Highgate Cemetery Heterotopia: A Creative Counterpublic Space

Abstract

Highgate Cemetery is nominally presented as a heterotopia, constructed, and theorized through the articulation of three “spaces.” First, it is configured as a public space which organizes the individual and the social, where the management of death creates a relationship between external space and its internal conceptualization. This reveals, enables, and disturbs the sociocultural and political imagination which helps order and disrupt thinking. Second, it is conceived as a creative space where cemetery texts emplace and materialize memory that mirrors the cultural capital of those interred, part of an urban aesthetic which articulates the distinction of the metropolitan elite. Last, it is a celebritized counterpublic space that expresses dissent, testimony to those who have actively imagined a better world, which is epitomized by the Marx Memorial. Representation of the cemetery is ambiguous as it is recuperated and framed by the living with the three different “spaces” offering heterotopic alliances.

Heterotopic sites of knowledge production: Notes on an architectural analysis of lecture halls

“…The ongoing body of literature informed by Foucault’s concept of heterotopia can be categorized in three distinct approaches: studying a specific case following Foucault’s examples and asserting it to be a heterotopia (Clements, 2017; Lees, 1997; Mohammadzadeh Kive, 2012), adding to Foucault’s list and seeking to prove a particular spatial example to be a heterotopia (Bowers, 2018; Lou, 2007); and finally, describing what heterotopic spaces can do, rather than what they are, while reinterpreting this Foucauldian concept and deploying it to rethink a contemporary situation (Beckett et al, 2017; Boyer, 2008; Wesselman, 2013). This article follows the last approach, that is, to analyze the spatial configurations of a number of lecture halls in educational environments and investigate their heterotopic potentials rather than presenting them as absolute heterotopia.…”