Heterotopia and the utopian project

Abstract

Utopias and their architectural embodiment. The ‘Heritage Utopia’. The chapter focuses on one of the main identifying features of heterotopia: its utopian coding. The utopian vision is able to ‘describe’ the social ordering in which it emerges, encapsulating its features—the good, the bad and the desired. As Foucault explains, heterotopias and heterotopic spaces are the materialized instances of such utopian impulses, projections and ideals. Several architectural materializations of utopias and their orderings are explored (Boullée, Ledoux, Fourier, Buckingham, Godin, Owen, Howard, Sitte and Unwin, Wright, Sant’Elia, Soleri), along with their inherent derivatives or hybrids—the spaces that inherit the coding of the model and with it its heterotopic coordinates. Although utopian projections gradually become more focused on the built form, imagining various ‘functionings’ of the tripartite mechanism (community, built form, production), they remain incapable to solve the issues addressed and to initiate new orderings. More than often these imperfectly materialized utopias remain one of a kind “laboratories” of unfulfilled idealized orderings, and in time become the subjects of heritage listing. Assessing these materialized utopias from a heritage perspective, heritage itself reveals its utopian encoding. Cultural heritage-as-utopian-projection is explored along with its potential heterotopic features, its translation into material manifestations entailing a heterotopic functioning. Focusing the analysis on the built heritage object, the impact of heritage listing is addressed as the main trigger of heterotopic functioning.