I do not remember when exactly I came up with the word alterotopia. It must have been around 2015, when I was deep into researching social innovation and ecovillages[i]. I felt the need to invent this word, because I felt triggered by the concept of ‘utopia’, both in its bright and dark sides. One the one hand, utopia bears associations with many inspiring literatures and writings (e.g. Erik Olin Wright on ‘Real Utopias’). At the same time, there is something deeply problematic and troubling about utopia, how the word gets (mis)used at times, and how utopian initiatives often fail or make matters even worse.  At this intersection of inspiration and discomfort around utopia, I started thinking about other ‘topias’.

I came up with the word altertopia to loosely and simply mean ‘places of change’, combining the Greek ‘topia’ for places, and the word ‘alterar’ from Latin and my mother tongue Portuguese, which means ‘to change’[ii].

This idea of alterotopia was partly inspired by Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’, which he introduced in relation with the more known word of ‘utopia’: a place that is too perfect to exist, i.e. a no-place. As formulated by Foucault, utopias “present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces”[iii]. In contrast, Foucault proposes heterotopias as places of difference, places that are different from what we consider a normal place, and by being existing as different places they are helping to confirm what is a normal place[iv]. Examples that Foucault gives are hospitals, elderly homes, prisons and cemeteries – these kind of places confirm, by their sheer existence, that our ‘normal’ places in society are free of illness, crime and death.

The concept of heterotopia has been used to study phenomena such as social movements and alternative initiatives, like e.g. ecovillages, as places of difference. I found these interpretations fascinating and inspiring. However, an underlying tragedy of heterotopias is that they have a dialectic relation with mainstream society, in the sense that by being ‘different’, they are confirming the dominant norm of what is considered ‘normal’.

 With the notion of alterotopia I wanted to focus on a different idea, namely that of places of change. So rather than referring to unattainable perfection (utopia) or difference (heterotopia) as a fixed state at a particular point in time, I wanted alterotopia to refer to places where things are constantly in flux and changing over time.

Initially, the word alterotopia was conceived as a prompt for creative writing, where the thought experiment was: what if we tell a story not from the perspective of human actors, but rather from the perspective of a place, like a valley, a root system or a rock in the ocean, where we use the longevity of this place to tell a story of how things have changed, and how things have remained the same, over a long period of time.

Whether or not a place is an altorotopia is a matter of degree, perspective and interpretation. Most places in the world have seen many changes. At the same time, so many elements, in most places, have remained the same. The notion of alterotopia is a lens to highlight places in terms of their constant change and state of flux and becoming, or rather: as constantly oscillating between stability and change.

Imagining the futures of the word alterotopia

So far the origin story of how the word alterotopia emerged in my life about 10 years ago. In the meantime, many things have changed, while others have remained the same, much like the idea of alteropia emphasizes. Just as important as reflecting on the origins of the word alteropia, it is important to reflect on its many possible futures.

What has stayed the same over the last 10 years, is my dream to use the idea of alterotopia for creative writing. In the near future, I aspire to write short stories that use the idea of alterotopia (even if not using the word in itself).

In more recent years, I have also contemplated the potential value of alterotopia as an academic concept and research method to do systematic and interdisciplinary research on how a places have changed over time, not just in terms of human behaviour and relations, but also in terms of all other more-than-human beings and materialities, both natural and artefactual.

Political theory and social sciences have an interesting, almost ironic, tendency to analyse the world, either in static and structuralist terms, or in terms of individual experience. Perhaps it has something to do with the dominant anthropocentric perspective, where agency is human and where everything that is beyond human appears to be un-changeable. However, if we turn the perspective around, for instance if we imagine to ‘see’ from the perspective of a building or a tree that has been there for centuries, we might see how volatile and changeable the world around us really is. So, paradoxically, by seeing from the perspective of things that seem relatively static to us (e.g. a building or a rock), we might see a static world become fluid and liquid.

Last but certainly not least, alterotopia as word has grown into something that is much bigger than its origins, and gains a life of its own. It was through the creative encounter with Marijke that we come up with the idea of Alterotopia as an initiative (with capital A) that aims to create a place and a website. Before this creative encounter with Marijke, alterotopia was just an internal dream and idea in my head, that I hardly dare share with the world.

In this place called Alterotopia, we explore other places and our world as assemblages of alterotopias. In that process, the original meaning of the word alterotopia also starts to shift and morph and develop in and of itself. In addition to her artistic practice, Marijke has applied her philosophy background to explore alterotopia as an approach, or even a philosophy, at a level that I could never have imagined.

The futures are unknown, and so are the journeys that the word alterotopia will travel. The one thing I do know is that word, its meaning and application, will change in so many ways, while some elements will remain, just like to word itself describes.