In the heterotopia of “The Factory,” Oyamada strips off the veil that hides poverty and the underclass and forces the reader to gaze steadily at the other space that the eyes refuse to see. 8

The Youcan (Yūkyan) Corporation that offers correspondence courses runs an “Award for the Top Ten Neologisms and Popular Words” (Yūkyan shingo ryūkōgo taishō) each year (Hashimoto 2018a, 3).

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REFERENCES Aida, Roku. 2019. “Tomadoi ‘hakasegō’ shutoku –shūshoku ya shūnyū de shōrai ni fuan.” [“Ambivalence at receiving a doctoral degree –anxiety about job prospect and income”]. Asahi Newspaper, 28 September 2019. Digital Daijisen 2020. “Furiitaa.” [“Freeter”]. Accessed February, 2020: https://www. japanknowledge.com/lib/display/?lid-2001016324900 (Keyword needed to access). The Economist. 2015. “Struggling: Japan’s Working Poor.” The Economist, 4 April 2015. Accessed February, 2020: https://www.economist.com/asia/2015/04/04/struggling Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Daicritics 16(1): 22-27. Hashimoto, Kenji. 2018a. Shin Nihon no kaikyū shakai. [New Japanese Class Society]. Tokyo: Kōdansha gendai shinsho. Hashimoto, Kenji. 2018b. Andaakurasu: aratana kasō kaikyū no shutsugen [Underclass: the Emergence of a New Lower Class]. Tokyo: Chikuma shinsho. Marx, Karl. 1844. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Accessed February, 2020: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm. MHWL [Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor, Government of Japan]. 2013. “Jakunen koyō kanren dēta.” [“Youth employment data”]. Accessed February, 2020: http://www.mhlw.go.jp/topics/2010/01/tp0127-2/12/html. Naikakufu [Cabinet Office, Government of Japan]. 2016. “Kodomo no hinkon ni kansuru shihyō no suii.” [“The development of the index on childhood poverty”]. Accessed February, 2020: https://www8.cao.go.jp/kodomonohinkon/yuushikisya/k_4/pdf/ s1.pdf. Oyamada, Hiroko. 2013. Kōjō. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. [2019. The Factory. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation]. Oyamada, Hiroko. 2014. Ana [The Hole]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Oyamada, Hiroko. 2018. Niwa [The Garden]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Sekine, Yuki. 2008. “The Rise of Poverty in Japan: The Emergence of the Working Poor.” Japan Labor Review 5(4): 49-66. Sugimoto, Kiyoshi. 2009. “Shūshoku hyōryū –hakase no sue wa” [“Drifting employment –what is the destination of those with doctoral degrees?”]. Asahi Newspaper, 18 January 2009. Tachibana, Toshiaki and Urakawa, Kunio. 2008. “Trends in Poverty among Low-Income Workers in Japan since the Nineties.” Japan Labor Review 5(4): 20-46.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 20

DISPELLING THE REALITY WITH A LOT OF ILLUSION OR THE HETEROTOPIC UTOPIA OF LIVING IN MEDELLÍN Juan Esteban Posada Morales* Faculty of Human Sciences and Economics, National University of Colombia, Medellín, Colombia

ABSTRACT The goal of this chapter is to explain the process of consent and to show that it contains a spatial matrix that works as an ontological dimension of contemporary capitalism in Medellín. Space is the fundamental variable of the capitalist experience that shapes the way of life in Medellín; a place with a pedagogy that gradually teaches individuals to follow an ideal of subject. This ideal is the regime of inclusion that places individuals as neoliberal citizens who exercise their powers through a network of power games that constitute them as “freedom” generating machines. The heterotopic utopia is the result in the city of Medellín of the application of all those elements or ideas that include us in the fantasy of investing in ourselves.

Keywords: neoliberalism, reprogramming

*

utopia,

heterotopia,

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

political

emotions,

ontological

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INTRODUCTION Psychological tensions that act on and model a “new” common sense1 in contemporary capitalism establish a considerable anxious yet extraordinarily persuasive energy. And so, to explain life presently is to explain the sense and its meaning —the very things which constantly crumble. By converting emotions2 that inhibit us whilst we sail the waters of contemporary capitalism into “life action,” we hastily consent to the creation of utopias3 and heterotopias4 that work as the best allies, meaning they are the sine qua non condition of our existence. They are the transcendental structure of the conditions of our subjectivity in these times. For this reason, this text will aim to explain the process of consent with an explainable matrix of a spatial nature as an ontological statute of contemporary capitalism in Medellín that must in turn be explained by carrying out a search for the possible conditions of a whole nucleus that operated as the structure of the societal power relations and the ontological assumptions that capitalism sets on the table with its ideal interpretation of the city.5

In his work Difference and Repetition, Deleuze identified the structural characteristic that constitutes common sense: “Finally, the third characteristic of transcendental memory is that, in turn, it forces thought to grasp that which can only be thought, the cogitandum or noeteon, the Essence: not the intelligible, for this is still no more than the mode in which we think that which might be something other than thought, but the being of the intelligible as though this were both the final power of thought and the unthinkable” (Deleuze 2001, 217). 2 In her work Political Emotions, Martha Nussbaum states that “all political principles, both good and bad, require for their materialization and their survival of emotional support that seeks stability over time […] generation and support and a strong commitment to projects to endure as such” (Nussbaum 2013, 15). 3 Foucault, in The Utopian Body, defines utopia as a place outside of all places, beautiful, clear, transparent, bright, fast, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration, detached, invisible, protected, always transfigured (Foucault 2010, 8). 4 The Lefebvrian concept of heterotopia (radically different from Foucault’s) draws border social spaces of possibility where “something different” is not only possible but foundational for the definition of revolutionary trajectories. That “something different” does not necessarily arise from a conscious plan, but from what people do, feel, perceive, and get to articulate in their search for meaning in their daily lives. Such practices create heterotopic spaces everywhere (Harvey 2012, 15). 5 Let’s, for example, consider the media’s take on the 2017 happiness rates for Colombia. A study measured happiness in the main cities of the country, looking to find out which are the happiest inhabitants and which remain depressed and worried. The diagnosis of happiness for Colombia, developed by the National Development Plan, was given to 9,710 Colombians in the metropolitan areas of Barranquilla, Bogotá, Cali, and Medellín, measured according to gender characteristics, income, access to social services, age, occupation, sentimental situation, perception of safety, and ethnicity, among others. The study was based on 4 variables: happiness, satisfaction, worry and depression. These indicators classified the happiest cities as follows: 1. Medellín: the happiest citizens are the inhabitants of the capital city of Antioquia, who scored 8.4 points on a scale of 0 to 10, compared to a national average of 8.2. They also obtained the best score in satisfaction and the lowest level of concern, lower than the other cities evaluated. For Colombians, Medellín is a benchmark when it comes to quality of life, and this is reflected in the well-being of those who inhabit it (Informe Inmobiliario 2017). 1

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What’s interesting about this interpretation of what we can call the heterotopic spirit of the neoliberal utopia is how we came to consent to it .6 This is the basis of a technology7 of consent that is embodied in government practices8, practices that we dare to call the emotional reason9. Let’s call this the subject to outline this process of neoliberalization of life (Laval and Dardot 2017, 347), which in turn comes to be in Medellín through technologies implemented in the urban space.10 In this way, the space has performed the subjectivity in such a way that being a citizen (Balibar 2013, 104) entails becoming responsible for chasing the assumptions behind these practices. It is in this sense that the space arises as the fundamental variable to the capitalist experience that shapes the way of life in Medellín; a place with a pedagogy that gradually teaches individuals to follow an ideal of subject, which is in itself the regime of inclusion that places individuals as neoliberal civilians who exercise their powers as citizens through a network of power games that constitute them as “freedom” generating machines11 (Hayek 2011, 31).

THE NEOLIBERAL SPACE Arguing that utopia is a “citizen’s illusion” and attempting to create the belief that heterotopia and reality are two identical things is to rig the spatial sense overnight; so, while one could —or could not— hold much sympathy for the efforts made by government

For Harvey (2007, 48), the channels through which the sufficient degree of popular consent was generated to legitimize the powerful ideological influences that circulated through corporations, the media and the numerous institutions that constitute civil society —such as universities, schools, churches and professional associations— (institutions that Hayek had already predicted in 1947), would support the capture of certain segments of the media and the conversion of many intellectuals, creating a climate of opinion that supported the sponsorship of “freedom”. These movements were subsequently consolidated by capturing political parties’ and, finally, state power. 7 “The term “technology”, in Foucault, adds to the idea of practice the concepts of strategy and tactics. In fact, studying practices as technology consists in situating it in a field defined by the relationship between means and ends” (Castro 2011, 381). 8 “The practices, for Foucault, are defined by the regularity and rationality that accompany the ways of doing, and that have, on the other hand, a reflex character: they are the object of reflection and analysis” (Castro 2011, 381). 9 Foucault, unlike many other philosophers, does not believe that reason is a kind of normative framework that philosophers can construct with great elegance and which we all must obey because it is reason and because it is one and immovable. Foucault thinks that one should not speak of reason in that way but of emotional rationality, that is to say: in the way in which men live their lives, they explore their condition of existence and create themselves as products of themselves (Castro-Gómez 2015, 156). 10 “The idea that city-space not simply contains or supports social life bur also expresses those social values that are necessary for social reproduction is well formulated and documented in the social sciences” (Stavrides 2010, 31). 11 “Through these positions, we will attempt to discern various levels of ontological intensity and envisage machinism in its totality, in its technological, social, semiotic and axiological avatars. And this will involve a reconstruction of the concept of machine that goes far beyond the technical machine” (Guattari 1996, 48). 6

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reason12 to turn the illusion into a reality, we must rethink what the meaning of this reality is: what to be a good citizen really means. This experience must necessarily be supported by one of the great social values of capitalist ethics (Hayek 2011, 24), management13 both public and private. That is, in Medellín, society is concerned with making use of these managerial values in space, ensuring a “decent” life, a life that proudly carries the mark of neoliberalism, showing a spatially efficient capacity. One of the impressive features of this management in Medellín is how it imbues with meaning the spatial construction of the people that are being produced and consumed in the city. The handling of the territory by illegal agents can exemplify this postulate: “The existence of the combos brought about a change in the habits of the inhabitants of the Colombian neighborhoods. An example of this is the citizens who try to move freely through the neighborhoods of Medellín [...] Elkin Aristizabal lives in Medellín and works delivering food and cleaning products to the commercial establishments in Colombia. ‘To be able to work I have to pay around 28 dollars a month, and it is a characteristic that depends on the merchandise,’ Aristizabal specified. Currently, all distributors of eggs, milk and natural gas are prohibited from entering the city because, according to the merchant, the Combos have their own company and are in charge of sales and marketing. ‘Once I didn’t pay and they stole from me, but one day my truck broke down and along with my son they helped us distribute the food by motorcycle,’ said Aristizabal. This marks the complexity of the issue, since these gangs, while increasing citizen insecurity, also offer ‘social assistance’ in areas where the State does not operate. In this way, the Combos, when the holidays approach, such as Christmas or Children’s Day, instead of asking for money, collect toys for children in the popular neighborhoods. At the same time, if their demands are accepted, they offer ‘security’ and respond to any person who has ‘problems’ with the business or local owner, who has paid for ‘the vaccine.’ ‘If you meet the quota, nothing happens to you,’ said the delivery man, though he stressed that if they fail to pay, the situation becomes delicate” (Capristi 2018, 3).

Attempting to integrate the public and private in managerial terms —that is, to manage the entire living space— is to invest in the satisfaction of needs and emotions. A critical reading might understand such management as a heterotopic utopia, that is, a particular form of subjectivity control that unfolds as a mechanism that normalizes the people of Medellin, that marginalizes the abnormality, that accepts living in this city taking a stance, which is produced in the neoliberal way of life and that only allows us to understand the

12

13

For Foucault, it is the domain between the operations that can be done and those that cannot be done, that is, between the things to be done and the means that must be used to do them on the one hand and the things that must not be done on the other (Foucault 2008, 27–28). Following the Thatcherian slogan, you shoul give rise to a set of beliefs and practices, managerialism, which is presented as a universal remedy for all the ills of society, reduced to organizational questions all that can be solved by techniques that seek systematically efficiency (Laval and Dardot 2017, 292).

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threats of not constituting our own space which is geared towards the neoliberal well-being that determines us. So then, what kind of freedom do we have in the city of Medellin? If the individual is totally subject to the series of practices and discourses that constitute freedom, that subjection cannot be made except on condition that the subject does work on himself, playing on his sense of freedom.14 In this sense, it is appropriate to keep in mind that the superficial effect of the contradiction between utopia and heterotopia is more of an unfathomable overlapping since our subjectivity has been directed to shape a consent that defends the realization/attainment of ideal places, except for a profound touch of our own deviation. The problem is that if this overlapping does not come to be, the ability of public insertion that is so important to achieve the citizen status is lost. In the sense of a city market “freed” to the materialization of the overlap between utopia and heterotopia, where all aspects of life are consuming, concentrating and purchasing the tenet prototypes, common sense is captured until a need is created to which citizens believe they need to cater in order to access well-being. But why do we consent to living according to the standards of success and wealth proposed for our city? It is in this context, however, in which the heterotopic utopia has gradually shifted towards a kind of subjectivism that, in a way, encompasses the central purpose, the missionary character of consent, that is towards a kind of neoliberal emancipation of subjectivity. Consenting to this displacement is the result of the “autonomous” organization of rules, values and will; this organization is the regulation of subjectivity through the creation of a moral hierarchy in regard to the duty to be typical of the neoliberal ontological experience. However, the creation of a moral hierarchy, seen across every step of the construction of experiential systems and theories for each individual, shows the interests that are related to the exercise of verification of everyday life. The production of spaces for these forms of capitalist beliefs become emotions that allow a “spontaneous” activity and “free” reflection, where the heterotopic utopia is sufficiently strengthened to reconstruct the space, to become part of it, to join it, to know that the function is to adapt to “reality” and interpret experiences, adapting to the environment,15 in this case neoliberal. The existence of these factors, which encourage and enhance individual differences, facilitates the unleashing of cultural learning behaviors and emotional functionality. And so, this functionality holds among its main effects the regulation of behavior, a taxing effect of learning and experience, which on an individual level enhances the representative dimension of the “successful” and prototypical state in spatial and psychological terms. In this sense, the real intention of implementing the commitments assumed with our consent of the capitalist way of life allows us to place in this logic a materializing trust, which we associate with the intention of (acquiring) citizenship, not only to produce a cognitive transition but also a political one (Foucault 2008, 26). 15 For Foucault, the exercise of government by the State over its territory implies an administration of “things”, this regulates the population and resources that it requires simultaneously for the constitution and management of a territory. These living conditions in the territory, places them as government techniques. Therefore, to originate the basic interests to regulate the relations between population, resources and spaces, shapes the environment (Foucault, 2009, 40). 14

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One of the consequences of this feature is that the individual in a below-threshold level of activation will be seen as a waste, while the individual who is in a high state will be seen as having an exemplary way of “life.” This factor, which determines the activation of the neoliberal way of life, allows the individuals of this city to permanently remain stimulated aiming at their optimization as an “extraordinary product.”

LIFE EXPERIENCES The dynamics of the heterotopic utopia are based, to a large extent, on a set of actions that support a set of spaces that dramatize the distinction between a good life and a bad life for all citizens. The way of life in our city has the clear objective of deepening the integration and interdependence of the accumulation of physical and regulatory competences in space; that is, the lifestyle of the citizens of Medellin is based on satisfied interest, without prioritizing any prior collective orders such as economic, social, etc., going as far as to extend an invitation to exclude any factor —human or not— that was disturbing the “order” according to that interest. Thus, baring a willingness to assume responsibilities in such a spatial scenario to a disturbing degree, everything that may fail in the exercise of normalizing at the speed that neoliberalism sets is to disappear and consolidate an identity and behavior “suitable” for public order, logically oriented by the binding interests of a society of “entrepreneurs of themselves” (Medellín 2017). The heterotopic utopia helps project the image of a society that seeks to strengthen business machines. It may be that the most important dimension of this idea is that of a citizen who could redefine his link between citizenship and institutions according to the tangible levels of the insertion he obtained as a product in the city market. In this sense, of course, there is room for maneuvering that allows one to hone the orientation of one’s emotionality and change one’s ethics and morals, radically redefining one’s commitments in terms of ensuring the rules of the economic game, always in the sense of the pragmatism that characterizes the formulations of moral business subjects. In part, this happens because the characteristic capital investments in meetings and commitments are easy to change in the short term because it is implicitly recognized that the integration structures with the cultivation of one’s own interests are convenient for the advancement of the type of social insertion that is trying to be consolidated. This sense presents results that serve, simultaneously, to endorse positions of vulnerability with an emotional signal that consists of a consolidated and mature individual who, neoliberally speaking, knowing their limitations, tries to initiate processes to reduce the failures that limit the promotion of their economic and social “development,” imagining a heterotopic utopia developed from more emotional than rational scenarios as the strategy to make profound changes in individual and collective contexts.

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Producing a “viable and dynamic citizen,” from the point of view of their insertion in the neoliberal economy, became a serious problem since at the time it contributed to the increase in the perception of risk associated with life16 and fueled despair, given the inability to materialize these postulates of “success,” thus forcing citizens to raise the internal strategies. In this sense, we can conclude that not only was the production of a management of a heterotopic utopia achieved in the city but also the shapes of the moral subject and the emotions of risk, which became the alternative courses of action against the profound vulnerability of the free citizen, was the area where space is transformed, to be breached by social processes and then to make sense of the “development,” of course, which became an important bastion of “positive” ways of life.

THE MEANING OF THE PROCLAMATION: HETEROTOPIC UTOPIA! This “new morality” contains crucial elements of social perception and of the matter of civil rights and civil liberties. It reminds us that despite the democratic nature of its action, it is connected to enrichment and the “good things” that happen in and with the market. Much of this depends on the peculiarity that it is a kind of ideological project that attempts to govern intimate life, both economically and politically, through the proposal of a “superior” subjectivity. To consider the impact of the fact that intimate life is governed by means of a heterotopic utopia is to consider that the governmental and “developmental” practices even escalate the sense in which we are going to produce our identity and our city. Thus, we are imbued with new utopian flows that bring us to a point where our capacity must double to make possible in us that great wave of prototypical automatism, producing and manufacturing identifications with the dizzying pace of the market. Living in this manner leads us to a situation where our subjectivity, our “freedom,” is a marker of the levels of “positive government.” The great thing is “that we can do what we want” even if it is limited by the calculation of the investment that is to be made with the available resources. But, what kind of lifestyle should be calculated? One must have some particular notion of how this utopia should be; an eternal quest to be self-managed, to pursue novelty and to have free time and space and thus forget the type of life where there is no free time, no free space, where monetary calculations do not favor us and where there is no more talk than that of the extraction of income within human society.

16

Suicidal behavior in Medellín has been steadily increasing in recent years. According to calculations made by Medellin’s Ministry of Health, between 2014 and 2019 the suicide death rate increased from 4.7 to 6.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. As these figures show, the main trigger for the attempts was economic hardship (Betancur 2020).

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By failing to materialize this utopia, the surge of fascist regimes is reinforced, putting blame on otherness; and of course capital fosters and marks a certain urgency to build barriers of absolute anti-solidarity against the “incapable” and the “insufficient,” those who fragment their lives in infinite moments of failure. This is very interesting since it means that assuming the commitments brought by the way of life to be a neoliberal heterotopia is to influence the creation of notions regarding individual experience, thus experiencing a projective animosity for groups that are incapable of “climbing up.”17 Therefore, the reasonable ways of continuing and modifying our own lives, in addition to conveying methods of identification that constitute us as free citizens, are those where we situate ourselves as inhabitants of a utopically “successful” narrative in a political consciousness that does not confront us with contradictions and creates values that redefine our conduct, our heterotopia, constituting us to live with a great ideological force, which claims that we are personally responsible for the world, for our ethics and for our monetary “wealth.” It has been communicated to us; we acknowledge it and understand it. The heterotopic utopia is, then, a “universal” way of life, and in turn it is an adventure of its peculiarities and of its uses, meaning that it is the idea that political action moves within universalism in the way of life belonging to neoliberalism, a way of life that tells us how we have to live, that shows us an ethic, that shows us a normative path, that says we must experiment and see how to best position ourselves to attain common values that are constituent for the city. It is validation for everyone; it is each individual’s nature; it is our dimension. The “freedom” in this context is certainly determined and cannot escape being as “the economy” dictates in its specific determination, meaning that we cannot claim that by an act of reflection upon ourselves we rise above our life, this macro-economically conditioned life. The heterotopia depends on the political and economic conditions in which it exists; however, it is very important to try to understand that the horizon of determination that we are in, and in which we therefore exercise our “freedom” that which is within our reach, under the conditions that are “economically” arranged, constitutes a particular, almost unique margin of this neoliberal utopia; in either case it cannot escape the determinations that are given to it and yet they articulate a discourse, that of “freedom.” In this way of life in which the subject has found himself in an extremely fragile situation, in which his determinations are mere merchandise transferred from one place to another, it is no coincidence that in order to live everyone must be taught how to live at the expense of their own lives —with my life I show you the other “successful” or failed life. These new local realities are a set of “enterprises” that enhance the “development” matrix, trying to maintain that continuity of the “business regime” at all costs; nuclei, such as “resilience” or democratic values, are precisely part of these new matrices that have strategically recovered a good part of the emotions that allow, in theory, ideologically and 17

Having a precarious economic condition and living in certain neighborhoods are reasons for discriminatory treatment in the capital of Antioquia (Loaiza 2015).

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also in political practice, the ensuring of a less conflictive continuity of neoliberalism. This means a psychic deepening of the discourses on “entrepreneurship,”18 the abandonment of the figure of a “wise” man who provides business solutions which are established as the reactivation of new ways of emotional and cultural management of the subjective.

CONCLUSION: THE DIRECTION OF AUTONOMY The administration of emotional and cultural forms has known —better than anything— how to establish the new parameters that have become the oxygen of the neoliberal fable, a medley of hopes for how to be “happy.” As we have been saying, we are beginning to see this in line with the basic idea of these “wonderful” tales that place neoliberalism as the fundamental value of the law of the entrepreneur, as the faculty for making “freedom” the meaning that unites each of the individuals with the idea of ontological reprogramming. Additionally, to capture emotions and culture, to place them at the center of knowledge and practices, to completely empty them of critical significance and return them so that we accept them and reprogram a vision of reality is to make a uniform vision for all our actions, for all our manners of acting and thinking, for all our “singularities,” and to be left with a single horizon of meaning in which we believe that we resist reality as if we were in a battle, fighting to win and succeed. The heterotopic utopia has been the result in the city of Medellín of the application of all those elements or ideas that arise and include us in the fantasy of investing in ourselves. Thus, it becomes the place no place, credited for the transformation and management of subjectivity, a key element to understand how neoliberalism structured this emotional common sense, that path to maintain the action and commitment of the subjects and to, above all, tolerate what was previously intolerable, the premise that prays the system is perfect, that there are no problems of any kind. The heterotopic utopia, by way of moral advice, has managed all kinds of inconveniences, frustrations, etc. in the sense that if the system is perfect, you should therefore not try to change the system; what you have to do is actuate your power before the system in terms of imagination. That is to say, in a moment of crisis, what the subjects, as political entities, need is to creatively make small motivational outbursts to mobilize and produce certain types of discursive and practical strategies that give to this all a wonderful “means to change the soul.” Understanding thus the heterotopic utopia as an element of management, as a cultural element that allows us to transform our ways of feeling, to transform our ways of thinking, 18

It is essential to stop to point out certain clarifications regarding this logic of contemporary management since this logic generally underlies a very problematic conception of power, which, in our opinion, prevents the rigorous examination of domination (Londoño and Bermúdez 2013, 493).

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to manage our own limits and to transform ideas into beliefs is to manage neoliberal rationality, reinventing the world and the “natural” tendency that fosters a reprogramming in which the basis is the investment in us, taking responsibility for our social evolution, “everything depends on me and my own emotion.” As one of the fetishes of this affective neoliberalism, the heterotopic utopia must be understood as a kind of competitive tool, completely individualistic, consisting not in canceling out the antisocial effects of competitiveness but rather the anti-competitive effects of the subjects. This way of being is reversed, reinvented, rebuilt, capturing adaptations “without us realizing it.”

REFERENCES Betancur, Jacobo. 2020. “Las razones detrás del aumento de suicidios en Medellín.” [“Reasons behind the increase of suicides in Medellín”]. El Tiempo, January 12, 2020. https://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/medellin/razones-detras-del-aumento-desuicidios-en-medellin-451046. Balibar, Étienne. 2013. Ciudadanía. [Citizenship]. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora. Capristi, Luciano. 2018. “Combos: Las bandas ilegales de Colombia.” [“Combos: Illegal gangs of Colombia”]. Nodal, August 29, 2018. https://www.nodal.am/ 2018/08/ combos-las-bandas-ilegales-de-colombia-por-luciano-capristi/. Castro, Edgardo. 2011. Diccionario Foucault. [Foucault Dictionary]. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Castro-Gómez, Santiago. 2015. Historia de la gubernamentalidad I. [History of governmentality I]. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores. Deleuze, Gilles. 2001. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum Print. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2009. Security, Territory, Population. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2010. El cuerpo utópico. Las heterotopías. [Utopic body. Heterotopias]. Buenos Aires: Nueva visión. Guattari, Félix. 1996. Caosmosis. [Caosmosis]. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Manantial. Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press Inc. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities. New York: Verso. Hayek, Friedrich. 2011. The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Informe Inmobiliario. 2017. “Medellín, la ciudad más feliz de Colombia.” [“Medellín, the happiest city of Colombia”]. Informe Inmobiliario, July 22, 2017 https://informein mobiliario.com/medellin,-la-ciudad-mas-feliz-de-colombia/925/n/.

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Loaiza, Jose. 2015. “Discriminación, un asunto común en Medellín que nadie denuncia.” [“Discrimination, a common thing in Medellín that nobody reports”]. El Colombiano, October 25, 2015. https://www.elcolombiano.com/antioquia/las-caras-de-ladiscriminacion-en-medellin-YK2972111. Laval, Christian, and Pierre Dardot. 2017. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. New York: Verso. Londoño Vásquez, David Alberto and Hector Leonel Bermúdez-Restrepo. 2013. “Tres enfoques sobre los estudios críticos del discurso en el examen de la dominación.” [“Three points of view of the critical studies of the discurse about domination”]. Palabra Clave 16, no. 2: 491–519. Medellín, Paola. 2017. “Centros comerciales ¿espacios públicos o privados?” [“Malls, public or private spaces?”]. Instituto de Estudios Urbanos - IEU, August 16, 2017. http://ieu.unal.edu.co/medios/noticias-del-ieu/item/centros-comerciales-espaciospublicos-o-privados. Nussbaum, Martha. 2013. Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stavrides, Stavros. 2010. Towards the City of Thresholds. Mountain View: Creative Commons.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 21

HOME, SOIL, HOMELAND: A JERUSALEM STORY Livia Judith Alexander*

Department of Art and Design, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, US

ABSTRACT This chapter focuses on the house and dwelling as a physical space and a metaphorical location for artistic practice. It addresses the house as a physical space —and by extension that of home, as a concept— as the main site of resistance to neo-liberal urban policies of extractive capitalism, consumerism, and their associated environmental impact. At the same time, however, the prominence of home as a discursive public space and of an ethnonational Jewish homeland is perceived as distinct from, and superior to, the fight against climate change. Rather than seen as inextricably linked, the ethno-national narrative remains unchallenged in Israel public discourse on climate change. The article is set in the context of creative placemaking policies, artists self-organizing in Jerusalem, and the impact of increasing neoliberal privatization of public spaces. Negotiating the tyranny of the Utopian Jewish homeland against the Foucauldian model of heterotopia as possible sites of resistance, the home and art installation merge building and environment to create a liminal space that reimagines, redrafts and redefines modes of governmentality and ecology.

Keywords: art installation, dwelling, environment, home, Jerusalem, soil

* Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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INTRODUCTION In October 2018 over a seven-day period, Israeli artist Tami Zori, staked a temporary home on the rooftop of an abandoned shopping mall in central Jerusalem as part of a citywide annual arts festival, called Menofim. Titled Zero. Home. Earth the social practice project was comprised of three distinct habitation structures —a sleeping unit, a hospitality unit, and a utility unit installed against the cement surfaces of a failed 1970s commercial development enterprise, the Brutalist-styled Klal Building. Committed to communal sustainable life, Zori created a model of a home that translocates soil into the urban fabric as the battleground against capitalism’s part in ecological degradation and climate change. Promoting a zero-impact lifestyle of minimal and wholesome consumption, Zero. Home. Earth put forward what Zori referred to as “dream outlines for the utopian city.” Zori’s futuristic soil pods installed in the Klal building adjacent to the city’s major outdoor food market —a market battling major forces of gentrification— serves as a focal point of multiple competing narratives about home, community, class, nation, and global planetary well-being. In this chapter, I focus on the house and dwelling as a physical space and a metaphorical location for artistic practice, and not on housing as a commodity, or as a container for the realization of a neo-liberal (and usually heteronormative) self. Rather, I seek to address the house as a physical space —and by extension that of home, as a concept— as the main site of resistance to neo-liberal urban policies of extractive capitalism, consumerism, and their associated environmental impact. At the same time, however, the prominence of home as a discursive public space and of an ethno-national Jewish homeland is perceived as distinct from, and superior to, the fight against climate change. Rather than seen as inextricably linked, the ethno-national narrative remains unchallenged in Israel public discourse on climate change.

Figure 1. Tami Zori, Zero. Home. Earth. Image Courtesy of Tami Zori.

I set my discussion in the context of creative placemaking policies, artists selforganizing in Jerusalem, and the impact of increasing neoliberal privatization of public spaces. Negotiating the tyranny of the Utopian Jewish homeland against the Foucauldian

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model of heterotopia as possible sites of resistance, the home and art installation merge building and environment to create a liminal space that reimagines, redrafts and redefines modes of governmentality and ecology.

CREATIVE PLACEMAKING IN JERUSALEM Over the last two decades, West Jerusalem city center has witnessed its fare-share of neo-liberal urban policies. Both the city-initiated and funded Manofim Festival and the grassroots Muslala organization that hosted Zori’s project are beneficiaries, though to a differing degree, of an initiative taken by then city mayor, Nir Barkat, a former tech entrepreneur, to revitalize and secularize the city in an effort to turn Jerusalem into a bustling center of business, culture and tourism. Spatially and politically, one cannot speak of Jerusalem’s urban policies separately from the broader political context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Homes and dwellings have always been a focal point in the Israeli-Palestinian battleground. (Weizman 2007; Segal et al. 2003; Pappe 2006; Krystall 1999, 2002). In Zionist history, it took the form of settlement strategies, beginning with what was known as the Tower and Stockade strategy aimed at by-passing British mandate restrictions on the erection of new Jewish settlements. Between 1937 and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionist settlers would set out with prefabricated dwellings and fortifications to rapidly erect the skeletal outlines of a settlement: a protective surrounding wall and a watchtower. Using an old Ottoman rule which prohibited the demolition of roved structures on landowners’ property, they thus sought to establish “facts on the ground” towards outlining the borders of the future Jewish national home.1 Later on, following the 1967 War, housing played a key strategic role in the establishment of Jewish settlements throughout the Occupied Territories and housing development projects in and around Jerusalem in an effort to Judaize key strategic territories surrounding the city (Abu Hatoum 2018; Misselwitz and Rieniets 2006; Cheshin et. al. 1999; Felner 1995). The city further established a national park around the Old city walls, thus limiting development in all the Palestinian neighborhoods adjacent to it.2 In contrast, during the same years, Israel and the City of Jerusalem enforced severe restrictions on Palestinian housing and development, as well as demolishing Palestinian homes as measures of military and political retaliation. In Jerusalem, the municipality divests financial resources to stifle any Palestinian urban development in East Jerusalem

To learn more about Tower and Stockage and access images see http://www.zionistarchives.org.il/ en/Pages/TowerStockade.aspx. 2 “Greening” arguments were used to justify the creation of the park. Emek Shaveh, an Israeli NGO working to protect ancient sites that belong to members of all communities, faiths and peoples, offers extensive ongoing reporting on this issue. See https://alt-arch.org/en/. 1

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in a tacit and not so tacit effort to force Palestinians to forgo their residence in the city (Hasson 2017; Nitzan-Shiftan 2017; Felner 1995).

Figure 2. The Hinnom Valley/Wadi a-Rababa, Jerusalem Walls National Park. Image Courtesy of Emek Shaveh.

During the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, also known as the Second Intifada (2000-2005), Jerusalem city center was a focal point of suicide bombings, followed by a spate of city-wide knife attacks and counterattacks, known as the “knife Intifada” in 2014-15. The heightened tension in the city kept tourists away and led a growing number of secular Israeli-Jews to leave the city. The increasing hawkish radicalization of the city’s Jewish population, the growing numbers of orthodox Jews and of Palestinians in the city, further pushed secular middle class and young people to leave Jerusalem. With an overall poorer population, the city’s Jewish orthodox and Palestinian communities contributed to the municipality’s declining tax revenues. Jerusalem quickly slipped into the poorest of Israel’s major cities (Keidar 2018; Hasson 2017). The search for transformation by then Jerusalem’s city mayor Barkat, came on the heels of political and economic challenges that left Jerusalem in a precarious demographic and financial position. To combat these challenges, Barkat hired the services of no less than the controversial guru of the “Creative City” model, the Toronto University scholar Richard Florida. When first published in 2002, Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class, set in motion an urban frenzy for “creative placemaking.” The term, which came into use by architects and urban planners in the 1970s, signals an approach that identifies creative talent —and in our case art and artists— alongside technology and tolerance, as

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key instruments in urban development, and as engines for attracting financial elites back to the inner cities, and thus enhancing economic growth. Cities began to actively pursue artists to enliven their communities. The rapidly expanding areas of creative placemaking are at the center of many urban planning strategic policies, Detroit in the U.S, Margate in the UK, or Dubai in the UAE are a few cases in point. At face value, urban placemaking aspires to generate “vibrancy” in communities through art initiatives, yet a key question remains: who are these programs really benefiting? In his 2005 critique of Florida’s work, Jaime Peck pointed out that urban placemaking comes with political ambiguity which “mixes cosmopolitan elitism and pop universalism, hedonism and responsibility, cultural radicalism and economic conservatism. …” But more importantly, Peck exposes the trickle-down gambit of such initiatives, subordinating the less privileged to those driving economic development (Peck 2005, 741). According to this model, cities must shift their attention to attracting citizen entrepreneurs who would then generate wealth and capital rather than on providing public services. Financial Times editor Rana Foroohar further posits placemaking as a lubricant in service of development. The “financialization of America,” whereby American businesses favor “balancing-sheet engineering over the actual kind and the pursuit of short-term corporate profits over job creation” —which often goes hand in hand with urban placemaking strategies— contributes to the widening gap between rich and poor while threatening planetary health (Foroohar 2016). Seeking to develop new strategies to make the city attractive to the “right” demographic of young secular, educated and affluent Jewish professionals —to make Jerusalem “cooler” as Noga Keidar puts it— meant a shift in urban policies that would attract Zionist footloose young population, while bypassing the challenges of divisiveness cutting through the fabric of the city and its current demographics of aging Zionists, Orthodox Jews, and Palestinians (Keidar 2018). Among the five issue areas oulined by Florida in the report he submitted to Mayor Barket in 2015, his team identifies a robust art and culture industry as a key component in the city’s creative economy.3 The art sector in Jerusalem has traditionally been characterized by its extremities: major established art and cultural institutions such as the Israel Museum, Yad Veshem, the Jerusalem Cinematheque and the Khan Theater on the one hand, and small experimental independent and somewhat marginal art organizations and collectives. Aided by Barkat’s new policies and investments in the arts sector in the city, Jerusalem had come to boast, not without its own challenges, a plethora of new festivals, biennales and events and is now often characterized as a center for more experimental art, while Tel Aviv is viewed as the country’s art market hub.

3

The four other issue areas identified in the report are the university system, the startup and tech economy, economic and social inclusion and a unique civil society (Creative Class Group 2015).

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THE TERRACE AS A NEW FRONTIER The Muslala Art Organization —host to Zori’s Zero. Home. Earth project— was one of the beneficiaries of the Barkat era’s adoption of the creative city model and can be seen as an ongoing living laboratory in which urban policies of placemaking and artist-activism cross paths. In 2014, Muslala relocated to the terrace of the derelict Klal Bulding in Central Jerusalem from its original home in the Musrara neighborhood along the former 1948 border dividing Jerusalem between Israel and Jordan.4 Designed by renowned Israeli architect Dan Eitan as an office building and a shopping mall, the Klal building was part of former legendary Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kolek’s vision to turn the city’s struggling commercial center into a vital hub. When inaugurated to much fanfare in 1978, the Klal Center was the largest of its kind in Israel, including 3 stores of commerce, 4 major bank branches, 14 floors of office space, a cinema, and an underground parking lot. Designed as a confusing labyrinth of split floors spiraling around a central open arena, and a majority of public usage over 280 individually owned commercial spaces, the building was quickly regarded as a major flop and fell into disuse (Horowitz 2018). The economic potential of the creative class to redress the building’s ongoing financial woes was recognized by the Klal building management when they provided the Muslala group the huge roof terrace space for free. Muslala members worked on renovating the rooftop, but also on improving the public areas below to facilitate a welcoming environment for visitors as they ascended the spiral structure up to The Terrace, as it is now known. The space quickly became a thriving center for art exhibitions, classes and workshops, as well as alternative permaculture, with additional arts and civic organizations slowly moving into the building, including a Hebrew-Arabic language school and an organization supporting emerging artists and arts non-profit organizations. For Muslala’s artistic director Matan Israeli, who views the city as a large canvas of artistic practices, the work carried out by the organization at the Klal building is gradually transforming the capitalist model at the core of the center to one that is alternatively drawing on the principles of sustainability, community and culture. For Israeli, the pressing challenges of sustainability taken on by Muslala surpass any divisions in the city, relevant to all its residents, be they Zionist, Ultra-Orthodox or Palestinian (Israeli 2020). Muslala’s collaboration with artist Tami Zori continues to be part of the organization’s vision seeing the city’s under-utilized rooftops as the new urban frontier in the fight against climate change. Carving out green spaces for shared ecological and communal experiences, the terrace is a site where urban living and nature connect. Similar to developments in other parts of the world, the shift to suburban living in a single house with a garden and two cars, has led to major problems of depletion of rural lands converted into new suburban 4

To learn more about the circumstances that led to this relocation out of the Musrara neighborhood, see AharonGuttman 2018.

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dwellings and increasing traffic congestion throughout the country (Horowitz 2018; Berger 2019). For today’s living, Muslala argues, the city offers a more sustainable form of living, and greenification of the city’s rooftops allows to maintain a vital connection with nature and the environment. But more than that, Muslala seeks to activate creative practice into a creative enterprise that supports and draws from Jerusalem’s economic echo-system, relying heavily on tourism. It developed a blue print, titled “Roof-Eden” (Gag-Eden), drawing on a play of words in Hebrew that references the biblical Garden of Eden. According to this plan, Muslala will develop a new model of inexpensive domestic tourism operating from a network of local green rooftops. They state: “Throughout the Middle East, rooftops have traditionally fulfilled a variety of functions: drying laundry, growing vegetables and pigeons, drying fruit, sleep on summer nights, hospitality under a vine tree, and gazing into the distance. The rooftop, as an open space under the sky is in fact, the soil of the modern crowded city. Till today, in Israel in general and in Jerusalem more specifically, there is barely any use of rooftops, nor is there any government or municipal support for this sector (of rooftop development) (emphasis in the original).”5 (Muslala Workplan 2020)

What Muslala puts forward in their Roof-Eden vision is a synthesis of alternative selfsustaining economic models and ecological mindfulness while drawing on yet modifying more traditional existing models that link art practice and tourism as developed by the creative city model. They indicate the emergence of a broader trend, characterized by architect and educator Gregory Marinic as “performative pastoralism,” blending buildings with a consideration of landscape and the environment and indicating a paradigmatic shift to naturalism. Subsequently, for Marinic, architecture, as a design discipline, must “not simply form, but perform various functions beyond those conventionally associated with buildings,” guided and informed by ecological and cultural contexts as the primary shapers of new kind of practical, ersatz, utopianism. This approximation of utopia and its idealism are thus translated into and embedded in everyday life as a form of “practical” heterotopianism (Marinic 2013). The first steps in developing this vision was a Rooftop Festival in 2017 when artist and designer Nati Shamia Ofer created a special sleeping space for rooftops, using the residency budget to build a proto-type. A year later, when there was a need for someone to test out the sleeping unit, the idea for Zori’s project Zero. Home. Earth during the Manofim Festival emerged. Prior to the Manofim festival event in Jerusalem in 2018, Zori participated earlier that year in another project in Muslala, during a short residency titled “ArtBNB”-“Living Room.” For that, Zori developed futuristic-looking living pods 5

While Muslala’s plan is not making a distinction between Jewish West and Palestinian East Jerusalem, rooftops in the Palestinian side are often covered with dozens of water tanks since water service is so often cut off.

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smattered with Jerusalem soil. Zori’s aim was to give visitors the opportunity to touch and be even momentarily immersed in soil in the midst of the Klal Center’s concert jungle, perhaps as a strategy that draws on Zionism’s visual mindscape steeped in tropes of land and soil —the agricultural cycle of biblical times, the land of milk and honey— coupled with European colonial ideas of making the desert bloom, seeking to make it’s landscape visually more European-like. For Matan Israeli, however, the use of pioneering imagery is an important translation strategy in the Israeli context. Rather than reflecting the problematic Zionist pioneering ideals of yore, it signifies the emergence of a contemporary vocabulary of ecological pioneering needed today. Rather than advocating expansion and the building of new settlements, it calls to withdraw into the cities (Israeli 2020).

THE HOME AS PROTOTYPE, THE BODY AS GROUND ZERO Alongside a newfound support for the arts, the neo-liberal ideology underlying Barkat’s wholesale adoption of the Floridian creative placemaking model entailed, like in many other cities adopting this approach, an increasing encroachment of public space, whereby urban public spaces were sold off to private real estate developers and turned into lucrative retail and exclusive gated condominium projects in central Jerusalem benefiting the wealthy few.6 The house, as a spatial construct —and dwelling, as the act of living and occupying a space— can be seen then as the site where competing narratives about belonging, ownership, class and ethno-national identity converge. In his discussion of West Jerusalem’s gated communities, Haim Yacobi argues that the privatization of space is “a combination both of local ethno-security discourses and of global neoliberal urban policies which do not contradict each other, but rather are complementary. The state’s monopoly over processes of planning and control of land enables it to subordinate the free market to its ethno-national priorities and provide preferential treatment to Jewish over Palestinian interests.” (2012, 2707)

In this context, attention to the climate crisis in Israeli public discourse is considered a kind of privilege, something one might attend to once the conflict is over, with priority given to perceptions of security… a discourse that relies yet again on a “state of emergency” paradigm that pits Israelis as victims of political reality, not as active agents in it. Against this dominant ethno-security narrative and neo-liberal climate, and in contrast to other models deployed by Extinction Rebellion and other climate activists who focus on 6

Many of these wealthy gated communities are mostly owned by rich American and French Jews, who only visit for a month a year. Subsequently, there is not much “dwelling” in those communities.

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public space, the house and domestic space in artist Tami Zori’s work is the home-front where the battle against climate change begins. It is a continuous thread and loci of practice in Zori’s work “to bring soil back into the city.” In 2012, Zori was invited to develop her first installation of a sustainable home as part of the Fresh Paint festival in the coastal city of Tel Aviv. Working in collaboration with the architect Yossi Kory, the house’s first iteration emphasized its conceptual utopian underpinning, turning on its head a basic child’s drawing, making a square house with it pyramid-shaped roof touching the ground. Built using upcycled materials, an energy efficient design that facilitated air circulation and regulated in-door temperature, including an indoor privy, alongside the growing of food in outdoor plant-beds, the house provided a conceptual proto-type for zero impact urban living. In 2006, Zori began her work by establishing City Tree, an incubator for climate resilience and urban ecological living. A commune based out of a flat in central Tel Aviv where together with a changing roster of members and residents, she carries out and develops models for sustainable urban living. The group’s alternative lifestyle to the neoliberal capitalist system includes the reduction of consumption to the bare minimum, an emphasis on upcycling and recycling, and a commitment to staying off the grid as much as possible. Committed to permaculture, as a practice that does not drain the soil, City Tree members are committed to growing their own food, or sourcing it directly from farmers, while rejecting the commercial food system.

Figure 3. Front and back view, Tami Zori, Zero. Home. Earth. Fresh Paint Festival, Haifa, Israel, May 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

The kitchen is filled with jars where lentils, beans and various grains are sprouted. The soup dish at the side of the sink is made from lemon peels. In the center of the apartment sits a bin where worms compost, while in the living room there is furniture crafted from tree branches.7

7

Hila Weissberg, Sprouts and the City: Living Sustainably, Shunning Capitalism in Urban Tel Aviv, Haaretz, April 2, 2013. https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-sprouts-and-the-city-the-organic-commune-1.5236465, Accessed May 13, 2020.

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Within the home, Zori activates her own body as tool and as a site of resistance to dominant institutional structures of production and capitalism. For her temporary home on the Klal building terrace the Manofim festival in Jerusalem, she collaborated with soil artist Dafna Yalon, of Adamahi organization, who developed large egg-shaped pods made of soil and organic matter where Zori could safely discard her body waste during her sevenday performance. The pods, left to dry out and then deposited in the large vegetable beds on the Klal Terrace, would provide natural organic matter to nourish the soil and support Muslala organization’s permaculture initiative. Through the lifestyle choices Zori makes, from what she puts in her mouth to nourish her body, to how she disposes of her excrements to then compost the soil that will then yield her food, Zori’s body becomes a site where two Foucauldian principles of heterotopia and biopolitics bump against each other, facilitating another way to think about the relationship between bodies, power, consumption (of food and otherwise) and climate change. Practices such as Zori’s, re-draft and blur the threshold outlined by Foucault between bodies and power, bodies and governmentality. It is around the time that Foucault developed his theories on biopolitics and governmentality in the 1960s and 1970s that France was undergoing major infrastructural changes in centralizing and corporatizing of its food production systems (Tenhoor 2015). If biopolitics is to be understood as a political rationality which takes the administration of life and populations as its subject, the disciplining and management of bodies through ideas/ideology, the escalating ecological crisis and widening economic instability brought about by these centralized systems demand the urgent replacement of such hierarchical models of order and control outlined by Foucault. As a site of resistance to neo-liberal capitalist structures, one may postulate the transition of the domestic into a heterotopic space, challenging a dominant order that is increasingly privatizing valuable public spaces and assets and prioritize the country’s institutional hegemonic ethno-political security discourse. Yet precisely its location within the private space, questions the very structures of power and mapping of space, real or imaginary, as laid out by Foucault some fifty years earlier. The space of the home is neither completely emancipatory nor antagonistic to institutional hegemony; neither entirely complacent, nor completely dissociated from the mechanizations of power or capital. The Panoptican of yore is replaced by the blurry and murky lines both separating and fusing the private and public spaces. Yet what remains firm is an integral relation between power and resistance posited by Foucault. If for Foucault, infrastructure and architecture set up certain relationships that control and modulate space in certain ways, the epistemic or real function of such a site will ultimately depend on this entanglement of power and resistance. If we are to consider the process of claiming the home or the itinerant art installation of a home, as a front, rather than a container for the actualization of the neoliberal subject, we must then ask under what conditions is the threshold separating private

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and public erased, how these spaces are being used and in what ways are they claimed and by whom? Within this context, Zori’s practice can be viewed as part of a broader tradition among artist-activists who are constantly re-imagining communities and public spaces, forging a vision for a future that could be otherwise. However, as one such leading artist, Pablo Helguara, argues in an essay for the edited volume Public Servants: Art and Crisis of the Common Good, artists seldom have the resources to create societal change on a grand scale, rather they “can produce pilots, models, or smaller gestures that, if expanded, could truly effect change” (Halguera 2016, 261). In creating itinerant domestic spaces of resistance to the developer-financiers model of creative placemaking, Zori is suggesting urgently necessary grand scale alternative pathways to the devastating ecological impacts of extractive capitalism.

CLIMATE FIGHT AS A ZIONIST UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA Zori’s home installations and Muslala’s itinerant homes for ecological urban rooftop tourism must be examined, however, not only as model homes for potential solutions for addressing climate change, but also against the epistemological Zionist imagery and its political ideology. As models, they invoke the presence, or alternatively, absence of its intended dwellers, while blurring the threshold between public and private space, the built environment and nature. Assuming a universality of home dwelling in light of the pressing demands of climate change, the work indeed emphasizes the global universal nature of the crisis, placing the needs of the individual and collective body in dialogue with the natural and built environment. Zori draws a direct parallel between Zionism’s forefather Theodore Benjamin Herzl and his fervent commitment to his utopic vision for a Jewish homeland, outlined in his novel Altneuland, and the need to re-ignite this utopian fervor of yore to address the pressing current threat of climate change. She draws on Herzel’s famous quote: “Dreaming and doing are not so different as people tend to think. All that people carry out originates in a dream. If you will it, it is no dream; and if you do not will it, a dream it is and a dream it will stay.”8

Utopias are generally perceived aspirational, signaling ideals of model societies and model spaces, or as Foucault refers to them as “non-places.” For Herzl, the occupants of this utopic space were Jews, and Jews alone. It was an imaginary space in that Herzl himself was not necessarily as occupied with where in fact it might be and it simply mapped out as 8

The quote is drawn from an epigraph appended to the frontispiece of Altneuland, originally published in 1902.

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a vision, a dream and a future roadmap. Where in fact it might be or who already resided in any of the spaces that came under consideration —in Uganda, Argentina or Palestine— was secondary or deemed irrelevant (Pappe 2006).

Figure 4. Left: image of CityTree apartment as promoted on AirBnB hosting site. Right: Theodore Herzl. Source: Central Zionist Archive/Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Like other utopian visions, Herzl’s dream, and its subsequent Zionist translation into practice, is aspirational for some, while dystopic and despotic for its colonized Palestinian Others. In addition to displacement, exile and ongoing occupation, the Zionist application of the Herzlian utopia also brought in its wake the ecological devastation to the built environment: the uprooting of trees, drainage of underground water reservoirs, the challenges of waste management in the face of blockades and ecological impact of the separation wall (Weizman 2007). In a brilliant critique of racism and settler-colonialism, anthropologist Ghassan Hage evokes Foucault’s notions of governmentality when he argues that the relationship between Islamophobia and nature as both posing a threat of being “ungovernable” by extractive capitalism and therefore in need of generalized domestication, a mode of “inhabiting the world through dominating it for the purpose of making it yield value…” while obfuscating it as a relation of nondomination (Hage 2017, 87-91). He goes on to argues “Domination is after all a struggle to make things partake in the making of one’s home. It is a struggle to make homely spaces, or, to put it more existentially, a struggle to be ‘at home in the world’. Yet, paradoxically, it is also a mode of domination, control, extraction, and exploitation.” (Hage 2017, 91)

Hage’s discussion of the idea of home in an abstract sense parallels the overlapping notions of home and homeland in Israeli-Zionist ideology and its origins in European settler-colonial thought and practice, established and obtained through aggression and domination, while maintaining its clear separation from the “homey, cozy, and warm spaces that are equally entangled with them.” (Hage 2017, 92)

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For Hage, this spatial and epistemic divide, contained as we have seen earlier, in the space of the home/homeland, sustains a “civilized space of legality and democracy [that] is dependent on the racist colonial space of unregulated accumulation for its existence, sustenance and regeneration” (Hage 2017, 61). This clear divide between cosmopolitan goodness and colonial savagery obfuscates any links to practices of exploitation and subjection that in fact link and facilitate them. But at this time of unfettered accumulation, it is those same lines and national borders drawn by the colonial order to regulate capital and “lawful” accumulation for the benefit of the colonizer, become undone and thrown into chaos. This spatial and epistemic erosion manifests itself in a sense of loss on control, decline in dominance and vanishing confidence in the ability to conquer nature and to keep the colonized at bay. Hage puts forward a compelling argument that gives us access to the imaginary of power and governmentality underlying settler-colonial societies such as Israel, while demonstrating its direct links to the logic of extractive capitalism and its impact on environmental degradation. The racialized Arab, in this schema, is viewed as no more than dirt, rubbish or waste, “an inevitable left-over of the process of colonization that one has to live with and manage, but that one can do without” (Hage 2017, 49). Hage goes on to create a striking analogy between the increasingly threatening accumulation of plastic waste washing up against our shores and that of Muslim asylum seekers roaming those same seas. The parallels between the growing ecological and refugee crisis are both linked through the system of extractive capitalism that exploits and feeds the powerful, while seeking to discard and distance itself from the waste it produces in its path.

BETWEEN UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA Ricocheting between utopia and dystopia, Zori’s temporary home installations addressing the climate crisis, as is the terrace of the Klal business-center-cum-art-space, where Zori’s project Zero/Home/Earth was installed, posit them, as I have attempted to demonstrate in this article, as sites of continual negotiation of power. As a localized, temporarily anchored spaces, they create real physical as well as mental spaces that act alongside existing normative spaces of home. Containing critical questions about land, property and ownership rights, belonging and access, these temporary installations of homes as a site of art practice, carry within them the weight of historic and symbolic power within the continued spectrum of contemporary Zionist discourse, negotiating the gap between the actual and ideal home. Soil and land in both the context of the project’s built environment in Jerusalem, and the natural world it draws on, the contested land of Israel/Palestine, must be viewed as a tableau —always inextricably financialized— where interdependent relationship between settler-colonialism, neo-liberalism and the Anthropocene play out.

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REFERENCES Abu Hatoum, Nayrouz. 2018. “Reclaiming Jerusalem: Palestinians’ Informalized PlaceMaking.” Paper Presented at the American Anthropological Association. Aharon-Gutman, Meirav. 2018. “Art’s Failure to Generage Urban Renewal: Lessons from Jerusalem.” Urban Studies 55(15): 3474-3491. Berger, Tamar. 2019. “Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case.” Comparative Literature and Culture 21:2, Article 3. Cheshin Amir, Hutman, Bill and Melamed Avi (eds.). 1999. Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Creative Class Group. 2015. Building a Creative Society in Jerusalem: Prepared for the Honorable Mayor Nir Barkat. https://www.creativeclass.com/_wp/wp-content/ uploads/2016/06/CCG-Jerusalem-FINAL-REPORT.pdf. Felner, Eitan. 1995. A Policy of Discrimination, Land Expropriation, Planning and Building in East Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Betzelem. Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Foroohar, Rania. 2016. Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street. New York: Penguin Books. Hage, Ghassan, 2017. Is Racism an Environmental Threat. Cambridge: Polity. Halguera, Pablo. 2016. “Portfolio: Pablo Halguera.” In Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good edited by Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Willson, 257-262. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hasson, Nir. 2017. Urshalim: Yisraelim ve-Palestinim be-Yerushalayim, 1967-2017 [Urshalim: Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem, 1967-2017]. Tel Aviv, Aliyat haGag. Horowitz, Ariel. 2018. “Le-Ma’an ha-Klal: ha-Binyan ha-Mitologi shel Yerushalayim Hozer le-T’hiya” [“For the Common Good: Jerusalem’s Mythological Building Revitalized”]. Makor Rishon. February 1, 2018. .http://www.makorrishon.co.il/ magazine/dyukan/16357/ Accessed January 5, 2020. Israeli Matan. 2020. Interview with the author, January 27, 2020. Keidar, Noga. 2018. “Making Jerusalem ‘cooler’: Creative Script, Youth Flight, and Diversity.” City & Community 17:4, 1209-1230. Keidar Noga. 2019. “Ekh Yazamim Politiyim Tirgemu et Richard Florida le-Yerushalmit” [“Political Entrepreneurs Translated Richard Florida to Jerusalemite”]. Urbanologia. February 27, 2019. https://urbanologia.tau.ac.il/how-political-entrepreneurstranslated-florida-to-jerusalem/, Accessed January 30, 2020 Krystall, Nathan. (1999) 2002. “The Fall of the New City 1947-1950.” In Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and their Fate in the War, edited by Salim Tamari. Jerusalem: The Institute of Jerusalem Studies & Badil Resource Center.

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Marinic, Gregory. 2013. “Landscape Utopianism: Information, Ecology and Generative Pastoralism.” Architectural Design 83(3): 94-99. Misselwitz, Philip and Tim Rieniets (eds.) 2006. City of Collision: Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism. Basel: Birkhäuser Architecture. Nitzan-Shiftan, Alona. 2017. Seizing Jerusalem: The Architectures of Unilateral Unification. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Muslala Workplan. 2017. ND. Gag Eden Pilot [Tokhnit Avoda: Hakamat Gag Eden]. https://muslala.org/en/about-us/. Pappe, Ilan. 2006. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peck, Jaime. 2005. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29:4:740-770. Segal Rafi, Eyal Weizman, and David Tartakover (eds.). 2003. A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. New York: Verso Books. Tenhoor, Meredith. 2015. “Markets and the Food Landscape in France, 1940-72” In Food and the City: Histories of Culture and Cultivation, edited by Dorothée Imbert, 333351. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Weissberg, Hila. 2013. “Sprouts and the City: Living Sustainably, Shunning Capitalism in Urban Tel Aviv.” Haaretz. April 2, 2013. https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-sproutsand-the-city-the-organic-commune-1.5236465, Accessed May 13, 2020. Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. New York: Verso Books. Yacobi, Haim. 2012. “God, Globalization, and Geopolitics: on West Jerusalem’s Gated Communities.” Environment and Planning, 44: 2705-2720. Zori, Tami. 2020. Interview with the Author. January 20, 2020.

In: Differences in the City Editors: Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen

ISBN: 978-1-53618-496-9 © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 22

HETEROTOPIAS OF PESSIMISM. AN APPROACH THROUGH THE WORKS OF JOHN HEJDUK AND DANIEL LIBESKIND Jaime Quintana-Elena* School of Architecture, Universidad San Jorge, Zaragoza, Spain

ABSTRACT There exist certain places that, for different reasons, evade an optimistic approach in the construction of a city. Some of them are even designed to be this way. Yet, the emotional baggage carried by these sad or pessimistic spaces contradicts the sociopolitical mentality of a city obviously looking towards an open, optimistic future. However, we find events that strike at the very fabric, whether it be human, urban, or social. To honour the victims of this impact, the rupture is healed with elements for remembrance, normally by means of symbolic, subtle resources so that their presence does not completely awake the ghosts that would disturb the daily routine. That being said, we occasionally come across places where the explicit expression of trauma constitutes its very reason for being. For want of a better term, we will call these places “heterotopias of pessimism”. John Hejduk and Daniel Libeskind have produced perhaps the most coherent and lucid discourses on this form of understanding architecture at the service of sadness.

Keywords: John Hejduk, Daniel Libeskind, heterotopias, metaphor, architecture, sites of memory

*

Corresponding Author’s Email: [email protected].

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Jaime Quintana-Elena “Lost is lost” (Hejduk 1990) “When you wake the dead, Immortals are there to greet you!” (Libeskind 1997, 49)

INTRODUCTION: SUCH PLACES AS SADNESS Sad places exist because sadness exists. It is an undeniable and necessary fact in our condition that we will, to a greater or lesser extent, be trapped by moods that ooze melancholy1 and fill the body with pessimistic attitudes, perceptions and experiences. At the same time, we can all identify with seeking supportive atmospheres or landscapes in compassionate surroundings. This is such an intimate and universal feeling that all forms of art, insofar as they seek to communicate what cannot otherwise be said, have found an inexhaustible source of inspiration in sadness. There is, however, a reluctance in architecture to develop spaces from or for sadness. This might be due to the fact that architecture, because of its permanence, visibility and capacity for suggestion, has always been seen as an optimistic undertaking, and has not been swayed by the pessimistic needs that any other form of expression does not hesitate to satisfy. Ever since Michel Foucault outlined his principles of heterotopia in Des espaces autres (Of Other Spaces) in 1984,2 the term “other places” has had time to evolve, to be qualified, contradicted and even diluted in the liquid reality of our times, to the point of being considered, as Doreen Massey defines it a “sphere of juxtaposition or coexistence of different narratives [...] a porous, open, hybrid meeting-place” (García 2014, 334). Otherness in our time is far removed from that which Foucault could perceive and study. The realm of “other places” today forms part of our dayly life because of its inner condition of constantly moving among other people’s worlds. According to this line of thought, and to Benjamin Geocchio’s approach, heterotopias function as space tensioners, rather than typical or typifiable space-time models. Essentially heterotopia is “more an idea about space rather than any present space. It is an idea that insists that the order of spatial systems is subjective and arbitrary, being something we know less about than what we may imagine. It is an idea that consequently produces and theorizes about Melancholy is a black hole; an imploded star that could not carry its own unbearable weight; a force that swallows matter, light and time. Melancholy is a phenomenon that conveys existence itself to the unreachable. However, and because of all these reasons, galaxies are. It is not the aim of this chapter to go into the concept of ‘melancholy’. We do not have the space nor the need of an analysis of the term, its attributes and its relation to philosophy, history and art. For the purposes of our discussion, we will use the term as the superlative degree of pessimism. And, also, with some of the above. 2 Year of publication. The writings and conferences about the subject are dated in 1967. 1

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space as transient, contested, full of lapses and breaking points.” (Genocchio 1995, 43; García 2014, 41-42)

Despite this relativization, there are still certain places that are clearly governed by the fundamental requirements that determine heterotopia. There is a type of “other place” that is subjected to the political conditions and power of each era. These are the ‘sites of memory’ —a term coined by Pierre Nora—. They stand out from historical records, which are “constructed on the basis of documents or documentary materials that allow a fact to be reconstituted, so that this work always takes place later. It is not felt immediately, but is, rather, an accumulative phenomenon, which seeks to establish a form of truth through science, even if it is not ‘the’ truth. [...] Memory on the other hand is something else entirely: it is affective, psychological, emotional; it is in principle individual, unlike history. Memory, moreover, is extremely fickle, plays many roles and has no past, since it is by definition an ever-present past.” (Erlij 2018, 20)

The political load of these “sites of memory”, when placed in a public arena like a city, is evident: when a catastrophe occurs —an act of terrorism or an event that confronts the norms of coexistence set out by a society— and if that society remains in place, it is forced to reaffirm its condition and a need to remember emerges in honour of the victims who are adopted as its own. This memory becomes physical by building memorials and monuments, parks or other commemorative elements. This society cannot afford to let oblivion end up denying the trauma and it builds in the name of memory. But it neither breaks the hourglass nor cracks when faced with this kind of event: memories must be subtle enough for the city’s normality to continue. There is thus a level of refinement that frees them from aspects that are too specific, so that the pill swallowed does not become wedged in the stomach of a city looking out onto a happy horizon. However, there are special situations that do not follow this rule, as is the case of Berlin and the debt that the city has assumed after the Nazi Holocaust. The countless “places/sites of memory” dotted around the city now form part of its configuration. When responding to these kind of traumatic events we may take two substantially different paths: the path of “mourning” or that of “melancholy”, whose characteristics are pointed out by Zizek: “In the process of the loss, there is always a reminder that cannot be integrated through the work of mourning, and the ultimate fidelity is the fidelity to this reminder. Mourning is a kind of betrayal, the second killing of the (lost) object, while the melancholic subject

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Jaime Quintana-Elena remains faithful to the lost object, refusing to renounce his or her attachment to it”3 (Zizek 2000, 658).

THE PLACES OF METAPHOR. THE DIS-PLACES OF PLACE The trauma of the war represented a void that marked an unsurmountable rupture in history, if not its very end. Post-modernism arose as the tone of an end-of-the-century feeling, the end of history and architecture; the feeling that Jean-François Lyotard sees as “a vague, apparently inexplicable, end-of-century melancholy” (Stead 1999, 321-328). It was in this time of post-modern consciousness, with Berlin as its epicentre, when John Hejduk and Daniel Libeskind proposed Victims and The Extension of the Jewish Museum respectively; two examples that have transcended the scrupulous norms of architecture’s optimistic character, immersing themselves fully in the most suggestive capacities that the discipline has to offer and accompanying the citizen through the terrible depths of sadness. Hejduk and Libeskind share a particular approach to architecture which, despite responding to vital needs such as “places of memory”, seems to be relegated by our present society and culture to specific phenomena on the fringes of everyday life due to the harshness of their crystallization. The Extension of the Jewish Museum in Berlin is perhaps the paradigmatic example in terms of size, projection and impact. Still, this particular case totally breaks with presumed subtleties and strives like no other architectural project to force us to physically experience —with everything the discipline possesses— the atrocities of the Nazi holocaust. Such matter involves a moment of awareness of what cannot be comunicated in any explicit experience —a gap which exists among the survivors, which includes everyone born after these times— a gap that eventually becomes obliterated and generates in itself an even greater emptiness in the post-historical world (Libeskind 2010, 202). The harshness with which Libeskind approaches his project is comparable to that which John Hejduk proposed for a competition in Berlin in 1984 entitled Victims. Despite the fact that the project was not carried out, some of Hejduk’s “victims” —small installations with their own personality, described and treated like characters in a play or masquerade— have actually been erected, although not in their original location, but in other places —given their intrinsic nomadic nature. John Hejduk and Daniel Libeskind see architecture as a discipline that transcends its dimension and feeds easily on any other form of expression: music, painting or literature. The relationship between architecture and poetry is indissoluble for both of them. So much so that Hejduk and Libeskind, both of whom have published collections of poems, speak 3

Giorgio Agamben stressed the idea that melancholy is not the failure of the work of mourning: “melancholia offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object” (Zizek 2000, 661).

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of architecture and poetry in the same terms. The reason lies in metaphor. From the Greek μεταφορά, “displacement”, metaphor is the shortest way. Suffice to say that “a” equals “b” so that, from some region of the imagination, the domains of “b” do actually spill over “a” and create a new landscape of meanings in the latter that would otherwise be impossible to imagine. However, this relationship does not remain as a one-way flow. It is a tension produced from the moment in which the two words are joined together to create a new context that is offered in a sort of Moebius strip: it allows us to move closer to the abyss of both worlds through the threshold that unites them. Cognitive Linguistics has vehemently postulated that metaphor shapes thought;4 that is: we think with metaphors. And it is in poetry where the metaphor is sublimated. In order to describe the attributes of certain states, feelings or emotions, poetry works projecting the human body itself —and its phisical dimention in particular— onto them. When it comes to making pessimistic feelings visible, language resorts to expressions such as void, gap, empty, darkness, low, narrowness, closed, and so forth, so that the recourse to spatial metaphor becomes necessary and omnipresent. Given the familiarity with which John Hejduk and Daniel Libeskind transfer these spatial approximations, it is hardly surprising the way they translate feelings in their architectural works: for “the void is very palpable since in architecture the void is a space” (Libeskind 2010, 204).

LIBESKIND METAPHORS/HETEROTOPIAS In 1999, 10 years after winning the competition for The Extension of The Jewish Museum’s project in Berlin, the building, still empty, was opened to 350,000 visitors who experienced the anguish of vertigo and disorientation, the weight of loss in the void, the spatial collapses in dead or unreachable ways; in short, the recognition of oneself and one’s imprint among the ruins of history. Libeskind’s attraction towards projects related to trauma —the urban project for the site belonging to the SS surrounding Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Nussbaum Haus Museum or the master plan for Ground Zero in New York— begins much earlier, in the Cranbrook Academy School of Architecture, between 1978 and 1985, where he made some of his most significant drawings and tehoretical projects. Micromegas (1979) is the most popular one, for its complexity in search of a new geometry, but the not so well known Anatomy’s Melancholy (1981) —a set of four fascinating drawings that have not received 4

Paul Ricoeur’s Metaphore Vive, (The Rule of Metaphor) published in 1975, and the work of Georges Lakoff and Mark Johnson, The Metaphors We Live By (1980), explain how we think and therefore build our language through metaphors. The repercussion of this line of thought brought, in Cognitive Linguistics, the study of a new term: “Conceptual Metaphor” that spread soon to new ways of encompassing the concept, such as “conceptual blending” and “ideasthesia” (Gilles Fauconnier in The Way We Think, 2003), and also the relation metaphor-embodiment, which is essential to the purpose of the present work.

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yet enough critical attention (Quintana 2016)— contain most of the contents that will crystalize in The Extension of the Jewish Museum. Libeskind plays in the building with the metaphors found in his previous works while looking for the visualization of melancholy (fragmentation, labyrinth, distortion, vertigo and desorientation) to lead us to the physical experience of trauma. But in order to understand it in all its complexity, the architect proposes references and routes that can only be reached by the spirit.

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Figure 1. Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Figure 2. Façade of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

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Source: Wikimedia Commons. Figure 3. Interior void of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

We find allusions to Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, Arnold Schöemberg, E.T.A. Hofmann and Mies Van der Rohe, which are manifested in a variety of ways in the configuration of the museum. However, the clearest examples of unreachable projections can be found, first of all, in the matrix of axes that emerged from the search for the location of Berlin’s Jews disappeared in the Holocaust, whose projection shapes the façade and the gaps. Thus, in order to understand each open crack in the building’s façade, one must project oneself through certain coordinates determined by a distant and invisible city until one reaches the lost voices of the Berlin’s Jews. The great void that crosses the building —the embodiment of absence— is, along with the zig-zag —a distorted David Star that arises from the matrix—, the other main element that configurates the museum. Always present and practically inaccessible, the void gave rise to a controversial debate that Libeskind had with Derrida as a result of an exhibition put on by the architect on the Jewish museum. At the subsequent round table, Derrida asked Libeskind a series of questions about the void and its utility, since it is used to join the museum together, but cannot be reached (Derrida 1992). To explain the purpose of this kind of opaque spaces, in an interview with the poet David Shapiro, John Hejduk tells the story about Peter Eisenman, who, after seeing two 15-metre-high installations in a Berlin lobby, told Hejduk that those structures were “not architecture, because you can’t get in them”, to which Hejduk responded: “YOU can’t get in them! In other words, he was not in the position to get into them, because he did not understand them. You can only get into something if you understand, or are willing to” (Blackwood 1992).

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HEJDUK METAPHORS/HETEROTOPIAS The work of Hejduk from the middle of the 1970s onwards, moved from the previous focus on formal exercises to a notion of imagination which implies that architecture should entail aspects of narrative, action and symbolic meaning. In order to do that, he started the generation of characters allowing him to overcome the Modern Movement’s funcionalism and stressing the possibilities of architectural meaning in a symbolic way (Søberg 2012, 114). In 1980 he presented Berlin Masque, a project that included 28 different structures. The masks allowed him to provoke a dialogue between forms and characters: “During the masque, the identity of the subject and the identity, essentially the forms of the shapes of the mask, amalgamate, equally dynamic” (Søberg 2012, 124). Those ideas were the origin of Victims, presented to be sited bordering the Berlin Wall where the Gestapo had their headquarters. Hejduk “mustered up a tribe of architectural animals, a traveling carnival of objects gradually assembled over the last decade; a tribe that now seems infinitely extensible. This company, without which Hejduk never travels, is composed of veterans of former voyages” (Vidler 1992, 207). Some of the sixty-seven “victims” of Berlin will reappear in future projects. Although the aim of the proposal is probably the same as in Libeskind’s museum, Victims finds its way through a different scenario: movable, nomadic, strange-looking objects with a zoomorphic shape are explicit reminders of the Holocaust: “The site itself —we are told— had formerly contained torture chamber during WWII; it was now to be occupied, among other objects, by houses for the ‘Identity Card Man’ and ‘The Keeper of the Records’ and by offices for ‘Identity Card Unit’ and ‘Record Hall’ — Kafkaesque figures certainly, but given unmistakable historical context by spaces such as the ‘Room for Those Who Looked the Other Way’, ‘The Disappeared’, ‘The Exiles’ and ‘The dead’. Representations of the repressed unsaid, they act as a perpetual reminder, a kind of memory theatre, of the uncomfortable past, both due to the sites they occupy and to the forms they assume.” (Vidler 1992, 208)

Anthony Vidler reads them like “some Borgesian elaboration of a Chinese Encyclopaedia” (Vidler 1992, 208). This reference is the same that led Foucault to consider —literally— the concept of heterotopia, as he explains in the preface to The Order of Things (Foucault 1994, VI-XXVI). However, as we mentioned before, Hejduk does not differentiate between texts and architecture, and he goes from poem to architectural structure and vice versa treating them as the same thing. Silence is a void with meaning. The air between one person and an observed object is a presence that configures the space and has an influence in the body. Libeskind’s interest in the void as the presence of the absence is comparable to the meaning Hejduk gives to

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the air. If The Breath of Bacchus is probably his best known poem about this topic, there is another poem from Berlin Night where he says: “I will tell you why I like the air I breathe, of course it keeps me alive, but there is a more important reason. It is because when I breathe the air in I breathe in all the sounds from all the voices since the beginning of time. All the voices that have placed thoughts escaping from the soul through the voice into the air which I breathe in. Sounds that I cannot hear —silent sounds filling the air that generations have spoken into. Consequently filling me with words that are an invisible text. An invisible sound text which mingles with my thoughts that are invisible. In essence an internal communion takes place giving the sense of the sublimity of silent transfer ever”. (Hejduk 1993, 18)

Another approach to postmodernism that is significant from the point of view of architecture is personification, i.e., the incorporation of references to the human body, which Hejduk and Libeskind include in different ways. While Hejduk will use the concept of the masque and the projection of his victims as characters in a masquerade with zoomorphic, nomadic appearances, Libeskind takes up the corporeal metaphor conditioned by a body that is radically different from its conventional form. A fragmented body, deliberately separated or mutilated beyond recognition: “This body no longer serves to centre, to fix or to stabilize. Its limits, interior or exterior, seem infinitely ambiguous and extensive; its forms, literal or metaphorical, are no longer confined to recognizably human, but embrace all of human existence, from the embryonic to the monstruous; its power lies no longer in the model of unity, but in the intimation of the fragmentary, the morsellated, the broken.” (Vidler 1990, 3)

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Source: Wikimedia Commons. Figure 4. House of the Suicide and House of the Mother of the Suicide.

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Figure 5. The Rolling House.

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CONCLUSION: SADNESS IN PLACE Hejduk called himself an architect of pessimism because the modern condition is sad and lonely (Hays 1996, 13). Libeskind chose to study architecture enroling at the Cooper Union School of Architecture5 in New York where Hejduk was already teaching (and later on he became the Dean of that institution). Hejduk and Libeskind shared a European origin and a cultural background related to the worse consecuences of the Second World War. They both shed the veil of sterile happiness in order to offer a “social pact”, whereby memory should be always present. In this respect, the proposals of both —the teacher and the student— to compensate the victims of the Nazi Holocaust in the city of Berlin are examples of other places that embody the silent presence of what got lost and bring their ghosts back. This encounter is not immediate and needs the will’s support to experience the embodiment of the space itself. Then, the ground erased by the displacement — juxtaposition— will reapperar to hold the new reminder of the past.6 Heterotopia can be understood as a physically realized utopia that produces special experiences since it is governed by rules that are different from those entailed in our usual social interaction including de facto their own time range. If we lay our eyes on the consequences of those experiences, our entering a heterotopia will lead to a change of feeling and attitude. For that to happen, a displacement towards “otherness” —a movement from one’s world to the other’s world— must take place. The displacement, by which metaphor works, consists of approaching certain fragments of reality we can hardly apprehend other way, since we cannot touch abstract concepts because there are things that only exist in words. In the realm of feelings and emotions, we can apply McLuhan’s7 assertion “all words, in every language, are metaphors” (McLuhan 1988, 120). This resource uses the spatial domain to provide us with a re-description of those symptoms experienced under our skin. Therefore, the unfolding of one’s body reveals a whole encyclopaedia of space, in which density and light rule. In the territories of pessimism, these same laws apply: “Understanding takes place in terms of entire domains of experience and not in terms of isolated concepts” (Lakoff 1980, 117). “Heterotopias of Pessimism” allude to a specific kind of space related to “Sites of Memory”, which themselves constitute a heterotopia. The “Sites of Memory”, as we explained before, come to compensate a particular loss in a society adversely affected, by restoring the memory of what is no longer present, through commemorative elements.

Its name at that time was The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Foucault notes how Borges in his passage of a “certain Chinese encyclopaedia” “does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed” (Foucault 1994, xviii). 7 His well known “the medium is the message” would also perfectly fit the purpose of explaining the constant tension between metaphor and whatever it touches and the explosion in a multiplying effect, onto different images. 5 6

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When the loss is as traumatic and profound as the immense void the Second World War left, sometimes, and in very particular places where a debt goes beyond reparation — as it happens with the Nazi Holocaust in the city of Berlin—, such condition calls for the help of pessimism and frees it to echo the scream of the lost voices. “Lost is lost” (Hejduk 1990), an extremely intense statement in which the use of the repetition —as redefinition or explanation— of the lost, hits us in a Sisyphus’s nightmare. It seems that the assertion leaves us no escape but to constantly collapse onto the two words. But the truth is that by crying those three words, the “lost” wake up as memory ghosts. Furthermore, as Paul Ricoeur pointed out: “Metaphor is a rhetorical process by which discourse unleashes the power that certain fictions have to redescribe reality. […] The place of metaphor, its most intimate and ultimate abode, is neither the name, nor the sentence, nor even the discourse, but the copula of the verb ‘to be’.” (Ricoeur 2003, 5-6)

That is, through the direct link that metaphor offers, we can wake the dead and greet them back.8 Heterotopias function as a juxtaposition. With no relation to the urban development of the city, their site is super-imposed as intruders.9 This phenomenon of stolen ground makes them sinister —close and strange at the same time. The ‘natural’ urban fabric that a city and its people daily breathe hardly supports this kind of raw reminders. Yet, we dwell in a world where pessimism finds its place. There are certain events that need the use of melancholy arguments to be remembered faithfully through these”Heterotopias of Pessimism”, places that might be disturbing, aggressive or unpleasant and discomforting. But to clean the melancholic traces they provoke —those which strike the spark of memory— is to lose them completely.

REFERENCES Blackwood, Michael. 1992. John Hejduk: Builder of Worlds. New York: Michael Blackwood Productions. Derrrida, Jacques. 1992. “Response to Daniel Libeskind.” Research in Phenomenology, 22 (1), 88-94.

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“When you wake the dead, Immortals are there to greet you!” (Libeskind 1997, 49). “Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly underline language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’” (Foucault 1994, xix).

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Erlij, Evelyn. 2018. “Entrevista a Pierre Nora: El historiador es un árbitro de las diferentes memorias.” [“Interview to Pierre Nora: The Historian is an Arbitrator of the Different Memories”]. Letras Libres, 230, 20-25. Foucault, Michael. 1994. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. García, María. 2014. “Los Territorios de los Otros: Memoria y Heterotopía.” [“The Territories of the Others: Memory and Heterotopia”]. Cuicuilco, 61, 333-52. Guidieri, Remo. 2010. “Donde no hay muros no hay nombres. Entorno a John Hejduk.” [“Where There Are No Walls There Are No Names. About John Hejduk”]. Minerva, 14, 86-87. Hays, K. Michael. 1996. Hejduk’s Chronotope. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Hejduk, John. 1985. Mask of Medusa. Works 1947-1983. New York: Rizzoli. Hejduk, John. 1986. Victims. London: AA Publications. Hejduk, John. 1989. The Riga Project. Philadelphia: The University of the Arts. Hejduk, John. 1990. Symposium on the City -Part 1 - John Hejduk. Alvin Boyarsky Memorial Event at AA School of Architecture. Accessed March 2020 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvr3-Rf9PLQ&t=1s. Hejduk, John. 1993. Berlin Night. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Lakoff, Georges, and Johnson, Mark. 1980. The Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago Press. Libeskind, Daniel. 1981. Between Zero and Infinity. New York: Rizzoli. Libeskind, Daniel. 1997. Fishing from the Pavement. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Libeskind, Daniel. 2000. The Space of Encounter. New York: Universe. Marotta, Antonello. 2013. Daniel Libeskind. Lulu.com. McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric Mac Uhan. 1988. Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Quintana, Jaime. 2016. “Melancolía de la anatomía. Una disección de los dibujos de Daniel Libeskind.” [“Anatomy’s Melancholy. A dissection of the drawings of Daniel Libeskind”] In Open Sourcing: Investigación y formación avanzada en arquitectura. Edited by Lourdes Diego, Jorge Fernández-Santos and Jorge León, 149-66. Villanueva de Gállego: Ediciones Universidad San Jorge. Ricoeur, Paul. 2003. The Rule of Metaphor. The creation of meaning in language. London: Routledge Classics. Søberg, Martin. 2012. “John Hejduk’s Pursuit of an Architectural Ethos.” FOOTPRINT Delft Architecture Theory Journal, 113-28. Accessed March 2020 from https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/footprint/article/view/753/930. Stead, Naomi. 1999. “The Anti-Classical in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin Museum.” In Thresholds, proceedings of the annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand. Ed.Roy Spence and Richard Blythe, Launceston and Hobart, 321-328.

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Vidler, Anthony. 1990. “The Building in Pain. The Body and Architecture in Post-Modern Culture.” AA Files, 19, 3-10. Vidler, Anthony. 1992. The Architectural Uncanny; Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge: MIT Press. Zizek, Slavoj. 2000. “Melancholy and the Act”. Critical Inquiry, 26(4), 657-81.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS In this section the readers of the book will find the short biographies of the authors that have taken part in it (27 researchers). As editors, we just want to highlight that they come from different countries around the world (America, Asia, Australia and Europa) and they represent all the possible stages in the scientific life: from young researchers doing their PhD to Professors. Their chapters offer a multidisciplinary approach to the same topic: heterotopias as utopian dreams.

PREFACE Jorge León Casero: Architect, Degree in Philosophy, Degree in Law and PhD in History. Between 2012 and 2016 he worked as Vice Dean of Research in the School of Architecture and Technology at the San Jorge’s University (Spain) where he directed the Open Source Architectures research group and was head researcher of the Social Risk Map project funded by Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. He is the author of the three-volume book Trilogía Metropolis (Logroño, 2018) and co-editor of the books Disciplines of the City (New York, 2018) and Open Sourcing (Zaragoza, 2016). He currently works as Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Zaragoza and as Architect: http://www.mylarquitectos.com/equipo.html. Julia Urabayen: Degree and PhD in Philosophy. She is professor of Philosophy and she works in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Navarra. In recent years, she has mainly dealt with systems of inclusion/exclusion, segregation, public-urban space, forms of political violence, citizenship and the city, as well as governance. She has published more than 100 works between books and book chapters (mostly in high-impact publishers: Olms, Nova Science Publisher, Porrúa, Pre-textos, among others), and articles

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in high-impact Journals (Topoi, Sage Open, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Co-herencia, Arbor, Pensamiento, Revista Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, Daimón y Pensamiento, among others).

SECTION 1: HETEROTOPIA AND POSTMEYTOPOLIS Heidi Sohn is Associate Professor of Architecture Theory, academic coordinator and interim chair of Architecture Theory at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. She received her PhD in Architecture Theory from the TU Delft in 2006. She is a member of the Borders & Territories and the Architecture Theory research groups. She is author of multiple publications. Sohn is a founding editor of Footprint Journal (2007-2012) and sits on the editorial board of Cubic Journal. Since 2017 she is head of the Theories of Architecture Fellowship Program at the Department of Architecture. Her main areas of investigation include genealogical inquiries of postmodern and post-human theoretical landscapes, monster studies and cultural analysis, as well as diverse geopolitical and politico-economic expressions of late capitalist urbanization. Miguel A. Alonso del Val: Architect and PhD Architect (Univerity of Navarra). Fulbright Fellow and Master’ Degree in Architecture & Building Design (CUNY). He has been a Full Professor at the ETSAM in Madrid and has received the Jorge Montes (2009) and Luis Barragán (2011) Awards. Visiting Professor at Spanish, European and American universities, led the Doctorate Program in Applied Creativity and is currently Chair Professor of Architectural Design and Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Navarra. Founder and Director of “ah asociados” architecture office, his work has been awarded with COAVN, BEAU, Veteco, FAD, PAD, Construmat, NaN and Saloni Awards; exhibited at the Venice Biennial (2008 and 2012) and published in El Croquis, A+T, AV, A+W, C3 TC and Detail; and in the guides Architecture of Spain 1929/1996, Spanish Architecture 1920/2000, GAN SXX and Phaidon World Atlas of Architecture. Joaquín Fortanet: Degree and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona. He has been a pre-doctoral research fellow at the “Fundación Caja Madrid” (2003) and the University of Barcelona (2004-2008). Guest researcher at the Center Michel Foucault (2005), Paris XII University (2005), University of Braga (2006), and University of Toulouse (2014). Associate Professor at the University of Zaragoza between 2009 and 2013. He received the International Richard Rorty 2013 scholarship. He is currently Assistant Professor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Zaragoza and codirector of the International Conference “La Actualidad de Michel Foucault”.

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Juan Diego Parra Valencia: PhD in Philosophy, Specialist in Literature, Musician. Professor-Researcher at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities–ITM. He is essayist and he has written some articles about philosophy, aesthetics, art, philosophy of technique, semiotics, cinema and music. He is the author of the books: David Lynch and the becoming cinema of philosophy (2016), Cantinflas. Every word is only one more word (2015), Franz Kafka and the art of disappearing (2007). He is the co-author of the books: The Deleuze Effect (2015), Deleuze, flowers to his grave (2017), Mitópolis. An essay on art and memory in public space (2017), The metaphysics of the internet (2017). Times ago, Tomás Carrasquilla? (2008). Jorge León Casero: see his CV in the preface section. Julia Urabayen: see her CV in the preface section.

SECTION 2: HETEROTOPIA AND PUBLIC SPACE Paula Cristina Pereira is the Principal Researcher of the Philosophy and Public Space Research Group of the Institute of Philosophy (UI&D/FIL/00502) and Professor at the Philosophy Department at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto (Portugal) and she is Director of the Doctoral Program in Philosophy. She has been a visiting Professor in several European Universities, as well as in Brazilian and Mozambican Universities. Since 2007, her research has focused on the human and urban condition; on the philosophy of the city and public space from the perspective of the common and common goods. She has published eight books, book chapters and multiple papers in national/ international journals. Irandina Afonso is PhD student in Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto and Researcher/Collaborator of the Research Group Philosophy and Public Space of the Institute of Philosophy (UI&D/FIL/00502) at Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, Portugal. Her publications reflect multiple and relational research interests which include gender identity, non-binary gender studies, contemporary subjectivity, ethics, the philosophy of the city and public space, social and political thinking. Meriç Demir Kahraman received her BA from Yildiz Technical University in Urban and Regional Planning (2008), her MSc from Yildiz Technical University in Spatial Organization and Design (2011). She is a lecturer and holds a PhD from Istanbul Technical University - Faculty of Architecture, Department of Urban and Regional Planning. She has an experience of five years as a Research & Teaching Assistant at ITU - Faculty of

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Architecture and a semester as an International Scholar at KU Leuven - Faculty of Architecture. Her major areas of interest are urban conservation and historiography, public space theories, and the social production of space. Tayfun Kahraman is an Assistant Professor at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Faculty of Architecture, Department of Urban and Regional Planning since 2014. He is also the Chairman of the Department of Earthquake, Risk Management, and Urban Improvement in Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality since 2019. He received his BA and MSc from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Urban and Regional Planning (2004 and 2010). He holds a PhD from Istanbul University - Faculty of Political Sciences, Department of Political Sciences and Public Administration (2017). He worked as an expert in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism – Republic of Turkey (2009-2014). He was the SecretaryGeneral (2006-2010) and the Head of UCTEA Chamber of City Planners - Istanbul Branch (2010-2018). Jingyi Zhu is a PhD student at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (UCL). She is currently finalising her doctoral thesis on the role of public space in urban transformation processes and its duality as a tool to achieve the city’s strategic development visions and a site for citizens’ everyday uses in the Shanghai urban regeneration context. She has degrees in urban planning and urban design from Tongji University and Politecnico di Milano. Her other research interests include public space design and management and the interplay between urban planning/design and the transformation processes of urban spaces. José María Castejón Esteban. He is an Architect graduated from the San Jorge University in 2015 with a Recognition Mention in his Final Degree Project. He teaches Architecture as an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Zaragoza (Department of Mechanical Engineering). As a professional, he directs the firm “Agencia de Arquitectura e Ingeniería 5310133”, of which he is a founding partner, since 2015. He is also director of the “Laboratorio de Agenciamientos”, which research about Architecture, Information and Complexity and whose specialization is “Architecture as Information at the intersection of Dynamic Systems”. He has also developed his work in other artistic fields, especially music and poetry.

SECTION 3: HETEROTOPIA AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY Ibán Díaz-Parra is PhD in Human Geography and bachelor in Geography and Social and Cultural Anthropology. He is a postdoctoral researcher in Human Geography at University of Seville. He has been a researcher at National Autonomous University of

About the Authors

335

Mexico and at University of Buenos Aires. His research focuses on socio-spatial processes and conflicts, gentrification, spatial segregation and urban movements in Andalusian and Latin-American cities. He has published some books and many scientific papers on these topics (Eure, Andamios, Norte Grande, Urban Studies, Progress in Human Geography, etcetera). He is currently the coordinator of the Ibero-American Network of Research in Urban Contention. Rachel Kallus is architect and town planner, holding professional degree from MIT and Ph.D. from the Technion. She is professor emerita at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning in the Technion, the founder and former academic head of the Technion Social Hub. Her scholarly work leans on critical theory in the social sciences, gender and cultural studies, to examine the sociopolitical aspects of spatial production, and the reciprocity between policy measures (planning) and design interventions (architecture) with the cultural and intellectual environments. She published extensively in planning and architecture journals and in numerous edited volumes. Professionally she practiced as architect and urban designer in the USA, The Netherlands and Israel, and nowadays works mainly with local grassroots organizations and NGOs. Ronnen Ben-Arie teaches at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions at Haifa University. His research interests include spatialities of power; resistance and transformation in contemporary political theory; urban transformation and urban design; contested and shared urban spaces; and settler colonialism in Israel-Palestine. He published on these subjects in journals and edited volumes. The title of his recent co-authored book, with Marcelo Svirsky, is From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018). Haya Zaatry is a Palestinian musician, architect and researcher based in Haifa. She is the co-founder of “Eljam”, a non-profit community project. In 2015 she graduated from the Technion with excellence and was nominated for the Reiskin Award for her graduation project. In 2017 she was the selected Palestinian artist for XABACA project in Barcelona, aiming to empower and connect female artists from around the Arab world. During the project Haya starred alongside a Lebanese and a Tunisian artist in the documentary “Borders and Promises”, named after one of her songs. In 2019, during her graduate studies (MSc in Architecture), she was awarded the first prize in the “Young Researchers Conference” that was held in the faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion. Orlando Alves dos Santos Junior has a degree in Social Sciences (Fluminense Federal University, 1988), a Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning (Federal

336

About the Authors

University of Rio de Janeiro, 1994) and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2000). He is a professor at the Urban and Regional Research and Planning Institute - IPPUR at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ and a researcher at the Metropolis Observatory Network. He has experience in the field of Urban Sociology, acting mainly on the following themes: urban planning, urban politics, citizenship, democracy, political culture, social movements, social participation and sports mega-events. Researcher sponsored by CNPq, scholarship- Level 2. Robbie Peters is a senior lecturer and currently chair of the department of anthropology at Sydney University. His earlier work includes a book (Surabaya, 19452010) and journal articles on urban renewal and the political economy of violence in Indonesia and on gender and work in Jakarta, Surabaya and Saigon. His current research and publications tackle such issues as the politics of death and its commemoration in the Indonesian city; the on-demand motorbike taxi economy in Indonesia; and the effect of new cash transfers programs on Indonesia’s urban poor. He is working on a book about the Indonesian city and the revolution and has published in such journals as International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Ethnos, Bijdraagen, City and Society, and Critical Asian Studies.

SECTION 4: HETEROTOPIA AND GENDER SPACE Peter Johnson completed his interdisciplinary PhD “On Heterotopia” at the University of Bristol. He has published a variety of journal articles related to Foucault’s use of space as a tool of analysis, and a range of studies of specific heterotopian sites, including cemeteries, gardens, and ships. In 2012, he set up the website “Heterotopian Studies” which has become internationally recognised as a resource for academics, writers and artists. His most recent research involves (1) exploring how the digital domain impacts on formulations of heterotopia and (2) the thought and practice of the philosopher Michel Serres and its relevance to the climate crisis. Felipe Schwember: Professor and researcher at the School of Government, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile. Bachelor of Law and Bachelor of Philosophy (Universidad Católica de Chile). PhD in Philosophy, Universidad de Navarra, Spain. His areas of specialization are the philosophy of law and political philosophy, both modern (Locke, Kant and Fichte, mainly) and contemporary (Nozick). He has been in charge of several State-funded (Fondecyt) research projects. The last one dealt with the criticism and reception of utopias and utopianism in contemporary liberalism. Author of the book Libertad, derecho y propiedad. El fundamento de la propiedad en la filosofía del derecho

About the Authors

337

de Kant y Fichte (Georg Olms, 2013). He has also published several articles in different specialized journals and has won the XIV Essay Contest “Caminos de la libertad”, Mexico. Eduardo Álvarez Pedrosian: Born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He is anthropologist and philosopher. Bachelor in Anthropological Sciences (Udelar, Uruguay), Diplomate in Advanced Studies in Philosophy and PhD in History of Subjectivity (UB, Catalonia, Spain), Post-Doctorate in Anthropology (USP, Brazil). He is professor and researcher of the Faculty of Information and Communication, Universidty of te Reublic (FIC-Udelar, Uruguay). He is the coordinator of the Transdisciplinary Laboratory of Experimental Ethnography (Labtee, in spanish), and its Program in Communication, Architecture, City and Territory (ACT-Com). Member of the National System of Researcher of Uruguay. Jorge Andreu Jiménez: Degree and Master’ Degree in Philosophy (Interuniversity Master: Research on philosophy, specialization in contemporary philosophy), University of Zaragoza. For his final-year project he did a research on language and meaning according to Martin Heidegger. He has been an Erasmus student at Eötvös Loránd University. During his exchange program, he cooperated to the Department of Logic and theory of Science. His current research deals with Heidegger’ early works and the aim is to reveal the substratum behind Being and Time’s concept of significance. He is doing his PhD in Philosophy in this topic.

SECTION 5: HETEROTOPIA AND SYMBOLIC SPACE Javier Pérez Herreras holds a masters´ and a PhD degree in architecture from the University of Navarra. He is founding partner with Javier Quintana of Taller Básico de Arquitectura, a research and professional laboratory for architectural design spanning between Pamplona and London. His professional work has been awarded by the Chicago Athenaeum, the Architects' Journal, the German Design Council, Arquitectura Española, BEAU and the FAD foundation. He has been exhibited at the RIBA in London, the AIA in Washington, the Italian Institute in Tokyo and Nuevos Ministerios in Madrid. Perez Herreras represented Spain at the 8th Venice Architecture Biennale. He is the author of books such as Cajas de aire and Ideo-Lógica. He was the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Universidad San Jorge, lecturer at the Universidad Pública de Navarra and visiting professor at the master’s in Architectural Management and Design of the IE University in London. He is currently Professor of Architectural Design at the University of Zaragoza. Angela Yiu is a professor of modern Japanese literature at Sophia University. Her areas of research include modernism, urban literature, cross-border literature, SinoJapanese literary studies, war and postwar literature, utopian studies, and contemporary

338

About the Authors

literature. She is the editor of Three-Dimensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911-1932 (2013). Her recent publications include “Beachboys in Manchuria: An Examination of Sōseki’s Mankan tokorodokoro” in Review of Japanese Culture and Society (2019) and “Literature in Japanese (Nihongo bungaku): An Examination of the New Literary Topography by Plurilingual Writers from the 1990s” in Japanese Language and Literature (2020). Juan Esteban Posada Morales is a political scientist who Works at the National University of Colombia. Master’ Degree in History and PhD in Human and Social Sciences. He is currently an associate researcher at the Faculty of Human and Economic Sciences of the National University of Colombia, Medellín. He was an associated researcher at the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO Ecuador) He has published several articles in scientific journals and book chapters. His research topics are focused on the configuration of the territory and social geography. He is the author of the book The Labyrinth of a Promise. Transformations of Medellin and its Citizens (1939-1962), published by the Editorial Fund of the Metropolitan Technological Institute (ITM), Colombia, in 2018. Livia Alexander is a curator, writer, and Assistant Professor of Global Visual Cultures at Montclair State University. Her work is focused on the relationship between infrastructure and artistic production, urbanity and placemaking, cultural politics of food and art, and contemporary art from the Middle East and Southeast Asia. She has curated and directed numerous art and film programs, exhibitions and events at renowned venues world-wide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, the Brooklyn Museum. She regularly contributes to Hyeprallergic, Harpers Bazaar Art Arabia, ArtsEverywhere, and Art Africa. Alexander’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Doris Duke Foundation, American Association of University Women, among others. Jaime Quintana was born in Edinburgh (Scotland). He studied at the School of Architecture of S.E.K. University in Segovia (Spain) where he graduated as an architect in 2007. In 2014 he postgraduated in Research and Advanced Training in Architecture at the School of Architecture of San Jorge University in Zaragoza (Spain), where he has been teaching from 2015 to 2019. After 10 years collaborating with the architectural firm “Sicilia y Asociados”, in 2018 he started “QS Arquitectos” along with his partner Carla Stamm. His research is focused on creativity, the concept of “felt-meaning” applied to spacial perception, the relationship between the Hippocratic humours and architecture and, ultimately, the poetic reason of architecture.

INDEX # 20th century, xxi, 17, 19, 57, 65, 128, 137, 141 21st century, 17, 21, 22, 25, 28, 74, 84, 134

A algorithms, 53 ambiguity, 88, 116, 305 amoeba city, 126 approaches, 11, 12, 13, 66, 75, 88, 89, 93, 117, 151, 165, 166, 243, 263, 320 Aragon, Louis, 195, 197, 199, 204 architecture, ix, x, xviii, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 3, 4, 7, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 29, 30, 31, 34, 40, 44, 46, 55, 60, 61, 67, 69, 85, 96, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 135, 143, 154, 160, 188, 206, 225, 231, 233, 239, 240, 242, 243, 251, 252, 257, 258, 260, 262, 263, 265, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 307, 310, 315, 317, 318, 320, 321, 323, 324, 325, 327, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337, 338 art installation, 301, 303, 310 artistic, 143, 151, 154, 157, 158, 232, 233, 236, 258, 267, 272, 301, 302, 306, 334, 338 artistic practice, 233, 301, 302, 306 assemblages, 13, 59, 231 assimilation, xix, 99, 103, 108, 207, 220 asylum, 196, 313 autonomy, xii, 59, 146, 151, 157, 158, 177, 210, 216, 217, 273

B Banyu Urip kampung, 181 beauty, xi, 115, 272 biopolitical, xvii, xxiii, 77, 128, 179, 186, 187, 248, 249, 253 biopolitics, xxiv, 14, 39, 44, 179, 187, 188, 205, 206, 238, 242, 247, 248, 252, 298, 310 birds and beasts, 275, 281, 283, 284 brothel, xvii, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, Butler, Judith, xviii, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 207, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 248, 251

C capitalism, xiv, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxv, 46, 47, 57, 63, 67, 69, 84, 94, 97, 128, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 165, 168, 170, 173, 176, 197, 204, 207, 209, 210, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 225, 226, 237, 243, 244, 247, 248, 251, 289, 290, 301, 302, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 315 change, xvii, xix, 8, 9, 18, 25, 40, 51, 54, 69, 70, 83, 86, 96, 99, 100, 103, 108, 115, 118, 124, 126, 134, 140, 144, 172, 193, 201, 204, 226, 260, 292, 294, 297, 301, 302, 306, 309, 310, 311, 327 Chinatown, v, xvi, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114 Chinese graveyard, 181, 183 circularity, xv, 17, 29, 60

340 cities, v, x, xi, xiv, xv, xvi, xxii, xxiv, xxv, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 38, 39, 44, 47, 55, 60, 63, 68, 69, 74, 79, 83, 86, 89, 90, 96, 99, 100, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 124, 126, 127, 141, 144, 145, 146, 148, 159, 160, 161, 163,164, 170, 171, 175, 176, 179, 184, 187, 188, 197, 199, 224, 225, 226, 230, 239, 240, 290, 298, 304, 305, 308, 335 citizens, xvi, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 67, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 92, 119, 145, 155, 159, 169, 184, 213, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 305, 320, 334, 338 citizenship, xxiii, 19, 69, 75, 79, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 176, 183, 184, 225, 230, 293, 294, 298, 331, 336 civil law, 125 civil liberties, 295 civil rights, 295 civil society, 145, 146, 291, 305 civil war, 36 civilization, 119, 226 civilizing, 18, 19, 224, 225 class struggle, xi, 92, 170, 171 closed, 35, 50, 82, 93, 101, 116, 165, 168, 169, 203, 224, 242, 321 collective, vi, xiii, xiv, xxiv, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 67, 73, 81, 90, 91, 151, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 232, 251, 279, 286, 294, 311 colonial city, 186, 231 common, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxiii, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 26, 28, 29, 35, 58, 63, 67, 69, 75, 78, 86, 87, 92, 94, 95, 96, 101, 116, 118, 138, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 175, 183, 229, 238, 250, 251, 271, 279, 282, 290, 293,296, 297, 299, 311, 314, 333 commonness, 236 compactness, 28, 29 complex topology, 10 concept-problem, 10 consumers exchange, 198 contemporary Japanese literature, 275 Corbin, Alain, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 204 counter-discourses, 93 counter-hegemonic spaces, xvi, 67 creative city, 304, 306, 307 creative placemaking, 301, 302, 303, 304, 308, 311 culture, ix, xxii, 13, 14, 17, 19, 30, 31, 47, 50, 68, 69, 76, 84, 89, 93, 96, 101, 112, 114, 128, 138, 139, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 157, 159,

Index 160, 161, 172, 173, 195, 198, 204, 239, 244, 252, 253, 297, 303, 305, 306, 314, 315, 320, 330, 334, 336,338 cybernetics, 57, 59, 60, 69 cyberspace(es), 51, 166, 204, 227, 243, 253

D Dardot and Laval, 168, 169 darkness and light, 184, 185, 186 data, iv, 25, 26, 47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 60, 66, 67, 68, 69, 104, 167, 186, 202, 269, 287 De Cauter, Lieven, xiv, xx, xxi, 4, 9, 13, 43, 44, 96, 97, 128, 142, 194, 205 Debord, Guy, xvi, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 127 defragmentation, 17, 26 Dehaene and De Cauter, xiv, 194 Dehaene, Michiel, xiv, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 96, 97, 100, 112, 113, 128, 144, 159, 194, 205 denizens, 184 design, x, xii, xx, 17, 18, 31, 53, 66, 67, 79, 100, 108, 113, 114, 160, 224, 227, 228, 231, 239, 245, 257, 263, 267, 301, 307, 309, 315, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337 deviation, 42, 49, 77, 89, 138, 141, 293 Devil’s Mansion (Rumah Setan), 181 diagrammatic thinking, 11 difference, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 37, 41, 55, 64, 67, 73, 75, 76, 81, 87, 88, 95, 96, 102, 103, 104, 112, 118, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 149, 161, 166, 174, 175, 214, 225, 290, 298 different, xi, xvi, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 26, 28, 33, 34, 35, 36, 42, 47, 61, 64, 65, 75, 76, 80, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 108, 110, 111, 116, 118, 119, 126, 133, 135, 138, 141, 143, 145, 146, 151, 153, 155, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 180, 184, 189, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 208, 211, 215, 216, 224, 228, 229, 231, 234, 235, 244, 245, 251, 259, 265, 267, 268, 270, 276, 280, 284, 285, 290, 311, 317, 318, 319, 324, 325, 327, 329, 331, 337 discipline, xv, xviii, xxiii, 7, 21, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44, 59, 63, 117, 128, 217, 242, 307, 320 disconnection, 20, 184 discontinuity, 14, 73, 75, 81, 82 disenclosure, 197 domestic privacy, 242

341

Index drawings, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265, 267, 269, 271, 272, 321, 329 dwelling, vi, xix, xxiv, 21, 22, 25, 29, 30, 31, 69, 75, 81, 139, 185, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 239, 240, 301, 302, 308, 311 dynamic topological system of thought-spaces, 10 dystopia, xxiv, 19, 252, 281, 311, 313

E

founding fathers, 184 Fraser, Nancy, 92, 93, 96, 218, 220 free market economy, 137 freedom, xi, xii, xix, 6, 35, 37, 67, 81, 87, 93, 95, 134, 144, 153, 157, 158, 167, 199, 208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 227, 289, 291, 293, 295, 296, 297 freedom of choice, 199 frontier space, 50, 51

economy, xxi, xxii, 34, 35, 39, 40, 54, 69, 109, 117, 136, 137, 139, 140, 161, 189, 204, 209, 218, 219, 295, 296, 305, 331, 336 emotional, xix, 49, 50, 52, 201, 290, 291, 293, 294, 297, 317, 319 emplacement, 88, 138, 194, 197 estranged labor, xix, 275, 284, 286 ethnic Chinese, xvii, 179, 181, 182, 188, 189 ethnographic, xviii, 223, 228, 232, 236 ethno-nationalism, xvii, 143, 146 experience, xvii, xxv, 4, 24, 34, 38, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 73, 75, 97, 105, 114, 128, 139, 148, 152, 163, 164, 168, 180, 195, 197, 199, 202, 203, 245, 262, 267, 269, 270, 271, 278, 284, 289, 291, 292, 293, 296, 320, 322, 327, 333, 336 expropriation, 183, 314 extraterritoriality, 77

gated community, xxiii, 188 gender, vi, xv, xvii, xviii, 78, 80, 148, 149, 159, 161, 166, 189, 191, 193, 195, 198, 200, 201, 203, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219, 220, 241, 242, 245, 251, 290, 333, 335, 336, 338 geography, xxii, xxiii, 4, 7, 14, 30, 44, 46, 68, 92, 93, 113, 133, 144, 159, 160, 161, 166, 175, 176, 193, 195, 197, 199, 202, 205, 261, 262, 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 334, 338 global sex industry, 199 governmentality, 40, 43, 44, 298, 301, 303, 310, 312, 313 grassroots territories, 163, 165, 166, 173, 174, 175 grid(s), 24, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 126, 141, 180, 309

F

H

feminist urbanism, xviii, 137, 223 flows, xvi, xviii, 5, 19, 26, 38, 47, 60, 65, 66, 67, 73, 74, 84, 101, 197, 231, 237, 280, 295 formalization of space, 60 Foucauldian mirror, 276, 285 Foucault, v, ix, x, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, xxiii, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 69, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 101, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 128, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 142, 144, 160, 179, 180, 185, 187, 188, 189, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 217, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 233, 234, 237, 238, 247, 248, 252, 276, 279, 280, 281, 285, 287, 290, 291, 292, 293, 298, 310, 311, 312, 318, 324, 327, 328, 329, 332, 336

Haifa, xvii, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 309, 335 Harvey, David, xii, xvi, xxii, 6, 7, 8, 14, 73, 86, 90, 91, 94, 96, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 224, 226, 239, 290, 291, 298 Hefner, Hugh, xviii, 198, 247, 248, 249, 250 Heidegger, Martin, 337 Hejduk, John, vii, xix, 317, 318, 320, 321, 323, 324, 325, 327, 328, 329 heterochronism, 9 heterogeneity, x, 3, 4, 10, 91, 137, 172 heterosexuality, 207, 209, 212, 216, 218, 219, 248, 250 heterotopia, v, vi, ix, x, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 33, 42, 43, 44, 45,

G

342

Index

46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 57, 59, 60, 63, 66, 71, 73, 75, 76, 77, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 123, 126, 128, 131, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 157, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 174, 179, 180, 187, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201, 203, 205, 207, 220, 224, 239, 241, 242, 243, 244, 247, 251, 255, 275, 276, 279, 285, 286, 289, 290, 291, 293, 296, 301, 303, 310, 318, 319, 324, 327, 329, 332, 333, 334, 336, 337 heterotopian alliances, 3, 12 heterotopian brothel, vi, 193 heterotopias, vi, vii, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 5, 10, 12, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 75, 76, 77, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 101, 102, 103, 112, 114, 115, 116,117, 118, 120, 122, 126, 127, 128, 135, 136, 138, 144, 149, 158, 160, 163, 164, 165, 173, 180, 188, 189, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 207, 220, 223, 225, 237, 240, 241, 242, 245, 248, 251, 279, 280, 281, 290, 298, 317, 318, 321, 324, 327, 328, 331 heterotopological thinking, 7, 11 heterotopology, xxii, 4, 6, 7, 11, 12, 204, 224, 228 Hiroko, Oyamada, vi, xix, xxiv, 275, 276, 287 historic center, 133, 140, 141 home, vii, xix, 76, 81, 89, 105, 137, 148, 152, 155, 182, 198, 199, 201, 203, 236, 246, 250, 272, 284, 286, 301, 302, 303, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313 homogenization, xvii, 34, 35, 42, 63, 135, 139, 141 house, xi, xxii, 18, 30, 50, 101, 125, 126, 134, 155, 181, 198, 243, 247, 250, 252, 263, 301, 302, 306, 308, 309, 326 humanization, 17 Humboldt, Alexander von, vi, 257, 261, 262, 263, hypermatter, 45, 46, 48 hypervigilated society, 242

I illusion, vii, 84, 100, 116, 140, 180, 194, 195, 199, 204, 213, 246, 279, 289, 291 industrial ruins, 231 informal settlements, 184

information, iv, xvii, 24, 26, 28, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 60, 65, 67, 194, 197, 204, 223, 271, 315, 334, 337 inhabit, 20, 42, 45, 49, 51, 54, 90, 215, 267, 272, 290 inhabitants, 17, 18, 20, 24, 28, 29, 47, 74, 134, 188, 279, 290, 292, 295, 296 Internet, the, v, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 137, 151, 193, 204, 205, 206 Ishigami, Junya, vi, xviii, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273 Israel/Palestine, 143, 144, 313 Israeli, Matan, xix, 143, 145, 148, 151, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160, 161, 302, 303, 304, 306, 308, 312, 314, 315 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 303

J journey(s), vi, xxv, 41, 55, 69, 201, 203, 238, 253, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 272

K kakusa shakai, 286 kampung, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189 Kinmen, 257, 263, 264, 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273 Klal Building, 302 knowledge, xxiii, 4, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59, 67, 69, 103, 142, 187, 188, 257, 259, 267, 271, 297

L land, xi, 6, 18, 119, 122, 123, 126, 129, 136, 141, 145, 146, 154, 158, 168, 171, 172, 173, 181, 183, 187, 308, 313, 314, 315 language, xxii, 50, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 79, 82, 88, 91, 95, 104, 151, 157, 171, 212, 245, 306, 321, 327, 328, 329, 337, 338 Lefebvre, Henri, x, xi, xii, xvii, xxiii, 65, 69, 73, 75, 80, 81, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 121, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 180, 185, 189, 226, 239 LGBTI identities, 226

343

Index LGBTQI+, 207, 208, 209, 210, 218, 220 liberal city, 43 liberalism, 39, 209, 210, 211, 213, 219, 313, 336 libertarianism, vi, xviii, 140, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219 Libeskind, Daniel, vii, xix, 67, 317, 318, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 327, 328, 329 life, x, xi, xvi, xvii, xxii, 5, 6, 10, 21, 27, 30, 38, 42, 66, 68, 75, 76, 77, 80, 82, 84, 87, 91, 94, 114, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124, 127, 138, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 187, 189, 195, 197, 203, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 225, 227, 234, 236, 237, 246, 248, 249, 259, 265, 271, 272, 275, 283, 284, 285, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 302, 307, 310, 318, 320, 331, 335 line, 4, 5, 7, 9, 12, 24, 31, 41, 46, 78, 84, 111, 114, 126, 155, 182, 183, 187, 196, 212, 232, 247, 258, 263, 283, 286, 297, 318, 321 living together, 235 local, xxiv, 18, 27, 47, 77, 83, 96, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 143, 145, 146, 148, 151, 153, 155, 157, 160, 165, 174, 200, 228, 229, 235, 236, 292, 296, 307, 308, 335

M management of subjectivity, 297 manifest, 10, 103, 151, 158 market, 19, 34, 47, 49, 110, 134, 136, 137, 141, 157, 164, 169, 181, 182, 199, 218, 219, 250, 293, 294, 295, 302, 305, 308 Marxist alienation, 284 Marxist wage slaves, 283 masquerade, 320, 325 Matan Israeli, 306, 308 material infrastructure, 46, 63 Medellín, vii, xix, 23, 30, 45, 289, 290, 291, 292, 294, 295, 297, 298, 299, 338 megamemory, 49 megastructures, 23, 57, 66 melancholy, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 328, 329, 330 mountains, 257, 261, 263, 265, 267, 269, 270, 271 multiple publics, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 100 multiplicity, xiii, xv, 9, 11, 13, 15, 36, 38, 76, 140, 144, 174, 187, 198, 224

N Naturgemälde, 257, 266, 269, 272, 273 Nazi holocaust, 319, 320, 327, 328 needs, 26, 81, 108, 171, 173, 187, 211, 231, 244, 245, 249, 250, 292, 311, 318, 320, 327 NEET, 278 neighborhood, xvi, 67, 140, 166, 228, 230, 232, 235, 236, 240, 306 neoliberal/neo-liberal, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xix, xxiv, 40, 41, 43, 91, 133, 135, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 157, 159, 164, 166, 177, 225, 253, 289, 291, 292, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 301, 302, 308, 309, 310, 313 neoliberal urbanism, x, xii, xiv, 133, 135, 140, 141, 177 neoliberalism, xi, xiii, xvii, xix, 73, 133, 135, 136, 139, 143, 145, 146, 158, 161, 163, 164, 176, 198, 289, 292, 294, 296, 297, 298 networks, 13, 23, 24, 28, 29, 48, 52, 67, 95, 104, 138, 151, 157, 158, 197, 199, 224, 228, 232, 247 New Order regime, 181, 182, 186 new spaces, 41, 42, 81, 84, 116, 225, 231, 244, 245 new worlds, 262 New York, vi, xvii, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 13, 14, 15, 18, 24, 30, 31, 43, 44, 55, 69, 86, 96, 97, 112, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 126, 127, 128, 142, 159, 160, 161, 176, 188, 204, 205, 206, 220, 221, 237, 238, 239, 240, 251, 252, 261, 272, 273, 287, 298, 299, 314, 315, 321, 327, 328, 329, 331, 338 non-citizens, 92, 184 non-discursive creative concept, 5 non-juridical right, 78, 79 non-regular workers, 276, 277, 278, 280, 281, 283 non-trivial systems, 57, 67 Nozick, Robert, xviii, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 220, 336

O oblivion, 284, 319 ontological reprogramming, 289, 297 ontology of the present, 226 ontotopology, vi, 223, 227 open, vi, xvi, 8, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 30, 39, 41, 46, 66, 67, 79, 87, 91, 92, 93, 101, 102, 106, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127,

344

Index

146, 149, 154, 165, 168, 169, 182, 183, 194, 197, 200, 202, 220, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229, 231, 234, 235, 236, 242, 252, 259, 265, 269, 270, 272, 306, 307, 317, 318, 323, 329, 331, 332, 338 open city, 17, 22, 23, 30 ordering, v, xvi, xxii, 9, 34, 36, 59, 99, 100, 102, 113, 205, 239 organizing systems, 59 other spaces, v, xvi, xx, xxi, xxiv, xxv, 5, 7, 13, 14, 42, 55, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 84, 85, 88, 97, 112, 116, 118, 122, 126, 128, 142, 144, 160, 179, 180, 188, 205, 224, 226, 227, 230, 238, 287, 318 overcrowding, 38, 39, 81

P performative, 78, 79, 80, 85, 121, 242, 244, 245, 250, 307 performativity, 78, 213, 244 peripheral urbanity(ies), v, 73, 75 peripheries, 27, 77, 224 perspective, 4, 17, 21, 25, 39, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70, 74, 79, 90, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 117, 160, 162, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 179, 180, 189, 195, 215, 224, 227, 228, 230, 231, 247, 262, 281, 333 pessimism, vii, xix, 317, 318, 327, 328 pharmacopornographic, 243, 244, 247, 248, 251, 252 pigeon, 185 place, xii, xv, xvi, xvii, 3, 6, 9, 18, 19, 23, 27, 29, 33, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 57, 58, 60, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 100, 105, 108, 110, 116, 120, 136, 138, 139, 140, 147, 153, 158, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 174, 175, 180, 181, 182, 186, 187, 188, 189, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200, 203, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217, 218, 228, 231, 235, 240, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 259, 262, 265, 268, 271, 272, 275, 276, 280, 281, 282, 285, 289, 290, 291, 293, 296, 297, 314, 318, 319, 320, 325, 327, 328 planning, x, xi, xxiv, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 25, 27, 30, 31, 36, 44, 47, 60, 69, 87, 99, 112, 113, 117, 118, 119, 126, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 145, 146, 149, 150, 158, 160, 161, 163, 176, 189, 228, 231, 238, 308, 314, 315, 333, 334, 335 platform capitalism, 57, 67, 69 platform urbanism, 66

Playboy, vi, xxiv, 206, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252 plaza, xviii, 23, 94, 119, 120, 121, 124, 126, 228, 234, 237, 238, 239 political agency, 79, 80 political emotions, 289, 290, 299 political project, xvii, xix, 139, 163, 165, 169, 170, 173, 210 pornography, 53, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205, 243, 244, 245, 249, 250, 253 pornotopia, xxiv, 198, 206, 241, 242, 243, 244, 248, 251, 252 post-capitalist societies, 242 post-disciplinary landscape, 12 postmetropolis, v, xv, xxv, 1, 45, 46, 47, 49, 54, 55, 240 post-modern radicalism, 133 post-modern urbanism, 134, 140, 141 postmodernism, x, 325 post-national, 144, 145, 146 power, vi, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, 14, 15, 26, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 53, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 91, 93, 94, 100, 110, 117, 124, 135, 137, 139, 142, 146, 159, 166, 168, 170, 171, 177, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 207, 213, 217, 220, 236, 237, 246, 247, 260, 289, 290, 291, 297, 310, 313, 319, 325, 328, 335 power relations, xiii, 77, 78, 79, 84, 100, 159, 166, 290 practices, xxiv, 5, 12, 13, 15, 25, 28, 33, 41, 49, 50, 54, 59, 74, 76, 91, 93, 100, 114, 128, 133, 135, 137, 145, 146, 150, 151, 158, 165, 168, 169, 173, 174, 198, 200, 202, 205, 223, 225, 228, 231, 236, 290, 291, 292, 293, 295, 297, 310, 313 Prada Tokyo headquarters, 125 Preciado, Paul B., vi, xviii, xxiv, 198, 206, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252 private, xi, xiii, xvi, xvii, xviii, 18, 20, 21, 25, 28, 29, 47, 67, 79, 81, 100, 108, 113, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 126, 127, 140, 141, 146, 150, 155, 158, 167, 171, 173, 187, 198, 199, 231, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 292, 299, 308, 310, 311 problematization, 5, 7, 10, 226 process, xi, xii, xvii, 7, 8, 17, 19, 21, 34, 47, 48, 61, 62, 65, 66, 81, 88, 91, 94, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 108, 111, 118, 145, 146, 154, 158, 164, 169, 170, 173, 197, 198, 220, 227, 244, 249, 263, 265, 267, 289, 290, 291, 310, 313, 319, 328 process of becoming, 8, 220, 227

345

Index process(es) of subjectivation, 223, 227 psycho-power, 53 public, v, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 13, 14, 15, 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 47, 54, 67, 70, 71, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118, 119, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 134, 135, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 150, 152, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 186, 196, 198, 201, 217, 226, 228, 229, 231, 234, 235, 236, 239, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 272, 280, 292, 293, 294, 299, 301, 302, 305, 306, 308, 309, 310, 311, 314, 319, 331, 333, 334 public space, v, x, xv, xvi, xviii, xxiv, 13, 14, 15, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 36, 47, 54, 71, 75, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 134, 159, 167, 168, 170, 173, 174, 226, 228, 231, 234, 236, 239, 242, 243, 247, 249, 250, 301, 302, 308, 309, 310, 311, 333, 334 public sphere, 70, 80, 83, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 145, 167, 249 pure openness, 126

Q queer theory, vi, xviii, 12, 207, 208, 209, 212, 219, 220 queer utopia, 207, 209, 210, 212, 214, 216, 217, 219 Queer Utopia, 217

R redefinition of spaces, 134 representation, 11, 51, 60, 61, 78, 87, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 110, 151, 167, 168, 171, 244, 245, 246, 249, 250, 251, 262, 265 revolution, xvii, xxiii, 28, 37, 90, 94, 96, 97, 137, 138, 142, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 189, 220, 239, 244, 249, 336 right to the city, vi, xi, xii, xv, xvi, xvii, 69, 73, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 95, 96, 136, 146, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 184, 226, 239, 334 roots, v, 33, 46 rumah hantu, 181

S salubrity, 38, 39 scientific, 4, 21, 22, 39, 59, 63, 116, 257, 258, 260, 262, 263, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 331, 335, 338 Seagram Building, 119, 120, 121, 126 self-produce, 41 self-transformation, 52 separation, vi, xi, xvi, 7, 18, 21, 48, 61, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 127, 137, 147, 268, 276, 312 Serres, Michel, 193, 194, 336 settler-colonialism, 144, 312, 313 sewage, 39 sex, 88, 91, 95, 193, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 208, 212, 242, 243, 245, 248, 250, 251, 252 sex worker, vi, 95, 193, 196, 198, 199, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 245, 250 sexuality, vi, xviii, 14, 50, 76, 80, 149, 193, 195, 198, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 209, 212, 216, 238, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251 sites of memory, 317, 319 Smart City, v, 25, 33, 39 social, v, ix, x, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xix, xx, xxii, xxiii, xxv, 4, 7, 9, 11, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 46, 48, 50, 51, 52, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102,103, 105, 108, 111, 113, 134, 135, 136, 137, 141, 144, 146, 148, 151, 154, 157, 159, 162, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181, 193, 196, 197, 199, 201, 202, 204, 205, 209, 210, 214, 216, 217, 218, 220, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 236, 239, 240, 242, 243, 246, 250, 251, 253, 276, 277, 278, 279, 284, 290, 291, 292, 294, 295, 298, 302, 305, 317, 327, 331, 333, 334, 335, 338 social cohesion, 23, 28, 164, 165, 173 social construct, 4 social empowerment, v, ix, xiv, 67, 68 social practice, 102, 146, 169, 175, 302 soil, vii, xix, 261, 301, 302, 307, 308, 309, 310, 313 space of poverty, 279, 286 space of presentation, 78 space tensioners, 318

346

Index

spaces of compensation, 195, 196 spaces of discontinuity, 73, 75, 82 spaces of illusion, 194, 195 spaces of transgression, xvi, 73, 75, 82 spaces of waiting, 75, 82, 83 spaces otherwise, 7, 8, 11, 12 spatial difference, xiv, xv, 3, 4, 13 spatiality, 7, 8, 74, 75, 83, 138, 229, 231, 232, 236, 242, 243 spectacle, 117, 127, 128, 140, 198, 242, 244, 246 Spookhuise, 181 squatter settlements, 183 Stiegler, Bernard 45, 46, 48, 51, 53, 55 strange, vi, 43, 275, 276, 281, 282, 284, 324, 328 street, xi, xxii, 41, 78, 104, 106, 113, 118, 119, 126, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 155, 161, 186, 228, 234, 235, 314 struggles, vi, xi, xxii, 87, 88, 92, 93, 163, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 217, 226, 231 Suharto, President, 186, 189 Surabaya, vi, xvii, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 336 surface heterotopias, v, 57

T temporality, 8, 138, 148, 230 terrestrial condition, 74 The 4 C City, 27 The Extension of The Jewish Museum, 321 The Factory, vi, xix, xxiv, 275, 276, 279, 280, 281, 286, 287 The Order of Things, 14, 58, 69, 77, 201, 205, 224, 324, 329 thinking otherwise, 4, 6, 7, 8 thought of difference, 10 topogeny(ies), 179, 184 topological, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 249 topologically continuous, 9

U un/disciplinarity, 4 underclass, xix, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 283, 284, 286, 287 undisciplined, v, 3, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14 undisciplined approaches, v, 3, 7, 11 undisciplined methodology, 13

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 80 urban citizenship, 143, 144, 145, 146, 158, 159 urban common, vi, xv, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 174, 175 urban condition, 74, 86, 333 urban intervention, 25, 223, 229, 235 urban life, 66, 138, 144, 145, 148, 151, 160, 171, 172, 173, 197, 227 urban management, 36, 38, 39, 60, 66 urban planning, x, xiv, 17, 18, 21, 22, 28, 36, 37, 40, 44, 115, 116, 117, 121, 122, 126, 133, 135, 136, 137, 139, 305, 334, 336 urban renewal, x, xxiv, 114, 143, 145, 157, 158, 314, 336 urban rooftop, 311 urban space, xi, xii, xvi, xvii, xxiii, 26, 29, 41, 42, 57, 60, 65, 73, 81, 90, 95, 100, 112, 114, 121, 126, 133, 135, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 168, 170, 197, 229, 235, 291, 331, 334, 335 urbanity, vi, 73, 77, 143, 145, 147, 158, 159, 160, 338 urbanization, 19, 46, 47, 84, 117, 170, 172, 173, 332 urbanizing, 18, 19, 173 utopia(s), vi, vii, ix, xv, xviii, xix, xxi, 19, 33, 41, 42, 43, 58, 69, 75, 77, 85, 89, 90, 96, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 157, 164, 165, 195, 207, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 224, 276, 281, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 307, 311, 312, 313, 327, 336

V virtual information technology, 45

W way of dwelling, 223 way of life, xi, 10, 42, 211, 289, 291, 292, 293, 294, 296 wild ground, 181, 183 working poor, 278, 279, 286, 287

X xenophobia, 84, 164

Index Z Zero. Home. Earth, xix, 302, 306, 307, 309 Zionist, 303, 305, 306, 308, 311, 312, 313

347 Zizek, 135, 139, 140, 142, 319, 320, 330 zoning law, 119 Zori, Tami, xix, 302, 303, 306, 307, 309, 310, 311, 313, 315