"Everything will be different": city picnic as heterotopia

Foucault's lecture "Of Other Spaces", which was delivered in 1967 and remained unpublished until 1984, was extremely influential for space and place studies and even became a manifesto of the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences. The term "heterotopia", introduced in this lecture, has had a great impact on many different fields from urban sociology and human geography to cultural anthropology and literary theory but also has been criticized for opacity, inconsistence and incoherence. This article presents first results of the research project that tries to concretize and operationalize the concept of heterotopia and aims to demonstrate how it can be used in research on new Russian urban culture phenomena. Using interdisciplinary methodology that combines Foucauldian heterotopology with Erving Goffman's frame theory, I undertake a case study of Omsk annual DIY urban public event called City Picnic to analyze how particular "other space" manifests itself and how it is being conceptualized by its creators and visitors. These research questions were answered by means of discourse analysis supplemented with some traditional cognitive-linguistic methods such as cognitive modelling and mapping, semantic category analysis, prototype analysis, and conceptual metaphor analysis. Data collected for discourse analysis includes various verbal and visual texts about 2012, 2013 and 2014 City Picnics: (1) posts, comments and discussions on its official website, in its group on social networking service "VKontakte", and in blogs; (2) media publications; (3) City Picnic logotypes, posters, banners, and maps; (3) photographs and photoshopped images made by City Picnic coordinators, members, visitors and journalists; (4) "spatial text" (zoning and design of the City Picnic territory). As a result, City Picnic was described as a space that exhibits the following heterotopological characteristics: otherness, alterity, and deviance; heterogeneity and diversity; contesting and inverting of the real spaces and places; compensatory intention; heterochronism; combination of eternitary and chronic heterotopias; concentration and representation of other spaces, places, practices and cultures; fractality; semi-publicness; being the other of the political and the other of the economical. The article concludes with the outline of further directions of City Picnic heterotopology that will require analysis of its para-political potential and discussion of the public space commodification problem as well as its framing / misframing mechanisms study that will shed light on the process of "reading" heterotopia.

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