Ordinary as Heterotopia
Ordinary as Heterotopia
Walking as a method for discovery is best suited for observing odd, ordinary, or in-between landscapes. In Rome I’m drawn to these types of places, over historical monuments, because there is an intrigue in vaguely defined moments, and a beauty in the messiness that you discover if you take a closer look. I love how these places are appropriated for expression or overtaken by non-human life. The otherness of these spaces is often driven by large urban moves, like infrastructure, geological constraints, topography, tensions between public and private, or cultural expressions and community values.[1] J.B. Jackson wrote about this notion, harkening to “reading” the everyday American landscape and what it can tell us.[2] The product of this Jacksonian way of seeing reveals a vibrancy and consciousness in every part of a city.[3] As landscape architects, recognizing the value in uncanny spaces hones the ability to read how embedded site layers affect experiential qualities in landscapes, and is critical for capturing the whole story of a place.[4] Furthermore, these vague zones are not legible in surveys or with GIS, they must be experienced by being there, inherently seeing, feeling, touching, smelling, drawing or photographing.[5] Acknowledging and romanticizing these experiences and spaces, allows me to be inspired by them and to create within them.
While I believe that intuition guides how we feel in odd or uncanny places (and just being in a place is a relevant form of site analysis!), many philosophers and researchers have tried to describe more concrete mechanisms by which a space is perceived as in-between. Approaches to understanding spaces of other are described in many terms: loose space refers to how spaces are used in ways that were not originally intended.[6] Homi Bhadha, and later Edward Soja described Third Space in urban theory speaking specifically to the triad of building, perceiving, and experiencing space.[7] And heterotopia, literally meaning “other place”, a term popularized by Michel Foucault refers not simply to perception but to real spaces with vague or overlapping meanings.[8] While Foucault’s use of the term describes heterotopias as counter-sites, contested, or inverted types of spaces, the term has also been used broadly in research to establish analytical paradigms for interpreting spiritual spaces, postcolonial landscapes, cemeteries, prisons, spatial justice, and gender studies, among many others.[9], [10] I believe heterotopia (or loose space, or thirdspace) is a rich starting point for a project about walking because it establishes a framework by which others have seen hard-to-define spaces and a lens through which they can be interpreted.[11],[12] This paradigm of research spans so many disciplines, and it speaks to the spaces themselves, meaning so much to different people and societies. This multiplicity establishes a curious and rich opportunity for drawing experiments that question modes of representation.
Drawing Difference
At this point in the project, maybe less than halfway through, a lot is still in process. What I have established, along with expanding the paradigm of in-between, is a curiosity towards a particular set of themes. As Rome is massively complex, this project can’t possibly cover the entire breadth of layers overlapping within the city. Rather than telling you the whole history of Rome, I’m focusing this project on how infrastructure, plants, and time interact. Each of these layers has a rich potential for deeper research discoveries along the way and my analysis focuses on how these themes can inspire ways of making. The hope is that these drawings capture enough of my experience in Rome to paint a picture of the place and how traveling can impact the way landscape architects see, but also allow for flexibility and change (and fun!) to occur during the trip. After seeing how the project evolves, and the way in which walks and drawings are created, I will analyze the experiential layer that establishes the uniqueness of each drawing.
The next blog post (out now!) shares my musings on drawing practice and experiments.
——————————————————————————————————————————————-
[1] Johnson, Peter. “The Geographies of Heterotopia.” Geography Compass 7, no. 11 (2013): 790–803. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12079.
[2] Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
[3] Meinig, D. W., and John Brinckerhoff Jackson. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
[4] Ibid. 4-5
[5] Ibid. 4-5
[6] Franck, Karen, and Quintin Stevens. Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life. 1st ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2007.
[7] Wiley.com. “Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places | Wiley.” Accessed February 28, 2023. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Thirdspace%3A+Journeys+to+Los+Angeles+and+Other+Real+and+Imagined+Places-p-9781557866745.
[8] Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.
[9] Maier, Harry O. “Soja’s Thirdspace, Foucault’s Heterotopia and de Certeau’s Practice: Time-Space and Social Geography in Emergent Christianity.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 38, no. 3 (145) (2013): 76–92.
[10] Johnson, Peter. “The Geographies of Heterotopia.” Geography Compass 7, no. 11 (2013): 790–803. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12079.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Talamini, Gianni, Caterina Villani, David Grahame Shane, Francesco Rossini, and Melody Hoi-lam Yiu. “Of Other Waterfront Spaces: Mixed Methods to Discern Heterotopias.” Landscape Research 0, no. 0 (November 29, 2022): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2022.2147492.
Bibliography
Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.
Franck, Karen, and Quintin Stevens. Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life. 1st ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2007.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Johnson, Peter. “The Geographies of Heterotopia.” Geography Compass 7, no. 11 (2013): 790–803. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12079.
Maier, Harry O. “Soja’s Thirdspace, Foucault’s Heterotopia and de Certeau’s Practice: Time-Space and Social Geography in Emergent Christianity.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 38, no. 3 (145) (2013): 76–92.
Meinig, D. W., and John Brinckerhoff Jackson. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996.
Talamini, Gianni, Caterina Villani, David Grahame Shane, Francesco Rossini, and Melody Hoi-lam Yiu. “Of Other Waterfront Spaces: Mixed Methods to Discern Heterotopias.” Landscape Research 0, no. 0 (November 29, 2022): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2022.2147492.