The topos

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.