Michel Foucault introduces the idea of ‘heterotopias’ in his essay ‘of other spaces‘. In this work he first establishes that the present epoch will be the epoch of space: of simultaneity, juxtaposition, near and far, side by side and dispersed.
This pronouncement bodes well for geography as a discipline, but perhaps not for GIS. Foucault, as with other authors who could be thought to be ‘poststructuralist’, is against a determistic views of time and space; a view most evident in GIS where order in space is established through data structures and explicit object hierarchies. However, he also notes that the current understanding of places as ‘sites’ is linked to contemporary technologies.
Sites themselves don’t constitute space or place however, space and place are constructed by the relationships between sites. Thus GIS may have the capability to manage sites- which deal with the relationships and proximity between different objects as defined by structures (series, trees or grids) as well as the demographic issue of placing and attributing things within a site, i.e. siting- but not space and place itself.
Foucault defines heterotopias as sites which relate to all other sites, but suspect, neutralise and invert the relations that they have- basically a site which is linked ot all others but inherently contradict them. Foucault gives examples of heterotopias as sites such as hospitals, schools, cemetaries etc – sites in which societal norms are replaced by another norm which has the effect of challenging and inverting the societal norm and creates instead an ‘unreal space’. Another way of thinking of a heterotopia is as a reflection in a mirror- the image you see is a real place, but reflected to a virtual location and thus inverted.
From this, it is clear to see that we can think of GIS as heterotopias. Any given GIS, depending on the work that it is being used for, contains a set of sites that exist in the real world, but which, within the GIS, are reflections. These reflections are not real places, but abstractions and generalisations of real places projected in an absolute, virtual, space.
Foucault goes onto define some of the properties of heterotopias, most of which apply to GIS. Most heterotopias are heterotopias of deviation, this can be seen to be the case in GIS where norms of societies are replaced by mathematical and geometrical norms, similarly (as discussed in Pavlovskaya, 2006 and 2009 in a previous post) heterotopias are remade by societies as they change, as indeed are GIS. A heterotopia, like a GIS, is often linked to slices in time, taking everything up to a certain point, or simply taking a moment; it is this charactersitic in GIS that means that it has trouble handling temporal data. Heterotopias have rights of entry and are not freely accessible, perhaps this is also true of GIS which require a different way of conceptualising space to the norm. Perhaps the most important aspect though is the following: a heterotopia is a space which is ‘other’, it can be seen as the mirrored ‘perfect’ space- as well ordered as our real space is disordered. Thus the GIS cements its position as a tool for interpreting the conceptual model of our world, in doing this it is the ‘heterotopia of compensation’.
postscript: I’ve recently been reading Generation A by Douglas Coupland, the novel really dovetails together the ideas of unreality in things like maps and earth-observation images and the challenging of societal norms. The insight is similar and conguent with viewing GIS as a heterotopia.
