The High Line, a new park on an old elevated railway on Manhattan, is an otherworldly space that invites an understanding in terms of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. However, this often-used term requires critical reflection, particularly to extend it beyond the immediately spatial to include the realm of the discursive. To this end, an analysis of the High Line is paired with a reading of a similarly different space in Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Balloon.” Bringing together a real park and a literary space shows how Foucault’s concept requires combining the focus on the spatial in “Of Other Spaces” with the focus on structural order in The Order of Things, if it is to be used for understanding not just theoretical or fictional but also actual spaces.
This chapter examines an aesthetic clash in the neighbourhood of Bos en
Lommer in Amsterdam. One side of the street features decorated satellite
dishes attached to social housing, which constitutes a battleground
for otherness. Such dishes are broadly opposed in Dutch public and
institutional discourse for being “ugly,” which amounts to xenophobia
expressed in aesthetic terms. Opposite is a disused school building recently
converted to an art-space-cum-hostel called WOW Amsterdam, a “creative
incubator” that injects aesthetic difference and thereby the politics
of gentrification into the area through foregrounding art, fashion and
consumption. I argue that this clash shows how aesthetics are politics,
and that the newly-inserted global gentrification aesthetic – following
the creative incubator formula – displaces the aesthetics, and politics, of
the battle for otherness across the street.
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