"Of Other Spaces"

Foucault talks about two types of arrangements: utopia and heterotopia, in his article “Of Other Spaces”. These arrangements are of special interest to him- they are endowed with the unusual quality of being connected with all other spaces but in such a way that they either abolish or reverse the groups of relations they shape. I was mostly drawn to his example of gardens as the oldest forms of heterotopia, as microcosms of species, and as the smallest parcels of the world in their totality.
Gardens were always optimistic reflections of the world, the liminal spaces between the known and unknown, matter and aether. As Foucault says they are capable of juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Gardens have the power to put different spaces and locations, mutually not joinable, into direct relations, in an actual location. The garden is a microcosm that represents symbolic perfection in its heterogeneity.
Another one of Foucault’s statements that was of particular interest to me was that heterotopias are real, actual spaces that represent a kind of reversed arrangements in relation to utopias: locations outside all locations. They begin to function at the moment when the link between time and space begins to break down and we must find a sort of order or purpose in the world surrounding us.