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Abstract

In this text Foucault centers his reflection on "outside" space, understood as "the space in which we live". Outside spaces could be classified and described according to theset of relations by which they are defined, such as places of passage like trains, of stopping off sites like coffee houses, beaches or cinemas, of closed or semienclosed resting spaces like the house or the dormitory. Nevertheless the author is interested in those spaces which, although they are related to all the others, contradict them and proposes a "reading" of these different spaces, these "other" places as "a species of simultaneously mythical and real responses to the spaces where we live". Foucault classifies these other spaces in two types: che utopias and the "heterotopias". The utopias are unreal places, "the same society perfected". However, the "heterotopias" are real places, counterplaces in which the other real locations are simultaneously represented, responded to and invested in. An example miseof these spaces in contemporary societies are the "heterotopias" of deviation, "those spaces where individuáis are placed whose behavior is deviant in relation to the average or the expected norm , for example jails or psychiatric hospitals.