From:

Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité

October, 1984;
(“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967
Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec)

Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias

MICHEL FOUCAULT

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its
themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the
ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the
menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential
mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics. 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. One
could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day
polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of
space. Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general
name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected
on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as
juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other—that makes
them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not
entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we
call time and what we call history.
Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form
the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space
itself has a history in Western experience, and it is not possible to disregard the
fatal intersection of time with space. One could say, by way of retracing this
history of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic
ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places: protected places and open,
exposed places: urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of
men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places as opposed to
the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place.
There were places where things had been put because they had been violently
displaced, and then on the contrary places where things found their natural
ground and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this
intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval
space: the space of emplacement.
This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real
scandal of Galileo’s work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that
the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and
infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to
be dissolved, as it were; a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its
movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely
slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century,
extension was substituted for localization.
Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had
replaced emplacement. The site is defined by relations of proximity between
points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or
grids. Moreover, the importance of the site as a problem in contemporary
technical work is well known: the storage of data or of the intermediate results of
a calculation in the memory of a machine, the circulation of discrete elements
with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the sounds
on a telephone line); the identification of marked or coded elements inside a set
that may be randomly distributed, or may be arranged according to single or to
multiple classifications.
In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises
for mankind in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living
space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men
in the world—a problem that is certainly quite important—but also that of
knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation,
marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given
situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes
for us the form of relations among sites.
In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally
with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to
us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the
elements that are spread out in space,
Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the
whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it,
contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified (apparently unlike
time, it would seem, which was detached from the sacred in the nineteenth
century). To be sure a certain theoretical desanctification of space (the one
signaled by Galileo’s work) has occurred, but we may still not have reached the
point of a practical desanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still
governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our
institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are
oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space
and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space
and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still
nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.
Bachelard’s monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists
have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the
contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly
fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our

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dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem
intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough,
encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space
from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or
space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while
fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should
like to speak now of external space.
The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which
the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and
gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not
live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We
do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we
live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one
another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.
Of course one might attempt to describe these different sites by looking
for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined. For example,
describing the set of relations that define the sites of transportation, streets, trains
(a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through
which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one
point to another, and then it is also something that goes by). One could describe,
via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined, the sites of temporary
relaxation—cafes, cinemas, beaches. Likewise one could describe, via its
network of relations, the closed or semi-closed sites of rest—the house, the
bedroom, the bed, et cetera. But among all these sites, I am interested in certain
ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites,
but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they
happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked
with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main
types.

HETEROTOPIAS

First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that
have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of
Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned
upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.
There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real
places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—
which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in
which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture,
are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are

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outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in
reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they
reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias,
heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these
heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the
mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror,
I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind
the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my
own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent:
such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror
does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I
occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place
where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it
were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the
other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my
eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. 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 it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be
perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.
As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described? What
meaning do they have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description—I do
not say a science because the term is too galvanized now—that would, in a given
society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and ‘reading’ (as some
like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of
simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this
description could be called heterotopology.

Its first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that
fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group. But the
heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely
universal form of heterotopia would be found. We can however class them in two
main categories.
In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia
that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or
forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to
the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents,
menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc. In out society, these
crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still
be found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or
military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first
manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place “elsewhere”

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than at home. For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a
tradition called the “honeymoon trip” which was an ancestral theme. The young
woman’s deflowering could take place “nowhere” and, at the moment of its
occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere,
this heterotopia without geographical markers.
But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being
replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in
which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or
norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of
course prisons, and one should perhaps add retirement homes that are, as it were,
on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of
deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation since in our
society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation.

The second principle of this description of heterotopias is that a society, as its

history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different
fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a
society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in
which it occurs, have one function or another.
As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery. The
cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces. It is a space that is
however connected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc.,
since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery. In western
culture the cemetery has practically always existed. But it has undergone
important changes. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was
placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. In it there was a hierarchy of
possible tombs. There was the charnel house in which bodies lost the last traces
of individuality, there were a few individual tombs and then there were the tombs
inside the church. These latter tombs were themselves of two types, either simply
tombstones with an inscription, or mausoleums with statues. This cemetery
housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in
modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become
‘atheistic,’ as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is
termed the cult of the dead.
Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the
resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was
not accorded to the body’s remains. On the contrary, from the moment when
people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it
is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is
ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any
case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right
to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the

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other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries
began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the
individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there
arises an obsession with death as an ‘illness.’ The dead, it is supposed, bring
illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right
beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this
proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness spread by the
contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century,
until, during the nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs
was initiated. The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and
immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark
resting place.

Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place

several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that
the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole
series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very
odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees
the projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example of
these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We must
not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a
thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The
traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring
together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world,
with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the
navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all
the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this
sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens
(the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic
perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The
garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world.
The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the
beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).

Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is

to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry,
heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men
arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows
us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual,
the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this
quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

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 From a general standpoint, in a society like ours heterotopias and
heterochronies are structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion.
First of all, there are heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, for example
museums and libraries, Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in
which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the
seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were
the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating
everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one
place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of
all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of
organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in
an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and
the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth
century.
Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time,
there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory,
precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not
oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques].
Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these’ marvelous empty sites on the
outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite
objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers, and so forth. Quite recently, a
new kind of temporal heterotopia has been invented: vacation villages, such as
those Polynesian villages that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and
eternal nudity to the inhabitants of the cities. You see, moreover, that through the
two forms of heterotopias that come together here, the heterotopia of the festival
and that of the eternity of accumulating time, the huts of Djerba are in a sense
relatives of libraries and museums, for the rediscovery of Polynesian life
abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the rediscovery of time, it is as
if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were accessible in a
sort of immediate knowledge.

Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing

that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic
site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as
in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit
to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make
certain gestures. Moreover, there are even heterotopias that are entirely
consecrated to these activities of purification—purification that is partly religious
and partly hygienic, such as the hammin of the Moslems, or else purification that
appears to be purely hygienic, as in Scandinavian saunas.
There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple
openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into the

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heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion—we think we enter where we
are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded. I am thinking for example, of the
famous bedrooms that existed on the great farms of Brazil and elsewhere in
South America. The entry door did not lead into the central room where the
family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had the right to open
this door, to enter into the bedroom and to sleep there for a night. Now these
bedrooms were such that the individual who went into them never had access to
the family’s quarter the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really
the invited guest. This type of heterotopia, which has practically disappeared
from our civilizations, could perhaps be found in the famous American motel
rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is
both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however
being allowed out in the open.

Sixth principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in
relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme
poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real
space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory
(perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we
are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is
other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is
messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not
of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not
functioned somewhat in this manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the
level of the general organization of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias. I am
thinking, for example, of the first wave of colonization in the seventeenth
century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in America and that
were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking of those extraordinary
Jesuit colonies that were founded in South America: marvelous, absolutely
regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved. The
Jesuits of Paraguay established colonies in which existence was regulated at
every turn. The village was laid out according to a rigorous plan around a
rectangular place at the foot of which was the church; on one side, there was the
school; on the other, the cemetery, and then, in front of the church, an avenue set
out that another crossed at right angles; each family had its little cabin along
these two axes and thus the sign of Christ was exactly reproduced. Christianity
marked the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental
sign.
The daily life of individuals was regulated, not by the whistle, but by the
bell. Everyone was awakened at the same time, everyone began work at the same
time; meals were at noon and five o’clock, then came bedtime, and at midnight

8
came what was called the marital wake-up, that is, at the chime of the churchbell,
each person carried out her/his duty.
Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we
think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place,
that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to
the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel
to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures
they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been
for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great
instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today),
but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is
the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up,
espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

This text, entitled “Des Espace Autres,” and published by the French
journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was
the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967.
Although not reviewed for publication by the author and thus not part
of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was relaeased into
the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel
Foucault’s death. Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec.