When we talked about utopia,
dystopia and heterotopia, we are actually talking about the different types of
a place. As you can see all of those three keywords consist of the word “top”.
The word “top”, also known as “topo” has the same meaning, they all mean “place”.
So, these words are basically talking about good and bad places.
The
first word that most of us are very familiar with is Utopia, which means
Good-place. The word literally refer to its meaning, it used to describe those wonderful
places such as the Garden of Eden or the Radiant City from Le Corbusier. They
are refers to a place that are very good to the society but yet most of them
are still imagination or unreal. While the heterotopia is like a reflection,
reflects us physically and mentally.
Similar
but complete different from Utopia is Dystopia. It means bad-place or the place
where they are not suitable for an ideal lifestyle. We can see in some movie as
well about the perspectives towards the concept of dystopia. The film called “Hunger
Games” is one of a great example of a bad place. The films narrowed us through different kinds
of topo, by showing two different societies, first one is a very utopia-like
city, which has a very luxury lifestyle. We can say that they are living in a
perfect world while there are also thirteen small districts that servers the
main city. Those districts are living with a very cruel lifestyle, in order to
keep the city going. This is an image of how a dystopia would look like.
So,
there are not just about place anymore, the detail goes beyond that and show
the complexity that a place can become. Both good and bad places are mainly
based on our perspectives and the lifestyle that those places can provide for
us.
