Liminal spaces: why the non-place unsettles us

You are in an airport, in the small hours. Around you, the same shops as always. The same grey light, the same carpet, the same signs. A metallic voice announces a boarding gate. You could be in any city on the planet. Nothing you see tells you where you are. You feel light, anonymous, as if suspended in the air. There is no past and no future, only a long wait. Time seems to stop between two flights. The place feels familiar and empty at once. And that strange feeling has a precise name. We are talking about non-places. Why do airports and malls feel so strange? Let us solve that mystery.

The term was created by the anthropologist Marc Augé. To grasp it, we must first talk about places. A real place has history, identity and relationships. Think of a village square or a neighborhood café. There people know each other and keep memories. The non-place is exactly the opposite. It is pure transit, without memory or belonging. Airports, motorways, supermarkets and chain hotels. Earlier, the geographer Edward Relph spoke of placelessness. Augé gives the idea a twist and pushes it further. These spaces are not made to be inhabited. They are made only to pass through.

Temperature, light and sound calculated

There is a practical reason behind that feeling, which is that almost everything there is calculated. The temperature never varies, in any season of the year. The light is uniform and casts no shadows that mark the hour. There are almost never windows to see whether it is day or night. The floor is smooth and stays the same for hundreds of metres. None of those decisions is accidental: they all serve to make the space work the same way always. But removing time from the setting also removes the reference the body uses. That is why you lose track of how long you have been there. It is not that the place is strange. It is that its clock has been erased.

What turns a space into a non-place? Augé links it to what he calls supermodernity. That is, an excess of space, of speed and of individualism. In a non-place you are alone in the middle of the crowd. Surrounded by thousands of people, yet speaking to none. And a curious paradox appears. You must prove who you are at every step. You show the passport, the ticket or the card. And yet, in doing so, you become anonymous. You stop being yourself and turn into one more passenger. The space speaks to you only through signs and instructions. You obey the arrows, but converse with no one.

And there is a silent exchange almost nobody notices. To enter one of these places you have to prove who you are. You show a passport, a boarding pass, a ticket, sometimes your face to a camera. In return, the place treats you like everyone else: same route, same rules, same counter. Augé described it precisely. In the non-place, identity is checked at the door and suspended inside. Outside you are someone with a history and with neighbours. Inside you are a passenger, a queue, a seat number. That is the paradox: you are never identified as thoroughly as in the place where it matters least who you are.

Koolhaas: junkspace

Now let us look at the architecture of these spaces. The architect Rem Koolhaas gave it a brutal name. He called it junkspace. It is that endless interior, windowless and air-conditioned. A continuum of shops where you lose the time and your bearings. There are no clocks or landscape to place you. Koolhaas also described the generic city. A city without history or identity, the same everywhere. For him, the airport is its purest symbol. You could swap it for another and notice no difference. The non-place is not a design flaw. It is the logic of global consumption turned to concrete. The whole city starts to resemble a terminal.

It is worth asking who is in charge inside, because it is not obvious. An airport or a mall look like public places: there are people, there are benches, you can stroll. But they are private property, and that changes the rules entirely. You cannot protest, hand out leaflets, play music, or stay without spending. A guard can ask you to leave without giving reasons. In a real square, none of that happens. Planners call it privately owned public space. It looks like a square, is used like a square, and does not have the rights of a square. The discomfort you feel is not only aesthetic. It is that of being somewhere you are not a citizen, but a guest.

Ritzer: something and nothing

And here is the commercial engine of it all. The sociologist George Ritzer explains it with a sharp idea. He distinguishes between what he calls something and nothing. The something is born of a concrete place and full of content. The nothing is empty forms, conceived in a distant center. The franchise and the chain are perfect examples. The non-place works well precisely because it is empty. With no local content, it becomes identical and predictable. It can be copied and controlled in any country. You change continents, but the corridor is the same. Emptiness is not a flaw in the system. It is its great advantage. That is why the same box fits the whole world.

And yet, it is worth looking twice before dismissing them. For many people, those places do have a history. Whoever works in the terminal has spent years in that corridor, knows every corner and their colleagues. For an emigrant, that departure gate may be where they said goodbye to their mother. For a teenager from a neighbourhood with nothing, the mall is where they meet their friends. Augé described the non-place from the point of view of the one passing through. Seen from the one who stays, the same space fills with meaning. No place is generic for whoever inhabits it. The generic is in the passing gaze, not in the walls.

Turner: the threshold that fascinates

And now let us connect to an internet trend. Why does a photo of an empty mall feel so unsettling? The answer comes from another anthropological idea. The researcher Victor Turner studied what he called liminality. It is the state of the threshold, in the middle of a rite of passage. Neither here nor there, between two worlds, in suspense. A non-place works only when people flow through it. Empty it of that crowd, and its truth is revealed. It turns into a pure threshold to nowhere. A set that waits for people who never arrive. The famous liminal spaces are exactly that. The internet has rediscovered, without knowing it, what Augé and Turner already named. The unease of being between places.

We should, however, listen to the criticisms. Is Augé not a little nostalgic? Perhaps he idealizes the authentic place of the past. And he looks with suspicion at the ordinary spaces of today. For many people, the airport is pure excitement. The mall is a warm and safe refuge. The motorway feels like freedom and movement. Besides, real life also happens in a non-place. Teenagers meet up in the food court. Families embrace at the arrivals gate. The worry is not that these spaces exist. It is that they become the only form of public space. That the square is replaced by the mall.

So let us return to the opening question. Why do these spaces feel so strange? Because we sense something we cannot put into words. They ask nothing of us and give nothing back. No memory, no relationship, only the permission to pass. We are neighbors of spaces that will never be ours. Perhaps the fascination with liminal spaces is a kind of mourning. A culture surrounded by non-places, missing the place. Next time you stand in that identical terminal, look. Notice that strangeness floating in the air. It is not the space that is empty. It is the relationship it refuses to have with you. One question remains that the trend of photographing empty corridors leaves unanswered. Why now? These images became popular precisely when the whole world lived through a real emptying. Closed offices, airports with no travellers, malls with the music playing and nobody inside. We all saw at once what these places are like without their function. And we discovered something uncomfortable: without people, nothing was left. An empty square is still a square. An empty concourse is nothing at all. Perhaps that is why the photographs unsettle us so much. They do not show a lonely place. They show a place that only existed while we were crossing it.

And that absence, in the end, speaks of us.