On the quiet erasure of liminal spaces, and why our cities are choking on connection they can no longer metabolise.

The loneliness epidemic has a proximate cause and a structural one. The proximate cause is covid. The structural one has been building for twenty years, quietly, in plain sight, in the form of a specific kind of demolition — the demolition of the in-between.

There’s a Japanese word for the empty space in a room before anyone enters it. The word is ‘MA‘. It doesn’t mean emptiness in the Western sense — nothing missing, nothing to be filled. It means a free zone. A pause deliberately designed into the structure of experience, the way a composer scores silence. A breath between things that allows different, irreconcilable things to co-exist.

We don’t have a word for that in English. And we’ve spent the last four years destroying whatever we had of the concept itself.

Somewhere in the convulsive re-ordering of 2020, we got rid of the hallways. Not just the physical ones — though those too, with offices abandoned and airports ghosted and the strange, threshold-life of transit stations scrubbed sterile by fear. We got rid of the metaphysical ones. The uncommitted moments. The time between leaving and arriving. The small in-between zones of daily urban life where, almost without knowing it, we used to shed one skin and grow another.

That’s what liminality is, really. Not the dramatic transformation — the marriage ceremony, the bar mitzvah, the initiation rite. Those are just the ceremonial version of something that used to happen at much lower frequencies, all the time, woven into the fabric of how cities worked. The coffee shop where you were neither at work nor at home. The commute where your body was in transit, but your mind was somewhere else entirely, working things out. The pub after hours, the walk to the station, the cigarette outside the office building where colleagues from different departments found themselves briefly outside the hierarchy, briefly human to each other.

All of it — the functional equivalent of a threshold. A place where you were neither one thing nor another. Not working, not home. Not performing, not private. Just between. Just human, for a few minutes, without agenda.

Those spaces are mostly gone. And I think it’s killing us.

Van Gennep had a name for it.

Arnold van Gennep spent the early 1900s documenting how societies everywhere navigated the movement from one state to another. From boy to man. From single to married. From civilian to warrior. What he found, every single time, was a three-part structure. Separation — you leave behind what you were. Transition — you float in the in-between. Incorporation — you arrive somewhere new, changed.

The middle part is the one that matters. He called it the liminal phase. From the Latin limen. Threshold. The space between what you were and what you’re becoming, where neither is quite true yet.

Victor Turner extended this in the 1960s and said something that should have landed harder than it did. The liminal phase is the state where “the normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination.” Where old certainties lose their grip. Where “reality itself can be moulded and carried in different directions.”

The threshold isn’t the uncomfortable bit before the transformation. The threshold is where transformation actually happens.

You cannot skip it. No matter how efficient your morning routine or how perfectly the app manages your commute — you cannot skip the threshold. You just stop being able to change.

Now think about what the modern city, and then the pandemic, did to the threshold.

The pre-existing condition.

Here is what I want to resist: the narrative that covid broke something that was working fine. It didn’t. It tore open something that was already sick. Covid lockdowns didn’t invent urban loneliness. The trendline was already going that way. What the pandemic did was strip-mine whatever buffering mechanisms remained and expose the raw infrastructure of disconnection underneath.

Neoliberal urbanism had been running its play for two decades before March 2020. Liminal space is, definitionally, unproductive. You’re not generating returns. You’re not consuming anything. You’re just between. And between doesn’t fit on a P&L. So the city, following the logic of capital with the diligence of a very good intern, gradually colonised every bit of it.

The corner shop became a supermarket became an app. The market became a pedestrianised retail zone with the same six chains in slightly different configurations. The library had its hours cut, then its staff, then occasionally its walls. The pub got a food menu, then a cocktail list, then a booking requirement, then a vibe that required you to have performed your social life before you arrived. The parks are excellent now and full of approved wellness infrastructure and signs listing what you cannot do.

Before March 2020, a person living alone in Mumbai or London or São Paulo still moved through a porous daily architecture — a dozen micro-encounters that were technically transactional but functionally social. The chai-wallah who knew your order. The auto-rickshaw argument that required you to negotiate with another human. The shared waiting area at the GP’s surgery where strangers looked up from phones and exchanged the brief solidarity of eye contact. None of this was intimacy. But it was contact. It was the texture of a life lived among other people, even when it didn’t feel like connection.

Those encounters happened in liminal spaces. Places that weren’t designed for relationship but hosted it anyway, precisely because of their in-between nature. A doorway is a liminal space. A train platform. A marketplace. These are the zones the Japanese concept of wa describes — not empty places but places full of invisible relational structure, shaped by the cultural expectations and social choreography layered into them over time.

And then.

The lockdown closed every one of those spaces. Simultaneously. For everyone.

And the technology that was supposed to fill the gap — Zoom, Teams, the endless pandemic-pivot to digital — did something technically impressive and socially catastrophic. It removed the threshold entirely. You went from your bedroom to a work meeting to your sofa to a FaceTime to your bed. There was no ma. No hallway. No walk to the tube where your mind could decompress. No pub where the after-work drink served the function the Japanese izakaya serves: to maintain relational harmony outside the hierarchy, to let the pressure off in a different space where different rules applied. Everything collapsed into the same screen. The transitions disappeared. And without transitions, there is no transformation.

The numbers that followed are not subtle. By 2021, a study by Harvard’s Making Caring Common project found that 36% of Americans, including 61% of young adults, reported feeling “serious loneliness.” The UK’s Office for National Statistics recorded that loneliness-related harms had measurably worsened during lockdown and had not returned to baseline. A 2023 Gallup survey found that global sadness, worry, and stress had hit record levels. The World Health Organization, the same year, declared loneliness a global public health priority, estimating that social isolation carries mortality risks equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

And everywhere, threading through everything, the smartphone arrived to plug every remaining gap. The queue. The wait. The lunch alone. The bus. Every moment that used to be ambient and unscripted and accidentally social — converted into an opportunity to stare at a rectangle delivering algorithmically curated content calibrated to your existing preferences. Content that confirms what you already think, delivered by an attention economy that has every incentive to keep you from encountering anything that might change you.

The city was supposed to produce serendipity. That is the whole point of putting this many people in one place. The density, the friction, the randomness — you are supposed to bump into things that change you. Serendipity isn’t a bonus feature of urban life. It’s the mechanism. And it requires unscripted space. Space where you aren’t already in a transaction. Space where the encounter isn’t scheduled. The hallway, not the meeting room.

We were already running low on hallways when covid hit.

The Screen Is Not a Hallway.

The most devastating sleight of hand in the post-pandemic settlement is the claim that digital space is a reasonable substitute for physical liminal space. It isn’t. Not even close.

The Japanese concept of ‘BA‘ — knowledge-mobilising space — is instructive here. Ba is about the arrangement of elements to create connections that produce new knowledge. The insight is that this requires genuine intermingling, the accidental collision of different perspectives in a shared physical zone. Japanese offices kept open-plan layouts not for surveillance but because they understood that breakthroughs happen at the edges, in the overhearing and the interruption, in the moment when your conversation about one thing accidentally enters someone else’s conversation about something completely different.

Zoom obliterates ba. You arrive in a meeting room with a predetermined attendee list and a structured agenda and you leave when the 45-minute block expires. There is no corridor outside the meeting room where you continue the conversation. There is no coffee machine where someone who wasn’t in the meeting overhears something and chips in. There’s just: a screen, a grid of faces, a red button to leave.

Social media, meanwhile, does something even more insidious. It simulates the texture of social space — the scrolling, the encountering, the occasional surprise — while delivering none of the relational metabolism that physical space enables. You see people. You don’t sit with them. You don’t adjust your body in relation to theirs. You don’t get the involuntary social information — the smell, the microexpression, the awkward pause — that teaches you how to be with other people. Online “community” is to physical liminal space what a photograph of a forest is to a forest.

The data on what this is doing to young people especially is alarming. Jonathan Haidt’s research has documented the correlation between the rise of smartphone-based adolescent socialisation — roughly 2012 onwards — and collapsing mental health indicators, particularly among young women. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and hospitalisation all bent upward following the shift from physical to digital social life. The hypothesis isn’t complicated: adolescence is the great liminal period, the extended threshold between childhood and adult identity, and it requires unscripted physical space to work properly. Take away the space and the transition cannot happen correctly.

That is, in some ways, the generation that lockdown put on ice. Already navigating a world stripped of reliable physical social space by the smartphone. Then handed two additional years of screens and bedrooms and the digital simulacrum of human contact. And we wonder why the loneliness statistics look the way they do.

Yohaku and the Art of Leaving Space.

There’s another Japanese term worth holding here: ‘YOHAKU‘. In ink painting and calligraphy, yohaku refers to the intentional blank space left on a canvas. Not emptiness as oversight. Emptiness as technique. The space that is not painted is not absence — it’s active. It gives the painted elements room to breathe, to mean something, to be seen.

Our cities have run out of yohaku. Every surface has been colonised. Every moment has been programmed. The parks are excellent now and also full of approved activities and wellness infrastructure and signs telling you not to do things. The high streets are Pret-a-Mangers and SpeedFit franchises and the same six restaurant chains in slightly different livery. The corner shops became supermarkets became apps. The town squares became pedestrianised retail zones.

Where do you go to just be between things? Where do you go when you don’t know what you are yet and you need the city to hold you while you figure it out?

This is not nostalgia for a golden age that probably never existed for most people. It’s a structural observation. The tokoro — the Japanese understanding of place as inseparable from the historical and cultural and social meaning embedded in it — has been scraped clean in the name of optimisation. The places that carried the accumulated relational meaning of decades of use, the coffee shop on the corner where the same people came every morning for fifteen years, the vinyl record shop where strangers compared taste for hours on a Saturday, the library reading room where you could be alone in public, genuinely alone in the specific way that is only possible when surrounded by other humans also being alone in public. Those places are mostly gone. And with them, the possibility of the encounters they hosted.

Maggi Savin-Baden, director of research at Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab, put it plainly: “The liminal state has become chronic.” She meant it as an observation about learning — how students now live in perpetual transition without the structured zones that allow transformation to consolidate. But it applies more broadly. We are all chronically liminal now, perpetually in transition, and stripped of the physical architecture that used to allow that transition to mean something.

The result is not exhilarating freedom. The result is loneliness of a very particular kind — the loneliness of floating without a threshold. Of being between things and having nowhere to be between them.

The young people are canaries.

Jonathan Haidt’s research is worth sitting with here. The correlation he documents between smartphones taking over adolescent social life — roughly 2012 — and collapsing mental health indicators, particularly in young women, is not subtle. Depression, anxiety, self-harm, hospitalisation. All bending sharply upward, right around the time the phone became the primary medium of social existence.

The hypothesis isn’t complicated. Adolescence is the great liminal period. The extended, vertiginous threshold between childhood and adult identity. It has always been supposed to happen in unscripted physical space. Genuinely unscripted, adult-free, nowhere-to-be physical space, where you try on different versions of yourself without consequences and gradually, messily, figure out which one is you. You need the hallway for that. The park after school. The bus where you can be anonymous. The corner where your group hangs around doing nothing, which is not nothing — it is the developmental work of learning how to be with other people without a programme.

The smartphone didn’t replace that space. It deleted it and replaced it with a platform that is always on, always public, always performing, always recorded. There is no threshold on Instagram. There is no between-state. There is only broadcast.

Then the pandemic put those same kids in their bedrooms for two years.

And we’re still surprised.

What gets built in the threshold.

I want to say something about what we are actually losing when we lose these spaces, because we keep talking about it in terms of loneliness metrics and mental health statistics without saying the underlying thing.

Liminal space is where identity is actually made. Not in the moments of arrival or performance or presentation. In the between. In the wandering. In the not-yet.

When Turner described the liminal phase he talked about the person in transition as having, temporarily, no fixed identity, no rank, no role. Which sounds like dispossession. But Turner’s point was that this is precisely what makes transformation possible. You cannot step into a new self while still fully occupying the old one. You need the suspension. The float.

Cities, at their best, used to provide that. Not the dramatic version. The mundane version. The commute where you were neither worker nor partner. The pub where you were neither professional nor private. The third place where your job didn’t define you and your history didn’t follow you and you were just, provisionally, a person among persons, working out in real time who you might be.

That’s not sentimental. That’s structural. Remove the in-between and people stop being able to update themselves. Identity calcifies. The self you were at 25, or 35, or whenever the world stopped providing you with unscripted space to be otherwise, becomes the self you’re still dragging around at 50. Not because growth stopped being possible. Because the architecture that made it possible was quietly demolished.

And then we wonder why cities full of people feel so lonely.

Three endings.

I don’t have a clean answer. I’m suspicious of anyone who does. The people building apps to solve loneliness are still inside the logic that caused it. A digitally optimised third space is not a third space. It’s a product.

What I do think, practically: every city planner, every developer, every architect deciding what goes on the high street — they should be sitting with van Gennep’s question. Where is the threshold? Where is the space that holds people while they are between things? Not the event. Not the activation. Not the community programme with a comms budget. The genuinely unscripted zone where nothing is being sold, nothing is measured, and people can just be between things for a while. That is not a luxury. That is infrastructure. We defunded it. We can choose to rebuild it.

And then there’s the personal version, which is the one I keep returning to.

A lot of us felt it during lockdown — a peculiar nakedness that came from having all the transitions stripped away. You couldn’t leave. You couldn’t arrive anywhere new. The threshold closed. And what you found inside was whatever you actually were, without the daily movement and encounter and accidental friction that usually processes the emotional sediment. Some people discovered reserves they didn’t know they had. Some people collapsed. Most people just waited. Floated. Hoped the hallway would reopen.

It’s been five years. The hallways are technically back. But they’re fewer, more expensive, more surveilled, more structured toward consumption. And we are, measurably, lonelier than before.

Van Gennep’s insight was that the in-between was not dead time. Not the uncomfortable gap to be endured between the meaningful moments. The in-between was where you became who you were going to be next.

We paved it over.

We’re still paying the toll.