ancient cities

spaces surrounding it. However, the difference presented
by heterotopia is not essential to that place.
Instead, heterotopia is foremost an ambiguous, variable,
and dynamic site that incites (re-)consideration
and (re-)negotiation of sociospatial norms. The concept
has therefore been deployed by critical theorists,
architects, and geographers to interrogate the
ways in which social norms and differences are built
into particular places. Most important, the concept
of heterotopia has been interpreted creatively to
theorize new forms of thinking and living differently
grounded in ordinary everyday spaces (rather
than in utopian plans).
The variable usage of the term heterotopia
should initially be considered with reference to
Foucault’s theoretical corpus. First, Foucault’s
direct treatment of heterotopia was inconsistent
and unfinished, represented by merely one book
chapter and a short lecture. The preliminary nature
of Foucault’s discussion means that its usage varies,
as does the degree to which his original texts
are read literally rather than metaphorically.
Second, although Foucault’s influence on geography
and urban studies is widespread, his theorization
of space remained underdeveloped. Hence,
critics have warned against a literal and simplistic
reading of heterotopias as physical, locatable sites
(Foucault offers examples such as asylums and
cemeteries), which can be compared with other
“normal” sites. Third, in overcoming this danger,
heterotopia can be more usefully aligned with
Foucault’s writings on power, difference, and discourse.
Foucault was concerned with ways in
which normative political power was exercised
(and resisted) through small-scale social practices
and structures. More complex deployments have
thus asserted that heterotopia provides a space
or rupture—conceptual–discursive as well as
literal—that can unsettle expected conventions.
Heterotopia provide(s) a methodological tool,
therefore, to effect contestations of normative
political power.
Since the 1990s, heterotopia has figured relatively
prominently in Anglo-American urban
studies. Conceptually, it has been related to contemporaneous
writings on otherness and marginality
(e.g., those of Henri Lefebvre and the
Situationists). Much empirical research on heterotopia
has aligned the concept with postmodern
urbanism and in particular with the place-specific
Hip Hop
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emergence of new spatial expressions of power in
Los Angeles. Elsewhere, the concept has enabled
sophisticated readings of the idealistic, aesthetic,
and commercial imperatives that inform new urban
developments as diverse as the Las Vegas Strip and
gated communities in postapartheid South Africa.
Finally, the term has been used to identify alternate
and unpredictable forms of (largely urban) utopian
experimentation that shed new light on the historical
processes inherent to the emergence of modernity.
Heterotopia remains contested—indeed, its
boundaries with both nonheterotopian and utopian
spaces are still blurry. Yet, this ambiguity is its
greatest strength: the power of spatial practice and
discourse to unsettle convention and to evoke alternative
forms of living.
Peter Kraftl
See also Lefebvre, Henri; Los Angeles School of Urban
Studies; Situationist City; Soja, Edward W.; Urban
Theory
Further Readings
Hetherington, K. 1997. The Badlands of Modernity:
Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge.
Soja, E. 1996. Thirdspace. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
HiP Ho P
Hip hop, like any historical process, has shifting
meanings over time. At one scale, it is the global
transmission of the localized cultural practices of
urban Black and Latino youth in the United States.
At another, it is the persistent reconfiguration of
these gestures by global participants in locally
situated contexts. At another scale, hip hop is a
kind of diaspora, a condition of the dispossessed
and dislocated. As Alex Weheliye points out, hip
hop links those excluded from the nation-state to
a global citizenship where alternative belonging,
desire, and imagination can be expressed. At yet
another scale, hip hop is an effect of unbalanced
power relations. Like other U.S. forms of material
and ideological culture, hip hop is mediated across
the globe, creating varying degrees of friction and
synergy with indigenous cultural traditions. Last,