Global Inequity and Intimacy in Urban Spaces Anonymous College

Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things features multiple urban spaces that have been altered by globalizing forces to engender a more invasive/invaded form of intimacy in the immigrant communities of London. This is best exemplified in the film when two immediately recognizable urban structures – a taxi depot and an apartment, linked visually by a focus on their verticality – are transformed by surreal acts of privacy invasion, revealing in the process the non-normative uses that immigrants have for these spaces. Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” gives us the vocabulary to describe these transformed and imagined spaces. He defines “heterotopias” as “places [that] are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about” (4). They are physically and culturally defined environments that reflect and influence the uses different groups of people have for them. In the environments of Dirty Pretty Things’ London, heterotopias appear wherever marginalized people repurpose urban spaces away from the functions of normative society that such sites metonymize, and into the sort of habitat necessary for their survival.

Like most films in the crime/thriller genre, Dirty Pretty Things takes place...