Foucault’s Concept of Heterotopia as an Èpistemé for Reading the Post-Modern City: The Viennese Example

Abstract

“The postmodern city is a myth, a tale, a telling, a poignant narrative that builds on the past to continually new horizons… The postmodern city is not only an epitomizing model of contemporary social and economic development, but also a metaphysical reality, a place where the real and the imagined are persistently commingled in ways we have only begun to understand…” (Chambers, 1990; Soja 2000). Normative notions on the city have to be dissected as an intersection of the near and the far order of urban societies (Lefebvre, 1996) and as fluid conceptualizations in a heterochronical context. However, cities similarly have to be read as “thirdspaces” (Soja, 1996)—contestations of mythical and real urban spaces and places, continuously re-interpreted and endowing urban spaces and places with even transient meanings. The paper seeks to grasp Foucault’s notions on heterotopia as a theoretical framework and èpistemé for approaching these “thirdspaces”—in-between the social relations and their inscriptions into the material reality of cities.