From heterotopia to alloútopia : more-than-human geographies of Singapore’s underwater Equarius Hotel

The Equarius Hotel and Singapore’s Sentosa Island

The Equarius Hotel is a five-star resort hotel located on Singapore’s Sentosa Island. Opened in 2012, the hotel is a sprawling compound featuring the main building located at the edges of a lush garden, as well as a dozen small villas surrounding a large, irregularly-shaped swimming pool. The main seven-storey building – which features 172 bedrooms – borders a section of the SEA Aquarium: the world’s second largest aquarium by water volume (45 million litres). At the edge of that border there is also a separate building comprised of 11, two-storey row houses referred to as ‘ocean suites’. The upper floor of each suite features a living room, a bathroom and a balcony with a jacuzzi. The lower floor, which is home to the master bedroom and the main bathroom, is situated under the aquarium’s water surface. The master bedroom features a glass wall facing directly inside the ‘Open Ocean Habitat’: a tank the size of seven Olympic swimming pools and home to 120 species of animals.

We arrived at the Equarius Hotel in the early afternoon of a March day in 2023. After checking in at the hotel’s main lobby and putting a US$3,550 dent into our research budget for our two-night stay, we were taken by golf cart to the hotel’s underground parking garage. With some directions and a map we could have easily walked to our room but the large accommodation fee entitled us to the privilege of being escorted around the resort on a golf cart by a butler (a privilege that, given our middle-class habitus, we were not accustomed to and that made us uncomfortable). A few minutes later we were dropped off at the small lobby of the row-house building where the ocean suites were situated and then led to the door of our suite by the same butler that had been driving our golf cart. The butler, a young man in his 30s, opened the door for us, led the way to the master bedroom and asked us to sit on a small sofa placed at the edge of the bed. With the lights in the room dimmed he directed our attention to the large wall in front of us. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked. He then pressed a button on the wall. The cover-like curtain covering the window in front of us began lifting, slowly revealing our bedroom’s expansive view onto the aquarium. As the curtain lifted with a soft whirring sound, the light coming from the aquarium’s sea-like environment began colouring our bedroom with a deep, dark blue.

The Equarius Hotel is located on Sentosa Island. Sentosa is a 4.71 km ² island connected to the rest of Singapore by an artificial causeway crossing the Keppel Harbour. The island was formerly known as Pulau Blakang Mati and throughout the 20th century was used as a British military base (and for a short period during WWII as a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp). It was renamed Sentosa (which in Malay means ‘peace and tranquillity’) in 1970, after a renaming contest organized by the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board. After the departure of the British military the island was re-invented as a tourist destination which until the COVID-19 Pandemic received about twenty million visitors per year. Sentosa Island features a 2 km-long coarse sand beach, golf courses, 15 hotels, a casino and countless tourist activities and attractions (more on this shortly) including the SEA Aquarium and Universal Studios.

The re-invention of the island as a tourist destination largely owes to the vision of Alan Choe, the Housing and Development Board;s first architect-planner and founder of the Urban Redevelopment Authority. In 1967 Choe was instrumental in convincing then-finance minister Goh Keng Swee that the island should not be developed as an Esso oil refinery – a plan under advanced consideration at the time – but should instead remain as a ‘green lung’: a parkland within the city. With limited time to wrestle the island from the alternate industrial plan, Choe sketched a plan featuring tourist attractions and resorts. ‘We tried to follow Disneyland, where people can imagine it as a holiday island’, the 91-year-old retired architect recently revealed in an interview with Channel News Asia. ⁶

Connected to the city by a busy six-lane causeway, a monorail and by a cable car, Sentosa is largely free of private cars (drivers are strongly encouraged to keep their vehicles parked at their resort hotels) but it is kept well-connected by a network of three inter-island buses routes, a beach shuttle and even a three-station intra-island cable car. Throughout the island, tourists find entertainment at places like the Madame Tussaud museum, Scentopia Singapore (an augmented reality scent-making experience), Magical Shores (an interactive beach light art attraction), Butterfly Park and Insect Kingdom (featuring over 15,000 live butterflies), Wings of Time (a multimedia performance), Sentosa’s 4D Adventureland (Southeast Asia’s first 4-D theatre), Hydrodash Sentosa (an inflatable device water park), Mega Adventure Park (featuring zip wires, an aerial rope course, a 50-foot high free fall simulator and a 16-m-high rock climbing wall), Wave House Sentosa (a 6,500 m ² wave pool), the Skyline Luge and Skyride (a self-steering, gravity-driven three-wheel cart downhill course), AJ Hackett Sentosa (a bungy jump and giant swing facility), Headrock VR (a virtual reality theme park) and IFly (the world’s largest vertical wind tunnel which allows for an indoor sky-diving experience).

A few researchers before us have noted that in spite of its name Sentosa Island is far from being a pristine or tranquil environment – as the list of attractions noted above shows. For instance, Ling and Shaw ⁷ have shown how Sentosa Island has been constantly re-invented and reconstructed in both social and physical terms as a site of pure consumption and a prime example of a resort development informed by a global market-logic driven by the continuous re-creation of tourist experiences. Such logic has been found to privilege the experiential and the visual over any concerns for local identities or the historical faithfulness of cultural heritage, all in the name of making attractions universally appealing and quickly consumable. ⁸ As Cohen once noted, Sentosa could easily be understood as the epitome of a Disneyland-like ‘contrived’ attraction comprised of a multitude of ‘staged’ representations and ‘by the emergence of simulated environments which provide experiences approximating “reality”’. ⁹

In light of the theme-park context where it is found, one could easily conclude that the underwater experience provided by the Equarius Hotel is really no different than any of the other contrived attractions that surround it. From such perspective, the notion of a luxurious accommodation providing a privileged gaze into a simulated ecological habitat would seem to be little more than yet another example of a placeless postmodern consumerist fabrication of nature as spectacle. Indeed, this was our initial impression when booking the hotel online. Since no empirical research has ever been conducted at underwater hotels ¹⁰ in our very grant proposal we had initially framed the Equarius Hotel as the concretization of a tourist utopia; a heterotopia, ¹¹ to be precise, that could be understood in terms of Jameson’s view of postmodern hotels as ‘protopolitical Utopian transformation[s]’ and ‘total spaces’ ¹² empty of transformative potential and sealed off from the outside world. Our subsequent observations turned out to prove our initial impression limited, but it is here, with the notion of heterotopias, that we wish to begin our reflection.

The Equarius Hotel as heterotopia

It had only been 10 minutes after the butler had left, that the two of us began noting the uniqueness of the underwater experience afforded by our window. Having conducted field research underwater before in the context of coral restoration, snorkelling tourism and swimming encounters with wild dolphins, ¹³ we were all too familiar with the sensory experience of interacting with aquatic species in their environments. We remembered being in water as requiring hard work. Not only must one be a relatively confident swimmer, but there are countless inconveniences and dangers one must adjust to. There is the inconvenience of cold water for example, as well as the growing feelings of fatigue brought on by moving around in a fluid medium. There are always dangers, of course, as well as the discomforting necessity to breathe more consciously than one would above the water surface. There are also constant adjustments that need to be made to one’s mask and snorkel, as well as ongoing concerns about water pressure’s effects on the ears, whether one is SCUBA diving or simply snorkelling. Being in water, in short, is an all-encompassing experience for the senses.

Being in our aquarium room, in contrast, felt like an exclusively visual experience deprived of all the other usual sensations. It was also an experience of the underwater world that felt incongruously ‘enhanced’ by the predictability of the controlled aquarium environment as well as by the comforts and conveniences of our accommodation. It was then entirely logical for us, a few minutes into the experience, to start thinking about our underwater room as a kind of utopia that had become real. This, in other words, seemed like a prototypical heterotopia just like we had anticipated.

It is well-known that Foucault’s ideas on heterotopias were intended to be thought-provoking rather than precise, and it is well-established that Foucault himself saw the limitations of his insights on heterotopias. ¹⁴ Despite the limited rigor of his conceptualization, Foucault’s ideas on heterotopias were clear, provocative and vastly applicable to a variety of case. As a result, to date, his ideas on heterotopias have been applied to cases as different as cruise ships, ¹⁵ an environmental installation, ¹⁶ the Citadel in Los Angeles, ¹⁷ the Palays Royal, masonic lodges and early factories, ¹⁸ peer-to-peer accommodations, ¹⁹ camps and encampments, ²⁰ female friends’ holiday destinations, ²¹ the Burning Man festival, ²² Airbnb, ²³ and countless other sites, prompting Johnson to refer to the vast research on the subject as a bona fide ‘cottage industry’. ²⁴

To understand heterotopias, we must begin with utopias. Utopias, Foucault explained, are emplacements that do not have a real place, or in other words imagined places or states of things that do not actually exist. ²⁵ Heterotopias, in contrast, are imagined places that have become real. In detail, heterotopias are:

real places, effective places, places that are written into the institution of society itself, and that are a sort of counter-emplacements, a sort of effectively realized utopias in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted; a kind of places that are outside all places, even though they are actually localizable. ²⁶

In the same breath, Foucault noted that between utopias and heterotopias there are mirrors, ‘a sort of mixed, in-between experience. . . a place without place’. ²⁷ In the mirror, one sees oneself where one is not, ‘in an unreal space that virtually opens up behind the surface’, a space where one is and is not simultaneously, in a kind of shadow that gives one visibility where one is absent. Though Foucault did not use the word ‘metaphor’, mirrors serve as much a metaphorical function as much as they actually exist.

Foucault then went on to list six ‘principles’ of a form of inquiry he calls ‘heteropology’. This is an important point which has often been missed. Heterotopia, as a concept, is obviously vague and undeveloped ²⁸ and as a result, it has been over-utilized to the point where nearly everything can be argued to be a heterotopia. ²⁹ Heterotopology, however, is a form of thinking about places that sensitizes one to look for heterotopic properties in places that might not appear to be heterotopias. The point in this sense, we agree with Johnson, ³⁰ is not to take the concept ‘too seriously’ and play with heterotopian thinking ‘as a method that rather than revealing and explaining, meticulously shows and describes’. ³¹ Thus, the task for the heterotopologist – in our view – is not that of systematically identifying and classifying heterotopias but rather that of showing how heterotopic thinking ‘makes differences and unsettles spaces, sometimes exposing the extraordinary in the most ordinary of places’. ³² In doing this through alloútopic thinking we shift away from the noun and the static category toward the verb and the provocative imagination. Moreover – and this is crucial for our development of the concept of alloútopia – by abandoning the pretenses of absolute categories with our inquiries we treat both heterotopias and alloútopias as continua marked by varying intensities (more on this later).

Let us now return to our room (shown in Figure 1 below). As can be seen from the photograph, separating the king-sized bed in the foreground and the SEA aquarium tank in the background is a large window, concave from the interior of the room, convex from the outside. With Foucault vaguely on our mind we initially found the window to have the metaphorical function of the mirror typical of heterotopias. Like a heterotopic mirror, the window seemed to afford us with a kind of ‘return effect’ ³³ in that by staring at it we discovered our own absence in the underwater place in front of us. The mirror/window, in other words, seemed to tell us that it was inside the aquatic that we were not. It was the water, that we were outside of. With our skin dry, our bodies warm, our breathing normal, the mirror/window seemed to provide us with ‘the depth of this virtual space that is on the other side’ ³⁴ but also with a tool for coming back toward ourselves and directing a reflection on where we were. The window, just like a mirror, thus seemed to function as a heterotopic tool by rendering our underwater bedroom ‘at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since, in order to be perceived, it ha[d] to pass through this virtual point’, ³⁵ which was underwater.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Our room at the Equarius Hotel, with a shark swimming by. Photo by Phillip Vannini.

We would have liked to find out how other hotel guests experienced their rooms, but it wasn’t possible. Not only were we in a private space surrounded by other private spaces, but we were faced with another problem too. World Resorts Sentosa – which owns both the Equarius Hotel and the SEA Aquarium – told us that the only way they would take part in our research was if our work aligned with the brand’s messaging on sustainability and if we agreed to give the resort control and copyright over everything we produced. Unwilling to become a corporate mouthpiece we resorted to focusing on our own observations and reflections. Though we conducted ‘expert’ interviews in Singapore, outside of our hotel, we decided to develop this writing in a pure autoethnographic fashion and reserve the analysis of interviews with future papers. After all hotel rooms are private spaces, we thought, and there was much to be learned in sitting in our room, gazing at the underwater world before us, and reflecting on our practices and experiences for the sake of conceptual development.

A couple of hours after sitting in front of the window and sharing our respective impressions we began noticing the intensity of the unusualness of our experience. There were multiple layers of incommensurability at play. Our room was incomparable to any other hotel room we had ever stayed in as the window allowed us to gaze not at a cityscape or natural landscape but at a skyless waterscape. Yet this was not so much a naturally-occurring waterscape, but one that had been designed by humans and yet rich with real animal species. At the same time, our experience of the underwater world was entirely incommensurable to our previous experiences being in water. Whilst in water, in the past, we moved around by swimming or floating. Here we found ourselves immersed in the foreign environment of the underwater world while laying lazily on a comfortable bed, in ‘a paradox of mobility and containment’. ³⁶ ‘The heterotopia has the power to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces’, Foucault noted in his third principle of heteropology, ‘several emplacements that are in themselves incompatible’. ³⁷ Life above the water surface and below the surface were juxtaposed in and by our room, turning the incompatibility of the two into a luxurious apprehension of nature.

After a few more hours in the room, we became familiar with the species found in the tank which our room bordered. There were wrasse, rays, sharks and countless other fish we could not identify, and even some humans. The humans were of three kinds. There were SCUBA-diving aquarium staff who went about the business of feeding the animals and doing ordinary maintenance, SCUBA-diving aquarium patrons who had paid to be led through a swimming tour of the tank, as well as aquarium visitors walking inside a viewing area on the other side of the tank from our room, slightly below our room. As afternoon turned into evening, and evening turned into nighttime, we also witnessed something else: the artificial source of light within and above the tank dimmed to give the aquatic species a natural sense of circadian rhythms. All of this reminded us of Foucault’s sixth principle of heteropology: the functional creation and maintenance of ‘a space of illusion’. ³⁸ This was a ‘meticulous’ ³⁹ space where aquatic species did not have to look hard for food or fight to maintain their safety. This was a space where neither us hotel guests, nor the typical aquarium patron, nor the SCUBA-diving visitor had to look hard or wait long to spot the key species that make a day’s memory.

As the day went on, we also started to notice the weaning intensity of the novelty of our experience. At first, the sight of a hammerhead shark or a giant ray were marked with shrieks of excitement and enthusiasm. We found ourselves giggling and being awed by every creature swimming by. We took photographs furiously and marvelled and wondered at everything we saw, just like any animal lover visiting an aquarium would. But with the hours going by, the underwater life unfolding before us began gradually losing more and more of its exoticness. The species we were seeing were always the same, doing the same ordinary things. This, in a way, seemed to make the underwater hotel room intensely more heterotopic than a conventional aquarium experience. When you visit an aquarium, you will find yourself going from one area of the facility to another relatively quickly, spending a few minutes here and a few minutes there. It is unlikely that as a casual visitor you will find yourself sitting behind an aquarium window for hours and hours at a time. It is even less likely that you will do so in a casual state of undress under a cozy blanket, perhaps as you eat food or blow-dry your hair after a shower. Like a heterotopia the place was both extraordinary and ordinary.

Foucault noted that ‘heterotopias are most often linked to slices of time – which is to say that they open onto what might be called, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronisms’ and ‘function fully when people find themselves in a sort of absolute break with their traditional time’. ⁴⁰ Therein, we felt, lied the unique power of the underwater hotel room: unlike an aquarium – which as a tourist experience is not particularly more different than other staged or manufactured tourist attractions – the placidity generated by the comfort of our accommodation had generated a complete break from both our everyday terrestrial existence and even from our conventional tourist practices. By ‘accumulating everything’, – that is nearly every aquatic species inside the aquarium – ‘the idea of establishing a sort of general archive’ of underwater sea life and ‘the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time’ ⁴¹ had become so normal, so ordinary, to lose most of its novelty and appeal.

From heterotopia to alloútopia

It was now the second day of our stay. The SEA Aquarium viewing area that was visible from our bedroom began receiving guests a few minutes after 10 am. We stood in front of the window for a while with our gaze directed below us and across the tank. We watched visitors marvel at the view, take a few photos and then leave for another one of the nine main exhibits. Some of them seemed to notice us too, taking pictures of us across the water. With the lights in our bedroom on and the curtain withdrawn we were as visible to them as they were to us. We had been sitting and laying there for almost 24 hours by then and seeing visitors pointing the cameras at us felt odd. But we had been feeling out of sorts for different reasons too. We had been reasoning that at an aquarium or a zoo your mobility around the facility contributes directly to your identity as a visitor, rather than a captive guest. It is in virtue of moving around and directing your gaze as you go, that your subjectivity as a visitor takes form. Simply put, a visitor visits and then moves on. An aquarium’s animal species, unable to move freely, are thereby an object of a visitor’s gaze. But this was no longer the case for us. By our second day in the room, we were no longer so sure about who was watching whom in our room and who was a visitor.

The feeling had started to take form the evening before. At first the species swimming by were unfamiliar and exotic, as we mentioned earlier. Then they started to become more familiar. We knew and recognized ‘the hammerhead shark’, we knew ‘the Oceanic Manta Ray’ and so on. Later on, they became even more familiar. With a quick Google search, we had learned that the three large manta rays had been named by the aquarium staff Mika, Mako and Manja. But we could not find the names of other rays, so in order to refer to them as individuals we gave names to two small devil rays who seemed to be always moving together and constantly swimming by our window. We named the larger one, who always swam a couple of feet ahead of the smaller one, Rufus. His trailing friend (or mate?) got the name Julius. The names were chosen to somehow reflect their appearance and character, and ultimately to underscore our growing familiarity with them, much like one might name a squirrel, a dear or a bird that takes up residence in a tree or yard in front of one’s home.

Rufus and Julius seemed – to us – to be inexplicably fascinated with us. Whereas all the other rays swooshed past our window, the two of them lingered and returned our gaze. Over and over again. We have no way of knowing this for sure, of course. Whether they might have felt any kind of curiosity or interest is impossible to determine, and their attitude was nothing but the result of our impression. But in a way, that was precisely the outcome of the unique conditions of our encounter: our imagination and immobility had given way to familiarity and ordinariness. Simultaneously, our room’s window onto the aquarium had formed a unique environment. Hotel bedrooms are known to be private spaces ⁴² but with the animals swimming before us becoming familiar subjects with growing intensity, our bedroom was feeling more and more public and synopticon-like. Less like a hotel bedroom and more like a hotel lobby – albeit a very species-diverse one.

By the late morning of our second day at the hotel we felt as though a nearly full reversal in terms of subjectivity had taken place. We were feeling fully emplaced, even stilled, in our room. Rufus and Julius, in contrast, were mobile, swimming around as they pleased. We were now both in front and behind – no longer just behind – the window. The aquatic species before us were also simultaneously in front of and behind the window, subject and object of our mutual gaze. They were seemingly as curious about us as we were about them. As familiar with us, by now, as we were about them. Our room no longer seemed a heterotopia because what Foucault had argued about the mirror no longer applied to our circumstances. The window of our room had functioned like a mirror at first – forcing us to reflect on ourselves – but by now it had taken its final form as a two-way transparent opening which afforded us humans with a view onto the underwater world and simultaneously afforded aquatic species (and aquarium patrons and staff) with a view onto us.

The window gave our room a kind of ‘topological duality’, rendering it into an ‘object that is at once inside and outside of other spaces’, with constitutive capacity to invert and open new social and material orders’. ⁴³ With a mirror you ultimately just see yourself and your own world reflected back at you. With a window, in contrast, we were able to see somewhere else, and so were our aquatic friends: while we gazed into the aquatic animal lifeworld, they gazed into the terrestrial human world. This was therefore not a heterotopia but an alloútopia: a realized utopia that allowed us humans to be somewhere else, within an animal lifeworld within which our presence was incongruent and unusual. And simultaneously it was a realized utopia that allowed the aquatic animals to be somewhere else too: in a hotel, in close contact with a human lifeworld that may or may not have been of their choosing.

We coin the word alloútopia (from the Greek alloú, for elsewhere, and topia, for place) to describe a place where humans and non-humans encroach upon each other’s lifeworld by way of an enclave which allows for their temporary co-presence. An enclave – simply put – is a portion of a territory surrounded by a larger territory whose inhabitants are distinct; it is a place inhabited by beings who are different from those surrounding it. We are careful in using the word ‘different’. We do not wish to create a binary opposition between humans and non-humans as we fully realize that the anthropocentric ‘othering’ of animal species, especially in places like aquaria is at the very ontological and ethical basis of their objectification and our colonial violence toward them. ⁴⁴ Yet, we recognize the political difference of humans and animals in terms of power: an undeniable structural inequality that allows humans to continue to exert control and violence upon animals, but not the other way around. In this sense the elsewhere that alloútopias draw attention to is often an extension of territory with colonial characteristics.

In coining the alloútopia concept we intend to stimulate the imagination of other researchers and sensitize them to alloútopic thinking in different contexts. Examples of alloútopias in the context of tourism, for example, seem to abound. Around the world there are now hotels and hotel rooms built in environments which give guests the opportunity to live right in the midst of animal habitats. In Germany, the Baumhaus Hotel is comprised of nest-like treehouses that afford guests a feeling of bird life (a similar hotel can be found in Sweden). A taste of bird life (mid air) is also available in Italy’s Bivouac Hotel and in Peru’s Skylodge Adventure Suites, which have been built overhanging mountain rock faces (the latter is attached to rock through bolt and cables). In Kenya, the Giraffe Manor has been situated inside a giraffe sanctuary and now giraffes, having become comfortable with human presence, have learned to routinely stick their necks through the dining room windows and eat food off guests’ tables. In Malaysia, the Sekeping Serandah sheds have been built to be kept open from all sides so guests can enjoy the sounds, smells and views of the rainforest, surrounded by the jungle’s inhabitants, such as monkeys and parrots. Floating and underwater hotels (built within aquaria or natural sea habitats) are similar enclaves: places where human guests can venture into animal habitats and dwell – however temporarily – somewhere unfamiliar to our species, somewhere we do not belong, in other words, somewhere else.

Our immediate application of the concept of alloútopia is to hotels because of our empirical focus in this paper, but alloútopias are not limited to hotels or similar accommodations. To some degree even zoos or aquaria may be said to have alloútopic qualities, but we should keep in mind that alloútopias are highly variable in intensity from one another. On one end of the continuum, one might find alloútopias of permanence, for example, architecturally stable enclaves that allow humans and animals to be within one another’s lifeworlds for extended periods of time. On the other end of the continuum there might be transitory alloútopias where short-term visitations might allow for little beyond fleeting encounters.

In coining the concept of alloútopia we intend to extend and complement Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, rather than to reject it. Alloútopias are related to heterotopias. Like heterotopias, alloútopias are realized utopias: places which, to borrow from Johnson’s conceptualization of heterotopias, are ‘spaces that are somehow “different”: disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory and transforming’. ⁴⁵ However, alloútopias differ from heterotopias in three significant ways. First, and perhaps more importantly, in coining the concept of alloútopia we want to draw attention to the more-than-human dimensions of alloútopic places, dimensions that are absent in Foucault’s humanistic approach to heterotopias. In his lecture Foucault focused squarely on ‘the problem of human emplacement’ ⁴⁶ and went on to conceptualize heterotopias as places that acquire their otherness in virtue of their relational difference from the totality of human society. Both what Foucault called heterotopias of crisis and heterotopias of deviation stand in what Saldanha calls an ‘ambivalent, though mostly oppositional, relation to a society’s mainstream [. . .] insofar as they work differently from the way that society is used to’. ⁴⁷ The focus is on human society and its sub-spheres. In contrast, alloútopias take form in relation to the juxtaposition of human and non-human societies. Alloútopias therefore derive their ambivalent and oppositional relation from the way in which they de-territorialize ⁴⁸ a habitat as being no longer exclusive to a species and increase its internal heterogeneity by re-imagining it as a space of contact between humans and non-humans.

From the above, emerges the second primary difference between heterotopias and alloútopias. Whereas heterotopias have mirror-like qualities insofar as they allow humans to direct their gaze towards themselves, ⁴⁹ the latter have actual windows or at least metaphorical window-like qualities. Therefore, rather than allowing humans to gaze at themselves, alloútopias enable humans to gaze at animals as much as they enable animals to gaze at humans. Like heterotopias, through their windows alloútopias feature ‘a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable’, ⁵⁰ but unlike heterotopias, alloútopias’ openings and closings are marked by a dramatically unbalanced power relation between their relational subjects. For example, whereas we underwater hotel guests could practice our mobility and exit our room anytime we pleased, the aquarium’s aquatic species could not leave the tanks to which they had been confined. And whereas we human guests could dip into the tank for a SCUBA-diving tour, no manta ray or hammerhead shark would have been allowed to take a guided tour inside our hotel rooms.

Thirdly, heterotopias were conceived by Foucault as a concept that would allow for the classification of spaces in the context of the social ordering of modernity. In contrast to that structuralist view, we treat alloútopias not an ordering mechanism or as the outcome of classification, but rather as events and processes. By saying this we mean that alloútopias are not fully formed categories but rather events in the making, they are verbs rather than nouns, open processes rather than static classes: places actualized by relations of exteriority rather than relations of interiority. ⁵¹ This third and last point is essential for transcending both the structuralist and humanist limitations of the Foucauldian concept of heterotopias, and it is also the most intellectually challenging aspect of our argument, so we wish to dedicate some extra time and attention to it. To do so, we need to introduce Angelica.

Angelica is the name of a giant Pacific octopus who once resided – before her demise – in The Deep, an aquarium in Kingston-upon-Hull, UK. Like Rufus and Julius did for us, Angelica caught the ethnographic attention of a cultural geographer, Christopher Bear. ⁵² In writing about Angelica rather than more generically ‘an octopus’, that is, by referring to an individual animal with a first name, Bear followed the lead of animal geographies in moving away from structural characterizations of animals as undifferentiated tokens of broad species. ⁵³ Oftentimes geographers, Bear remarked, treat ‘animals as little more than a background to human society, reinforcing dualisms of nature and culture’ ⁵⁴ and so in focusing on one distinct animal and her actions and character Bear hoped to ‘give a greater sense of animals as animals, to tease apart nonhuman difference and more closely interrogate the diversity of animal life’. ⁵⁵ In building a relation with Angelica over his visits at the aquarium Bear thus described how he was able to learn about her personality and in doing so what at first have appeared to be an alien-like species in a foreign environment, gradually for him became an individual with a subjectivity of her own.

We want to think of the intensities of the encounters generating alloútopias in similar terms. We do not wish for the concept to signify a space with a pre-formed meaning, a space where two undifferentiated groups of subjects (‘humans’ and ‘animals’) objectify one another on the basis of their structural difference from one another. Rather, we view an alloútopia as a potential for the actualization (or lack thereof) of intensities shaping relations amongst humans and non-humans. Relations which may or may not challenge understandings of one another, may or may not generate stories which may or may not lead to re-imaginings of human and animal habitats, and may or may not allow both humans and non-humans to envision different possibilities of co-existence and reciprocity. Therefore, rather a counter site arising from an oppositional system of differences, rather than something that exists based on the presupposition of transcendent totalities, we view alloútopias as assemblages of heterogeneous and internally differentiated more-than-human lives encountering one another in a variety of ways through inter-species affective encounters entangling one another and their lifeworlds into event-like places marked by ongoing, multi-faceted and often contradictory processes of territorialization and deterritorialization.

We do not want to over-explain alloútopias. For us an alloútopia is not a definitive concept but instead a sensitizing one. Like the concept of heterotopia, an alloútopia is a device for showing and describing, a thinking tool for a certain provocative and speculative more-than-human inquiry that draws attention to a realized utopia, a kind of ‘imagining for real’. ⁵⁶ In fact, our own analysis here is fully speculative, in an attempt to practice a kind of alloútopic thinking, a form of imaginative and more-than-representational epistemological inquiry that may take us somewhere else, a place where realistic and representational thinking could not reach. In fact, as mentioned before, we have no way of knowing whether Rufus and Julius were truly curious about us, or whether they were as interested in other hotel guests. Similarly, we have no knowledge on how other hotel guests related to them. It would be a mistake for us to assume that an underwater hotel room is an alloútopia simply in virtue of its architectural enclave-like quality into a lifeworld that exists somewhere else. To make that assumption would be equivalent to suggesting that a place has an absolute and universal function or meaning.

When we say that our underwater hotel room was an alloútopia we mean that it became one for us through a series of imaginative and affective encounters with individual members of another species. Alloútopias unfold as an act of knowledge creation on the part of an experiencing observer. For us this was a kind of an assemblage-forming act through which the potential of our room to take us and our ray friends elsewhere actually unfolded. In doing so the alloútopia manifested its geographical uniqueness as a place where difference, incompatibility and incommensurability between individual members of different species transformed into a new place – an elsewhere – where new relations among us were imagined through alloútopic inquiry.

It is in this emergent event-like quality of alloútopia that lies the key difference between heterotopias and alloútopias. Whereas heterotopias are defined ‘as sites which are embedded in aspects and stages of our lives and which somehow mirror and at the same time distort, unsettle or invert other spaces’, ⁵⁷ alloútopias can be understood subjunctively as sites which could serve as stages for encounters between human and non-human lives, window-like stages where the uniqueness of inter-species encounters may distort, may unsettle, may invert, but also may abuse, exhaust, colonize yet somewhere else and also may re-envision, may re-imagine, may re-territorialize, may transform a place intended to be something and somewhere into something and somewhere else.

Conclusion

The contemporary tourist landscape is rife with enclavic spaces which may actualize their potential as alloútopias. In particular, we note the proliferation of unique architectural designs for unusual hotels, cabins, sheds and the like which give human guests the opportunity to encounter animal habitats in novel, proximate and intense ways. The proximity of these more-than-human encounters ⁵⁸ and the potential they hold for re-imagining one another’s lifeworlds is unique but also incredibly diverse from situation to situation, and case to case. The case of underwater hotels is emblematic of this diversity. Underwater hotels are different from one another in relation to the environment where they were built, for example, with important consequences for the kinds of alloútopias they bring to life. Underwater hotel in this regard might bring forth different encounters, and therefore different ‘elsewheres’ whether they were designed inside aquaria or in the open sea. They might also actualize very different alloútopias with regard to the materials being used, the species present, the kinds of technologies in place to mitigate environmental impact, the number of guests present, the various corporate conservation-oriented activities that are enacted and so on. To borrow from Braun’s writing on assemblages, the actualization of alloútopias hinges on ‘the making of socionatures whose intricate geographies form tangled webs of different length, density and duration and whose consequences are experienced differently in different places’. ⁵⁹ Therefore, it would be a mistake for anyone to read this paper and conclude that underwater hotels (or similar enclave-like dwellings) ‘are’ alloútopias. Alloútopias aren’t. Rather, they happen. Or not. As events, not categories, when they do happen, they happen with varying intensities warranting close empirical scrutiny and careful analytical disentangling through a kind of alloútopic thinking that is not afraid to lead the imagination somewhere else.

At the same time, it would be rather anthropocentric of us to argue that alloútopias can only be understood as human-made architectural structures. Animals have the same abilities to form enclaves into our lifeworld as we do into theirs. As we type these very words, we notice a cobweb that has been woven by an obstinate spider in the corner of our office’s ceiling. Outside our window, in the soffit of our roof, we see two sparrows that have returned to their nest with the arrival of spring. Since we live in a rural area, our neighbors and we are also accustomed to seeing squirrels making homes out of attics, racoons moving into old sheds or bees turning garden umbrellas into beehives. In Canada, there have been reports of bears, moose and even seals entering people’s homes, hanging out for a while, and even taking a bath in swimming pools. We have no way of knowing how those particular animals experienced those places, whether they enjoyed their time there, whether they did so as a kind of a ‘tourist’ practice, or out of need, convenience or curiosity. But what is certain is that their actions generated permanent or temporary enclaves into our lifeworld with the potential to re-imagine our relations. These are the alloútopias we have been discussing in this paper: relational emplacements which give different species visibility to one another, a kind of visibility that may solidify, unsettle or mutate the continuity and transformability of the various degrees of separate existence, as well as complex layers of co-existence, of the human and non-human world.

In basing the notion of alloútopia on the unfolding of relations of exteriority, rather than on a totalizing structure of differences, we have engaged here in a kind of alloútopic thinking that is non-representational and post-humanistic, rather than structuralist and humanistic. In doing so we invite others in their research to show and describe how other alloútopias actually happen as assemblages of various subjects and their practices and affective encounters. We invite others to turn their focus to alloútopias as ad hoc coalescings of historical and geographical circumstances, as contingent spaces with varying intensities drawn from and effected upon their more-than-human visitors and dwellers, as entities with variable states of coherence, as sites marked by uneven power relations and ultimately as heterogenous becomings which may intensify or undo their status as being somewhere else, somewhere where a new kind of life might be possible. Finally, we invite others to further develop alloútopic methodologies to enable novel inquiries capable of leading researchers somewhere else, and then somewhere else.