Heterotopia and capitalism in architecture. The ideological function of heterotopias as own discours of the architectural discipline in the age of biopolitical governance

Abstract

Almost all the studies about Heterotopias undertaken in the field of architecture have focused on the identification or development of certain spaces as counter-sites, i.e., spaces able to put up resistance to the disciplinary techniques of an administrative power that normalises and controls individuals. By contrast, the present paper holds that, once the disciplinary conception of power has lead to biopolitics and completed the process of a real subsumption of society into capital, Heterotopias have begun to work unambiguously, optimising neoliberal relations of governance and production, losing the emancipatory power sometimes still ascribed to give way to their having an ideological and mystifying function for the power they purport to resist. Through the concept of Heterotopia, architects, urban planners and geographers continue to act as technicians in the service of capital, while nevertheless sincerely believing in the emancipatory power of their work.