This essay has been inspired in its entirety by the following passage:
“I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror.
The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.
But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.” - Michele Foucault
The corridor between Madrid’s Chamartín station and the metro smells like burned sugar and piss. Every time. Twenty-three years of passing through and the scent hasn’t changed—just the shoes that carry me.
Foucault wrote about heterotopias. Other-spaces. Places that sit inside reality but operate by different rules. The cemetery that holds all time at once. The ship that exists nowhere while crossing everywhere. The theater where impossible places stack on a single stage.
But he missed something.
There are spaces that only exist when you’re moving through them.
Heterotopodos, places that form beneath your feet and dissolve behind you, held together solely by the act of passage.
The underpass near Atocha station, 1994.
My father walked three steps ahead, always. The fluorescent lights hummed at a frequency that made my back teeth ache. Graffiti tags I couldn’t make sense of yet.
The space stretched longer than its actual meters, a tunnel that expanded with the duration of being fourteen and following your father’s tense shoulders through crowds of strangers.
I tried retracing this year.
The underpass is gone now, replaced by glass and tile. But even before they demolished it, I’d walked through as an adult and found nothing.
Just a short connection between two platforms. The heterotopodos had collapsed the moment I stopped being the kid who needed to keep up.
These spaces hold rules that shift:
You cannot photograph a heterotopodos successfully. The image always looks like an ordinary hallway, stairwell, bridge. The camera doesn’t travel through it the way flesh does.
You cannot stand still inside one. Try stopping mid-crossing on Lisbon’s Dom Luís I Bridge at sunset, surrounded by tourists doing exactly that. Feel how the space rejects stillness. Your legs twitch. Something in your inner ear protests.
The heterotopodos requires motion to maintain its borders.
You cannot return to the same one. The space beneath the overpass where one kissed someone in 2001 exists for nobody now. Not even yourself, though your mouth still remembers the mint gum she chewed and the rumble of trucks overhead.
The heterotopodos dissolved when you stopped mid-kiss and became two people standing on concrete instead of two bodies suspended in the particular gravity of seventeen.
Dublin’s Liffey boardwalk at 3 AM. I’m walking off drunkenness, or into it. The direction doesn’t matter when your feet are moving.
The river sounds different when you’re alone, louder somehow, as if it only fully exists for solitary walkers. The metal planks hold my weight differently than they do during daylight crowds.
This is temporary architecture. Not the boardwalk itself, which is permanent enough. But the space between me and the black water below, the space around my moving body—that space only exists right now, for these footsteps, in this particular configuration of exhaustion and the smell of river salt and the distant laugh of drunk people I can’t see.
A heterotopodos.
Someone else walks this same boardwalk tomorrow morning and experiences different geometry entirely. Their feet touch the same wood but occupy different space.
Airports are the obvious example, but too easy.
Yes, the departure lounge operates outside normal time and place, Foucault probably loved them.
But focus instead on the walking: those long corridors between gates, moving sidewalks that give the illusion of rest while your body still travels.
The heterotopodos exists in the stride itself.
In the moment when your weight shifts from rear foot to front. The half-second when both feet touch ground. The space generated by the rhythm of walking - left, right, left- that creates a bubble of altered reality around the moving body.
Pilgrims understood this without naming it.
The Camino de Santiago isn’t the roads and hostels.
It’s the space that forms around you while walking it, the days that stop counting normally, the way your identity loosens somewhere past Roncesvalles and reconstitutes differently with each step.
You’re not the same person at the end because the heterotopodos you walked through changed the material you’re made of.
My son is three. Yesterday he refused to walk on cracks in the sidewalk. Not the game, real terror. “The floor is broken there,” he said. “I’ll fall into the break.”
He sees the heterotopodos more clearly than I do now.
Those cracks aren’t just concrete imperfections. They’re genuine ruptures when you’re a meter tall and the world is still teaching you its rules. The space above a crack operates differently. Your foot might go through. You might.
He’ll forget this in a year. Learn that cracks are just cracks. But right now, his small body creates heterotopodos with every careful step around the broken places. And he’s not wrong.
The space is different there, in that moment, for him.
Stairwells hold them. Especially the concrete ones in parking garages, train stations, apartment blocks built in the 70s. The echo changes halfway down. Your breathing sounds external. The light falls wrong between floors—neither the illumination from above nor below fully reaching the landing where you pause to check your phone.
Stand still on that landing too long and the heterotopodos spits you out.
You become just someone loitering in a stairwell.
But catch it mid-descent, feel how the space folds around your moving body, and you’re somewhere else entirely. Nowhere you could map.
I think about the paths worn into grass by repeated foot traffic.
The way desire creates trails where architects didn’t place sidewalks. But more than that: the space above those worn paths becomes different.
The air molecules remember the thousands of feet that passed through. When you walk a desire path, you’re traveling through accumulated movement, through the ghost-space of every previous walker.
A heterotopodos that gets deeper with use.
The problem with describing these spaces is that language wants to locate them.
Wants to say “the bridge” or “the underpass” or “the corridor.”
But heterotopodos don’t have fixed positions. They manifest in relation to moving bodies and dissolve when motion stops.
You know them when you’re inside them.
That particular quality of being between, not the metaphor of transition, but the actual spatial experience of passage.
The texture of air that only exists when you’re cutting through it with your stride. The sound your shoes make on surfaces that seem to hold their breath while you cross.
Today I’ll cycle home from work instead of taking the tram. Not for exercise or fresh air - though I’ll claim both if asked. But because there’s a stretch of street, two or three blocks long, between the old slaughterhouse and the new library, where something shifts when I’m alone and moving at exactly this pace.
The heterotopodos will form around me like water around a moving hand. It will exist for the duration of my passage. Behind me, it will collapse back into ordinary pavement and streetlights.
And tomorrow someone else will walk those same three blocks and experience completely different architecture. Their feet will touch the same stones but occupy other space.
Foucault mapped the heterotopias, the ships and mirrors, the cemeteries and gardens. Fixed other-spaces with addresses and opening hours.
But beneath our feet, in the rhythm of walking, temporary geographies bloom and vanish with each step. Spaces that exist only in motion. Only in passage.
We’ve been moving through them all our lives without names for them.
I’m calling them heterotopodos.
The spaces that only exist beneath moving feet.