Manhattan as a heterotopia

I was trying to think of other examples of heterotopia and the first thing I thought of was art school. Then I went to New York for a few days and decided that Manhattan is (in a sense) a heterotopia. It fits the criteria that Foucault lists.

Foucault’s sixth principle is that heterotopias have to “function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles.” I was thinking particularly of the way in which Manhattan exists physically inside America but has become symbolic of something else. From the inner depths of the continent, it is viewed as an “other” space. In the town I grew up in, Ames Iowa, New York was this place that a person could go to pursue another type of life. If one did not want to get married at a young age and raise a family, if one was slightly strange or different or exciting or weird, one could go to New York. If a person could manage to divorce his or herself from the landscape and nature so integral to Iowa, he or she could move to the city.

Foucault mentions that heterotopias “presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.” And that “in general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place.” I think the same could be said of Manhattan, an island city where the sheer cost of living and even visiting is enough to keep one out. I remember when I lived in New York feeling that every person in the city was fighting to stay in as the city was trying to spit him or her out.

“The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several places” This is certainly true of Manhattan where one often has the feeling of walking through a gigantic shopping mall as every street is crowded with ads of utopia for sale. On the streets of New York, there is an illusion (believed by many) that happiness can be purchased. There is something distinctly unreal about Manhattan, a city that has recently begun to hide its problems dangerously well.

Heterotopias are also “linked to slices in time”, which is certainly true in Manhattan. Manhattan is a city of trends, the most modern city in the country in terms of fashion and technology, cell phones were everywhere in New York before my parents had one in Iowa. I am not sure if it is a heterotopia of illusion or of compensation, but perhaps it is both.