Heterotopic Urban [A]Destinations

Abstract

Different from the Utopias, normally treated as a unique projection of an ideal future, despite their multivalent potentiality of refusal, the heterotopies are always plural, multiple unique places in their existences; places at the margin of universal and universalizing logics. The term is connected to one of the discussions held by Foucault [1] on the existence of unique spaces, which dispositions in the society transform them in deviant or diachronic spaces in relation to the cultures, in which they are inserted. They are spaces administrated and managed according to quite specific laws, on the one hand, inverted images of the logic to which they belong or which they reflect; spatial differentiations resulting from the social realities and logics of which they are repressed and begin to illustrate in an inverted manner and, on the other hand, they take on the role and the chance to be spaces with a onto-teleologic dimension (existence and purpose) that may be disturbed by temporary situations capable of introducing other impermanent operating logics (events of heterochrony). Which were the logics that came as social and spatial becoming “with” the heterotopics places: The Viaduc des Arts in Paris, the Spitellau Viaduct in Wien, the High Line Park in New York and the still “hesitant” transformation of Elevado João Goulart, in São Paulo, into a park? Which infrastructural spectra are those which, when they return as antagonists of what they were or what they insist on being, deflagrate other sociabilities? What was expropriated from these infrastructures at the moment they returned and return, and are socially re-appropriated, according to another city-planning logic? What is in front of us and what is still to be seen as an urban and social phenomenon? This entity that returns is edited by visible and spectral forces, invisible, or by what is apparently beyond and beneath the thing, surrounding it, underlaying it but, even so and despite of it, already is or still is the thing itself.